1/72 Special Hobby A4b Rocket

Gallery Article by Charles P. Kalina on July 20 2014

USA Moon Landing  - First Human on the Moon  (1969)

 

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.

CPK

      

Photos and text © by Charles P. Kalina