MOS6510 Models

One of my favourite Chills of 2025.. We talk about the Operation Herrick range in 1/48. I wonder if any of these kits will be in the 2026 Airfix Range Launch??

1 day ago | [YT] | 5

MOS6510 Models

SET THE DATE Monday 29th Dec 2025 ...
I will be hosting a Scale Model Quiz from 8pm. There will be Prizes!!
I have been using some software that is interactive with your phones, so no cheating lol.. You will need to download the Speed Quizzing App from your relevant App Store. Look out for the Blue Logo Version!!! It will involve questions from the 2025 scale model releases, Paints, and general scale modelling knowledge. And they are all Multi Choice :) Details will be shared nearer the time and on Airfix and Chill this Monday, so I will explain how it all works.

If you are interested please let me know below

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3 days ago | [YT] | 56

MOS6510 Models

The Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet is one of those clever little Franco-German love children that came about because, back in the swinging sixties, everyone started to realise their old jet trainers were about as cutting-edge as a Fiat Panda in Le Mans. You know the sort of thing, like the Lockheed T-33, that ancient American sluggish jet that rattled like a bag of Snap On spanners, or the Classic Fouga Magister two seater developed in the 1950’s, which looked delightful but so underpowered it was basically a hairdryer with wings.

So Britain and France joined forces to build something supersonic and terrifying, but halfway through they developed it into the SEPECAT Jaguar, a proper, complete nuclear-capable strike beast that’s brilliant at blowing things up but absolute shite at teaching wet-behind-the-ears teenagers how to fly without sending Deepest Sympathy Cards to their Parents.


That left a whopping hole to fill. So, le French knocked on the door of ze Germans and said, “Why don’t we build a trainer together? It’ll need to be subsonic, sensible, not too expensive, and we can be friends with benefits.” Ze Germans, who’d been buying American planes for years and secretly fancied a bit of European cooperation (plus they needed something to replace their trainer jets.. the rather outdated Fiat G.91s, which were basically Italian lawnmowers with weapons), said “Ja, bitte!” They even pushed that it must have twin engines because they’d lost so many pilots in the single-engine F-104 Starfighter (The Witwenmacher) that they were running out of brave young men.


There was a competition, and the winner was a mash-up from Dassault, Breguet (which Dassault later swallowed whole in 1971), and Dornier.
It started life as the TA501, but they named it the Alpha Jet because it sounded faster than it actually was. The French wanted a trainer, basically to turn cadets into proper pilots, while ze Germans wanted a light attack jet to lob bombs at Russians if the Cold War got a bit warm.

So they built two versions: the French one with a round nose for that elegant catwalk look, and the German one with a pointy nose that made it look a bit nasty and aggressive. Both are powered by a pair of SNECMA Turbomeca Larzac engines – French, obviously, because the Germans tried to sneak in an American General Electric job, and the French threw a massive Gallic strop until everyone agreed to use the home-grown one after the French said they would fund the engine’s development themselves...


It wasn’t the most powerful thing in the world, but it’s reliable, and you could repair it in ten minutes with a drunk mechanic using chewing gum and a lollipop stick, which is handy when you’re in a hurry. Production was split among the Europeans. Dassault did the front and middle bits in France, Dornier the wings and tail in Germany, and the Belgians chipped in with the nose and flaps because... well, why the hell not?

They built hundreds of them. The French and Germans bought loads, and then everyone else from Egypt to Cameroon snapped them up. The Germans retired theirs after the Wall came down and sold them off cheaply, probably to fund more beer. The French, being French, gave some to the Patrouille de France, their aerobatic team, who paint them in red, white, and blue and fly them in ridiculously tight formations while trailing smoke and making the crowd go “ooh la la.”

