1/72 Special Hobby A4b Rocket
by Charles P. Kalina
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Steve Bamford will insert full sized version of photo 01.jpg here
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The
A4b was a proposed winged version of Germany's A4 ballistic missile, better
known as the "V-2". By late 1944,
German forces were being pushed out of France and the low countries, and the
V-2 could no longer reach Britain from German-controlled territory. Wehrner von Braun
proposed extending the range by fitting the rocket with wings, converting its
re-entry velocity into a supersonic glide.
For the glide phase, the rocket would have a human pilot, who would
(ideally) bail out before impact. During
the winter of 1944-45, Germany test-fired two A4's with bolted-on wings. Both failed, and the
project was abandoned. Von Braun later
claimed that it had just been an excuse to study manned spaceflight on the
German Army's dime: Hitler had declared
the V-2 a "national priority", so Von Braun pitched his manned rocket
as an improved version of the V-2.
Special Hobby's A4b kit is essentially Condor's V-2 kit, with a hole cut for the cockpit and a sprue of extra parts (wings, control surfaces, pilot's seat). One problem with using a generic V-2 fuselage is that there's nowhere to anchor the wings. This makes it hard to get a good fit, and they're prone to break off in ways that are hard to repair. Granted, the "real" A4b probably would have had the same problem (the second test launch failed when a wing broke off during re-entry). I added a pilot figure from spare parts, and made a display stand using a wooden base and acrylic rod.
Because
I can never do anything quite out-of-the-box, I decided to depict the A4b as a
U.S. experimental rocket plane. It was
far too Wiley-Coyote-esque to be credible as a
weapon, but it made a bit more sense as a research project. The United States used captured V-2's for
postwar rocket research, and it stands to reason that captured A4b's might have
been used in the same way. The markings
are spare U.S. roundels and some homemade stencils. The paint scheme is based on the
high-contrast pattern that was used in both Germany and the U.S. to aid camera
tracking.
Steve Bamford will
insert full sized version of photo 02.jpg here |
CPK
Photos and text © by Charles P. Kalina