Saturday, June 02, 2007

Model silliness

Listening to: Better Than Ezra: Greatest Hits. Felt like listening to some alternative-ish indie-ish 90's rock tonight.

Making models of planes as I have done for umpteen years is a good way to learn almost completely irrelevant things about them. Below, left to right, is an A-4 Skyhawk, a MiG-25 Foxbat, and an Avro Vulcan, all in 1:72 scale.
One of the things noticed is that the Skyhawk is tiny for a combat plane, and the MiG is fairly huge. In fact, the planform of the Skyhawk will fit entirely inside that of the MiG. The Foxbat on the other hand, fits entirely within the Vulcan.
Ever wanted to see a Skyhawk stacked on a Foxbat stacked on a Vulcan? Now you have......
Sometimes I have too much time on my hands....

I quite like the Foxbat. It has an old school design brutality about it. Developed in the 60's by the Soviets to counter a high speed bomber the US tested but never put into service, it is a pure interceptor rather than a multirole fighter.

Everything about the way it looks shouts 'speed above everything else'. The wing is a simple thin slab (with no aerodynamic concessions to manouvreability), built for speed. The engines are huge and powerful, again for speed. Capable of flying at nearly 3 times the speed of sound it was the only thing that could come close to intercepting the near mythical SR-71 Blackbird reconnaisance aircraft. It was the inspiration for the 'Firefox' novel and movie.

I like it from a design point of view because it is completely uncompromised. It is designed to do one thing and one thing only.

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