They even tried upgrading it over the years with better engines, fancy avionics borrowed from the Mirage 2000, Clever laser rangefinders, and these so-called Magic missiles. Thus turning it into the Alpha Jet 2 or MS2 for run-of-the-mill customers who wanted to pretend they had a proper fighter. There was some backroom chat of a naval version for the carriers, but that never happened because, let’s face it, landing a jet on a ship is hard enough without the French being involved.

And to make it mustard, for the attack role, just hang a gun pod on the belly, the 30mm DEFA for le French, 27mm Mauser for ze Germans – and four more hardpoints under the wings for bombs, rockets, or whatever you fancy dropping on the bad guys. It’s not the fastest, it’s not the biggest, and it won’t win any dogfights against a proper fighter. But it’s cheap, cheerful, easy to fly, and does exactly what it says on the tin. It can be used to train pilots brilliantly and, if needs be, ruins someone’s day on the ground. In a world full of overcomplicated, overpriced American badasses, the Alpha Jet is a reminder that sometimes the Europeans can get it properly right. And that’s saying something.

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6 days ago | [YT] | 84

MOS6510 Models

Back in the 1930s, the British Army had this daft idea for tanks. They wanted tiny little light ones, like the Vickers, to shimmy about doing reconnaissance stuff, I guess, basically playing hide and seek with the enemy. Then there were the heavy infantry tanks to lumber forward and punch holes in the lines for the poor bloody infantry. And finally, the fast cruiser tanks to charge through the gap like the cavalry of old, sabres flashing, except with tracks and a bit more firepower. Brilliant in theory, but as we'd soon find out, completely pants in practice.

Because the UK was feeling the pinch at that moment, the first proper infantry tank, the Matilda I or A11, was knocked up in 1935 and slipped into service in 1937. Around 140 of the things were built, because who needs lots when you can have a few?
It had good armour for the time, but the running gear was all hanging out like a mechanic's arse, a crew of just two blokes who must have been best mates by the end of the day, and it was armed with... errr… a machine gun. Yep.. Either a .303 or a .50 Vickers. And that's ya lot!! . No proper gun.

Most of them got knocked out in France in 1940, but credit where it's due: at the counterattack at Arras, these little plucky buggers gave the Germans a proper fright !! Rommel almost shit himself, thought he was facing a massive armoured division.

Barely two years later, the Techies were already banging away on the A12 – the Matilda II. Now THIS was a proper tank. Thicker armour and a decent gun; it served brilliantly all the way through the war, earning the nickname "Queen of the Desert" because nothing the Italians or early Germans threw at it could touch it.

It got backup from the reliable Valentine and then the absolute beast that was the Churchill – it was ugly, slow as a wet weekend, but it could climb walls and take a pounding like no other. Indestructible and brilliant at everything from beaches to bridges.

By 1943, someone finally saw sense and binned the whole light/infantry/cruiser bollocks. Instead, they went for bigger, better cruisers: the Cromwell (fast and a tad fun), the Comet, and then the brown sauce big daddy of them all – the Centurion. This was called the "universal tank" and became the main battle tank blueprint, leading right through to the Chieftain, Challenger 1, 2, and now 3.

The start of the war? A massive shock. Most British tanks were found wanting, embarrassingly quickly, by the Germans. Except, the Matilda II, which was a star. By the middle of the war, Churchills and Cromwells were giving as good as they got, and by the end, Britain was churning out the Centurion – arguably the finest tank of its era and the forerunner of everything modern and Western.

And all this incredible progress started with that itty bitty Matilda I in 1937, and just six years later, in late 1943, they were designing the Centurion. In six years! Under wartime pressure! The British techies went from machine-gun tin cans to world-beating armour.

Gecko Models have announced their brand new 1/35 MATLIDA 1 A11 in 1/35 Scale model kit DUE IN MARCH 2026 £30 rrp

This kit comes with decals, photo etch parts, interior turret detail, interior driver compartment detail and one German tank figure.


