Russia

A bundle of reference links

This entry was posted in inspiration military pictures Reference Russia World War 2 on by

Whilst going through the archives of Spinneyhead, I’ve found a few posts and links that might be of interest to modellers-

Fetch!
The Russian dog anti tank mine.

Captured
In the dynamic flow of a battlefield equipment can get lost or captured. A quick trip through captured and repurposed weaponry-
The world of captured planes
Captured Planes
Captured Allied planes (Warning- cheesey beyond belief music, which is a shame because there are some very useful images here.)
A collection of pieces about captured B-17s
Fleet Air Arm planes captured by the Axis
A gallery of tanks captured by the Germans
Modelling a captured Russian KV-2
Israel made good use of captured T54s and T55s and various other vehicles.
Russian tank museum, including many captured tanks.
Captured First World War tanks.
Ships captured by the German Navy.

Test Beds
I’ve just been to the Museum of Science and Industry and checked out the aviation hall. Interesting stuff-
Avro Lancasters were used as flying test beds for jet engines. Video of the tests is online here.
The Avro 707 isn’t quite a flying wing, but I have a soft spot for the delta wing planes such as this and the Vulcan.
A picture of the Hafner Rotachute (more) hiding away in the corner of a painting has given me ideas for another novel way to land assault troops. The Germans used similar devices for spotting from U-Boats.
But the most affecting plane in the whole display is still the tiny Yokosuka OHKA, a suicide jet that was pretty much a desperate last gasp from the Japanese.

Wing and a Prayer
The Me-163 ‘Komet’ was quite an astounding beast. I alluded to a similar plane when the Wasp squadron visited Dreamland (Chapter Three, blink and you miss it). Flight Journal has a long interview with one of the Komet’s chief test pilots.
It also has to be remembered that the Germans weren’t the only ones experimenting with new and unusual aeroplane designs. The Allies’ first jet plane was the Gloster Whittle, a pre-cursor to the Meteor and test bed for jet engines.
The ‘Hiller-copter’ and Landgraf H-2 were early twin bladed helicopter designs.
America experimented with flying wings in designs such as the XP-56 and XB-35, which I’ve mentioned many times before, but there were also experiments with gliders along the same lines.
The Brits also experimented with flying wings, as well as canard and tandem wing designs.
Even the Swedes got in on the act with the Saab 21A.

And also- Engines of the Red Army

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Fore!

This entry was posted in Russia space on by

Russian cosmonauts are set to take the longest golf shot ever on a space walk from the International Space Station. Experts are wondering whether to label the station as a natural obstacle.

In a worst-case scenario, the ball would remain at the same altitude long enough that its orbital plane shifted until it could hit the station side-on, says J C Liou, an orbital debris expert at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US. “Then you could potentially have something similar to a head-on collision with an impact speed of about 9.4 kilometres per second,” Liou told New Scientist.

The force of such a collision would be equivalent to that of a 6.5-tonne truck moving at nearly 100 kilometres per hour. “So the outcome of the worst-case scenario could be quite catastrophic,” he says. But he adds that such a dire scenario is “highly unlikely” to occur.

via GeekPress

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Thunderbirds are Go!

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Russian space engineers are working on a strap-on backpack which they say could help a person trapped in burning skyscrapers to glide safely to the ground, nestled inside an inflatable umbrella-shaped shell.
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The device is inspired by an inflatable nosecone that was initially designed for a Russian probe to Mars but was never used, and which will be tested in a souped-up form in a missile launch next month.

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I-401

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A large World War two Japanese submarine has been found on the sea bed off Oahu. The sub was captured at the end of the war whilst on a mission to drop germ bombs on US cities, or bomb the Panama Canal, using the folding wing bombers it could carry in its hold. When Russia wanted to inspect I-401 it was scuttled to keep the secrets of the largest pre nuclear submarine from them.

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All Quiet on the Eastern Front?

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The D-Day memorials, as all these things do, brought a lump to my throat when I thought about the sacrifice of those years. This article in the Guardian has a timely reminder that even more soldiers, on both sides, died in Russia and Eastern Europe.

(The Eastern Front, Stalingrad, Enemy at the Gates [Two very different films about the battle for Stalingrad.])