Condor 1/72nd A4b

The A4b can be thought of as a manned V2 with wings. Apparently it didn't excite von Braun as much as the more elegant A9, but I still find the shape of the A4b rather evocative. Like Condor's A9, it consists of a V2 with a sprue of extra parts, mostly the large wings and the enlarged fin trim tabs (yes, I know they aren't really trim tabs in the modern sense, but that's how I think of them. Sue me already).

Assembly was pretty straightforward, except for adding the wings. They are butt-jointed to the fuselage, and whenever you butt-join a flat surface to a cylinder, you get gaps. I filled them with auto body filler and sanded them out, and replaced the basic seat with a better one I found in my junk box. I decided to show the canopy open, but I couldn't find any source that told me which way the canopy opened. Despite my hunch that it was a clamshell-style thing, I cut it in half and hinged it forward, like early MiG-21s, because I happen to like that look.

Oh God, another launch table! The same comments pertain. It's not easy to build, and most of the small parts are afflicted with parting lines, and I was never sure if I was putting the right parts in the places, but if you keep it all aligned and don't mind scraping a lot of tiny parts, it builds into a nice table that is actually sufficiently square it won't require any shimming.

I decided to build a "launch complex". The complex is entirely fictitious, as I never found any photographs of what a real A4b launch facility would have looked like. Guessing that the Germans would have mounted the boarding and umbilical tower on rails, I sacrificed a piece of HO EZ Track for its rails, and took a truck off an HO boxcar. I added a platform to the top of the truck, and then added a wooden dowel to that as a platform. This was dressed up with random bits and pieces of wood and plastic. The "boarding ladder" was snipped out of quarter-inch hardware cloth, and the various boxes and whatnots at the base of the tower are (I think) interior parts from an old 1/48th scale F-105. Not accurate at all, but they convey a reasonable sense of accuracy, I think. I drilled the A4b and added fuel and drain lines made from ordinary insulated wire (I like using that because one can eventually convince it to take a fairly accurate droop, something that one can't do with rubber tubing).

The base is a piece of plywood, and the raised launch platform was carved from a piece of Styrofoam. The whole works was covered with Durham's water putty and scribed to resemble concrete. The vehicle is the old Hasegawa Mercedes staff car, the six-wheeled one with the figure riding shotgun who isn't in any way meant to resemble Adolf Hitler.

Oh God, another splinter scheme... This one was entirely made-up; I picked a scheme of light grey, grauviolett, and black, and spent a week picking all the tiny slices of 3M tape off my fingers. The black was dead-flat out of the bottle and looked strange and rough compared to the other two colors, so I sat for a while with an old t-shirt and a tub of rubbing compound until the various colors had a similar sheen (even though I overcoat my models as a matter of course, the black would have looked rough and pebbly even under a clear coat).

The decals were a mixture of Condor decals (mostly colorful circles that ring the points where the hoses connect to the rocket) and stuff out of my supply of spare decals, which by this point was virtually depleted of white Balkan crosses and swastikas (no great loss, one might say).