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1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 78

MOS6510 Models

Have you ever heard of the Caproni Campini N.1, or the C.C.2 if you’re feeling particularly Italian. It’s the machine that, for one glorious moment in 1940, was hailed as the world’s first proper jet aircraft… until someone remembered the Germans had quietly cracked it a whole year earlier with the Heinkel He 178. Typical. The Italians turn up late to the party, waving their arms, shouting “mamma mia, look at my jet!”, only to discover Hans across the road has already been flying his for twelve months and didn’t bother telling anyone.
It’s the 1930s, Mussolini’s strutting about like a peacock on espresso, and a clever chap called Secondo Campini rocks up with drawings of something he calls a “thermo-jet”. Basically, he wanted to strap a piston engine to a compressor, blow the hot air out the back and call it the future. To prove he wasn’t completely mad, he built a jet-powered boat and pootled it round Venice at a blistering 28 knots. The Italian Navy watched, shrugged, said “meh”, banned him from selling it abroad, and went back to polishing their battleships.
Undeterred, Campini teams up with Caproni (because his own company was basically three brothers and a shed) and in 1934 the Regia Aeronautica, in a rare moment of enthusiasm, says “fine, build us two prototypes and a static test rig, but make it quick so Il Duce can brag about it.” The result is the N.1: a rather pretty all-metal monoplane that looks like it should be quick… but isn’t.
Now, the engine. It’s what we now call a motor-jet, which is a fancy way of saying “a normal piston engine driving a massive ducted fan with an afterburner tacked on the back because why not?” Up front there’s a whopping great three-stage compressor, driven by a 900-horsepower Isotta Fraschini V12. The air gets shoved past the piston engine to cool it (clever), mixed with the exhaust (very hot), has extra fuel chucked in and set on fire (extremely hot), then blasted out the back through a variable nozzle. On paper, brilliant. In reality, it produced about 700 kg of thrust, which is roughly what you get from an angry hairdryer.
First flight: 27 August 1940, Taliedo airfield near Milan. Test pilot Mario de Bernardi, clearly a brave man, trundles into the air for ten minutes and keeps it under 225 mph “just to be on the safe side”. The cockpit got so hot he had to fly with the canopy open, turning the sleek jet into a convertible with the aerodynamic efficiency of a garden shed.
Performance? Dreadful. It was slower than most piston fighters already in service. The contemporary Caproni Vizzola F.4, with a normal engine and a propeller like God intended, could leave it for dead. Fuel consumption was heroic in entirely the wrong way. And because the compressor was tiny, the thing had all the thrust of a wet fart.
Still, they wheeled it out for propaganda. On 30 November 1941, de Bernardi flew the second prototype from Milan to Rome (getting lost on the way and accidentally buzzing Pisa), then did a victory lap over the capital while Mussolini stood on a balcony nodding approvingly. Foreign delegations were dragged in to gawp at this “miracle of Italian technology”. Nobody was rude enough to mention it was essentially a piston engine wearing a jet costume.
One airframe got bombed or blown up by retreating Germans, ended up in Britain, and was scrapped in 1949. The other survived and now sits, looking slightly embarrassed, in the Italian Air Force Museum at Vigna di Valle. The static test fuselage is in Milan, quietly gathering dust.
In the end, the Japanese copied it for a version of the Ohka suicide rocket, the Soviets knocked off a version for a couple of obscure fighters that never amounted to anything, and Caproni even suggested shoehorning one into a Reggiane Re.2005 as a sort of half-hearted rocket boost. None of it mattered. Within a few years proper turbojets arrived (Whittle, von Ohain, etc.) and the motor-jet was consigned to the bin of history marked “interesting, but no”.
And that’s the story of the Caproni Campini N.1, the world’s first jet aircraft… that wasn’t really a jet, wasn’t very fast, and only got the title because the Germans kept schtum. Still, it looked fabulous, and in Italy that’s half the battle.

