IPMS Scale Modelworld 2015

[major_clanger]

Last year was my first trip to Scale Modelworld, as described (with lots of picture) in this post. In short, imagine combining the dealers' room and exhibit areas at Loncon 3, then about doubling it, all dedicated to scale plastic model-making.

This year I had company on my trip to Telford in the form of gummitch who came up for the day. If this was meant to be a cunning plan that we would each guard the other's wallet then I'm not sure that it worked; we both departed the show after nearly four hours with a bag-full of goodies, mostly in the form of tools or modelling supplies. I was extremely restrained and only bought two kits, and of those one was a deliberately silly cheap one (another minion to go with this one) and the other was one I'd already ordered - the 1/35 Kettenkrad for which this was a trial run. autopope, we will need to have a chat about appropriate colour schemes for Ilsa...

Anyway, on to pictures. As before, there were literally thousands of amazing builds on display or in the competition area, so these are just a few that caught my eye.



Very nice Tornado pre-flight diorama:



Scratch-built (i.e. not from kit) Cobra Mk III from the original version of Elite:



Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking (one of my early memories of space in the news):



1:48 Gloster Javelin. Making models of unpainted bare-metal aircraft is really difficult to do well, but this was an absolute beauty:



Mind you, some paint jobs are hardly easy to reproduce. This was a very impressive model of this specially-painted Japanese F-15:



As ever, there were quite a few 'What-Ifs' and 'Might-Have-Beens', such as this RAF A-10:



Or this Beriev VVA-14M2. The Soviet Union actually flew the prototype, but never in vertical take-off mode as shown here. Which is a pity, because as this diorama shows, it would have been awesome (although the reality I suspect would have involved a lot more spray.)



Assorted cancelled or proposed British projects, including the HS.681 STOL transport, the SR.177 rocket/jet interceptor, and assorted variants of the Lightning:



Getting to the very extreme end of what-if, you don't imagine that Moonbase Alpha was the sole operator of the Eagle Transporter, do you?



World War One Jaeger!



Staying with the sf theme, there was this tiny but fantastically-detailed diorama from War of the Worlds of HMS Thunder Child engaging the Martian fighting machines, clearly inspired by the iconic artwork from the Jeff Wayne album:


(gummitch put the 2p down for scale. "Come on," said the chap behind that stall, "I think it's worth a bit more than that...")

I cannot confirm or deny that the BBC is to cross-over two popular series:



... or do its own unique take on Pigs In Space:



As ever, Thunderbirds remains a popular model-making subject even after 50 years:







2001 and Star Wars are also perennial favourites:





Meanwhile, this Battlestar Galactica Fleet, from the 1978 original, was hardly table-top scale modelling!



One very neat idea was this model not just of the aircraft featured in the American Air Museum at Duxford but of the museum layout itself:



More silliness! There is a vogue in Japanese modelling for caricature 'Egg Plane' models. Well, here we have the Scotch Egg Plane:



Many of the dealers, from Airfix to small specialists, were displaying new or forthcoming kits. It seems popular to do this by showing an opened-up, unpainted, build of the kit to show off all the detail:








The full set of pictures is here.

Comments

[nanila]

Apollo-Soyuz Docking! Awesome!

Also, the Scotch Egg Plane is making me very happy.

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

It's worth mentioning that my day was marked by my meeting Mira for the first time. She is, I hope you won't mind me saying, a proper little madam. (And also a delightful example of an Abyssinian.)

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

She was clearly very taken with you, and is now looking at us as if to say "See? I don't have a tubby tummy after all! That nice man who visited said I was tiny."

[hano.livejournal.com]

That RAF A-10 is a great 'what if?' Although I don't recall there was any serious chance of it ever happening was there?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I've never heard that it was seriously considered. I've seen some BAe (as was) proposals from the 1980s for a close air support aircraft so if there had been an OR there might have been pressure to go for a local development, although would we really have gone once again for developing our own platform when a perfectly good equivalent was available? (Answer: who knows, it's not like we didn't on other occasions.)

Also, service politics might have intervened. The RAF would probably have viewed the A-10 as rather slow and ugly as 'fast jets' go (and indeed a large part of the USAF has always felt the same way). However, any suggestion that the Army Air Corps could operate it would have been fought tooth and nail; there was enough of a fuss over the Army getting the AH-64, which the RAF seemingly claimed was too complicated and well-armed to be flown or indeed maintained by the Army. In other words, the Light Blue view might have been 'we don't want it, but we're buggered if the pongos are going to get it instead.'

It seems that the US was quite happy to export the A-10 but nobody else was interested. Ironically, the Soviet Union and then Russia seem to have done quite well selling the Su-25, the aircraft meant to be the A-10's Eastern Bloc counterpart. Mind you, the Soviet Union had the advantages of a big domestic customer and a captive export market.

Incidentally, there was only one two-seat A-10 built, the N/AW prototype. That model is evidently a build of this kit of it.