Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Baikonur and St. Petersburg

 English Russia keeps delivering the goods with cool photo collections. The Baikonur space launch facilities in Kazakhstan, as photographed by a visitor and the darker side of St. Petersburg.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Aetheric Mechanics

SCUD, originally uploaded by warrenellis.

WArren Ellis has posted a set of reference images used in his upcoming Aetheric Mechanics graphic novel. They loo like prime materials for Luft '46 subjects.

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Friday, April 11, 2008

Soyuz on the train

 io9 has pictures of a Soyuz rocket being hauled across the desert to its launch site by a diesel train. It might be hard to scale match a model of the rocket (or even find one, I couldn't get a match for "Soyuz" at Hannants) and a Russian train, but think of the diorama possibilities.

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Rebuilding a Sherman tank

 Jalopnik has pictures of one man's project to rebuild a Sherman tank

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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Russian WW2 memories

 A collection of personal photographs from a Russian soldier's collection.

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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Autorama

 Jalopnik have been to the Detroit Autorama, and have a lot of posts crammed full of inspiration for car modellers.

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Saturday, February 09, 2008

Russian soldiers in Chechnya

 This photoset from English Russia shows Russian troops in less hectic moments during the Chechen conflict.

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Friday, January 18, 2008

Library of Congress photo collection on Flickr

 If you're interested in modelling any American subjects then you might want to check out the Library of Congress feed on Flickr, which is filling up with documentary images, mostly from the start of the twentieth century.

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Monday, November 05, 2007

Coop goes to the So-Cal Speed Shop

 Coop has a gallery up on Flickr from a visit to one of the most famous customising companies in the world- So-Cal Speed Shop L.A. Open House, 11/3/07

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Monday, September 03, 2007

Reader's Rides

 Pictures of hot rods belonging to readers of Hot Rod Gazette. As a number of these are very English it may be hard to get models of them in larger scales. But I have a liking of small scale customs, so I may take inspiration.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

MAKS 2007 International Air Show

 More airshow pictures from English Russia.

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Friday, June 22, 2007

A tank from a lake

 Tanks from the Second World War are still being pulled out of the lakes around St. Petersburg. If I remember my history correctly, the city was resupplied across the frozen lakes during the winter phases of the siege and at times the ice broke. The site refers to it as a "BT" tank. You can get BT5 or BT7 tanks in 1:35th scale from Zvezda, or BT5, BT7 or BT2 from Unimodel in 1:72nd. A salvage operation like this would make for an interesting diorama.

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Billetproof

 The Billetproof rod show concentrates on less "polished" hot rods, rat rods and the like. Jalopnik has some pictures- El Camino, Party Wagon, Billetproof.

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Sunday, May 20, 2007

A bundle of reference links

 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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Sunday, May 06, 2007

Belly tank racer

L1090971.JPG, originally uploaded by COOP666.


I'd like to make a model of one of these some day. It's a dry lake racer with a body fashioned from an aeroplane droop tank. Coop was out at a meet at El Mirage yesterday and has a set of photos on Flickr of the hot rods, motor bikes and people who were there.

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