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1 week ago | [YT] | 62

MOS6510 Models

Shopping at Jadlam

My card took a hammering!! lol

1 week ago | [YT] | 87

MOS6510 Models

Picture the scene. It’s 1942, the Red Army is getting a proper kicking from the Germans, and some bright spark in Moscow decides the one thing they really need is a flying tank. Not a tank with a bit of extra armour, no. A proper tank. With wings. Because obviously what every battlefield needs is a five-ton lump of steel swooping in like a particularly aggressive pigeon.

They called it the Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka, which is Russian for “Tank Wings”, because the Soviets never met a piece of equipment they couldn’t give a name that sounded like a drunk man falling down stairs.

Now, other countries – sensible ones – had worked out that if you want to get a tank to a fight quickly, you stick it in a glider, tow it behind something big and slow, and hope for the best. The Brits had the Hamilcar for the Tetrarch or M22 Locust light tanks, the Americans had various contraptions, all perfectly reasonable. But no, the Soviets looked at that and thought: “Gliders? Pah! Too complicated. Why don’t we just bolt a set of biplane wings onto an actual T-60 tank and have it glide in on its own?”

So that’s exactly what Oleg Antonov did. He took one perfectly good (well, by 1942 Soviet standards) T-60 light tank, stripped out the gun, the ammo, the headlights, most of the fuel, and anything else that wasn’t strictly necessary for not dying immediately, then strapped on a massive wooden cradle with enormous fabric-covered wings and a twin tail that looked like it had been stolen from a 1920s airliner. The result looked like a tank that had lost a fight with a very large kite.

The plan was simple: a Pe-8 or an ancient Tupolev TB-3 would tow this flying shed until it was over the battlefield, at which point the tank driver – yes, the driver sat inside the tank the whole time – would release the tow rope, glide gracefully down, chuck the wings off like a snake shedding its skin, and then trundle into battle shouting something heroic.

They tested it once. Once. On the 2nd of September 1942, the legendary test pilot Sergei Anokhin climbed into this contraption, got towed aloft behind a TB-3, and immediately discovered that the drag was, and I quote the official report here, “rather more than anticipated”. In layman’s terms, the tank was about as aerodynamic as a bungalow.

The TB-3, already struggling to get airborne with four engines and the aerodynamic profile of a block of flats, suddenly found itself trying to drag a flying brick through the sky. The pilot decided that crashing was undesirable, so he cut the tow rope. Anokhin, to his enormous credit, managed to glide the thing – smoothly, apparently – down into a field, dumped the wings and tail, fired up the engine and drove the tank back to base as if he’d just popped out for a newspaper

And that was that. The project was abandoned faster than a Lada in a snowdrift, because there simply wasn’t an aircraft in the entire Soviet Union powerful enough to tow the bloody thing at the required speed without stalling and falling out of the sky like a stunned yak.

So there you have it. The Antonov A-40: proof that in wartime, someone will always try to build a flying tank, and proof that physics will always win. Marvellous.

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 48

MOS6510 Models

Picture the scene: it’s 1944, the war is rattling towards the finish line, and the chaps at Supermarine decide that what the world really needs is… another piston-engined fighter. Because clearly the Spitfire, one of the most beautiful aeroplanes ever to slice through the sky, wasn’t quite good enough anymore.

So they take a perfectly serviceable Spitfire, rip off those gorgeous elliptical wings that made grown men weep, and bolt on a brand-new laminar-flow wing that looks like it was designed by someone who’d just discovered the ruler for the first time. Then they shoehorn an enormous Rolls-Royce Griffon up front (basically a lorry engine with delusions of grandeur), give it an undercarriage that folds inwards like a drunk trying to get into skinny jeans, and slap a gigantic tail fin on the back because the thing was apparently as stable as a shopping trolley on ice.

They called this contraption the Spiteful, which is frankly perfect, because by the time it was ready, the war was more or less over, and everyone was busy building jets.

The RAF had ordered 150 of the things in a fit of optimism, but in the end, only 19 limped off the production line before someone came to their senses. Performance? Oh, it was marginally quicker than a late-model Spitfire. Marginally. You could have achieved the same result by giving a Spitfire pilot an extra-strong cup of tea and a following wind.

The Navy, not to be outdone in the stupidity stakes, ordered a folding-wing version called the Seafang, which managed to combine all the Spiteful’s mediocrity with the added bonus of being able to fall off aircraft carriers. Hardly any of those were built either.

Now, the naming business. This is where it gets properly British. Someone suggested “Victor”, which apparently sounded too cocky (heaven forbid we win the war or anything). Then they thought about keeping the Spitfire name, at which point half the RAF threatened to go on strike because you can’t just slap “Spitfire” on something that isn’t a Spitfire, any more than you can call a Ford Focus a Rolls-Royce just because it has wheels.

Winston Churchill himself got involved (because obviously the Prime Minister had nothing better to do in 1944 than argue about aeroplane names). There was talk of “Valiant”, which Supermarine hated because it didn’t begin with S. Finally, some bright spark came up with “Spiteful”, and everyone went “yes, brilliant, that’ll do”, probably because it perfectly described how they all felt about the entire sorry project.
In the end, the only bit that worked properly was the wing, which they later stuck on the Supermarine Attacker – the world’s first jet fighter to look like it was designed by a committee that had lost the will to live.

So there you have it: the Spiteful. A faster, uglier Spitfire that arrived too late, cost a fortune, and achieved precisely nothing. And yet, in a funny sort of way, I can’t help liking it. Because only in Britain could we spend the last years of a world war building a fighter plane purely out of nostalgia… and then name it after the mood we were all in when we realised what we’d done.

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2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 110

MOS6510 Models

Apart from part J47 flying off to Scotland (asked Airfix for a new part) this cockpit is done and now onto the wings!! 1/24 Bf109G

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 131

MOS6510 Models

In the grand parade of 1940s light tanks, the T-70 wasn’t actually half bad. For something that was basically a tin box on tracks with a popgun bolted to the front, it had armour thick enough to make most of its rivals look like they’d been built out of old biscuit tins, and the gun was… well, it went bang about as often and as loudly as everyone else’s. So far, so adequate.

But here’s the catch, and it’s a catch big enough to swallow a GAZ lorry whole: they stuck ONE solitary bloke in the turret. Just one. This poor sod had to be the commander, the gunner AND the loader, which is a bit like asking one man to drive a bus, sell the tickets, make the tea and fight off muggers at the same time. Unsurprisingly, he spent most battles flapping about like a startled chicken while the enemy politely brewed up his tank.

So in July 1942 some bright spark in Moscow finally said, “Hang on, why don’t we give him a mate?” and they knocked up a proper two-man turret. The result was the T-80, which was basically a T-70 that had been to the gym and discovered personal space.

On the 4th of December 1942 they ran a proper shoot-off, same crew, same range, same everything. The T-70 chugged along like a drunk uncle trying to load a shotgun with boxing gloves on. The T-80, on the other hand, fired twice as fast and actually hit things twice as often. Twice. As. Often. They even bolted a supercharger to the engines so the extra weight of the bigger turret didn’t turn it into a wheeled wardrobe. On paper, the T-80 was a winner. The commissars rubbed their hands, the factory gears spun up, everyone cracked open the vodka…

…And then came the Battle of Kursk.

Turns out when there are Tigers and Panthers prowling about like angry metal dinosaurs, sending a light tank forward is about as clever as bringing a spoon to a sword fight. The entire concept of the light tank suddenly looked as modern as a horse and cart on the M1. So in August 1943, after building precisely 78 T-80s (barely enough for a decent traffic jam outside Leningrad), they pulled the plug.

Another brilliant Soviet triumph: design a perfectly good tank, just in time for it to be completely obsolete. Magnificent.

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 45