I recently discovered something completelly unexpected, comparing one of my worst kits with one of my very best:
Click on Image to Enlarge
The former being the SMER 1/48 SwordFish (left) - so crude, it's almost like an early cast-resin mold - and the latter being the truly stupendous Tamiya version (right).
For several years before I snagged the Tamiya kit (THANKS, Donny!) I already had the SMER, whose doggi-ness by no means presented any obstacle to building/correcting it - in fact, quite the contrary. However I did hold off putting in the required hours because I believed - as even the original eBay auction had stated, IIRC - that the SMER mold was significantly underscale. Reputedly an easter-european repop of an ancient (Heller?) mold - in something more like 1/50.
Well, ancient it obviously is, but - unless the Tamiya SwordFish is also undersized - the SMER is (at least) every bit of 1/48 scale, as proved by the following, direct side-by-side comparison:
The SMER parts are those molded in the lighter gray, shown in each case above the corresponding Tamiya parts. While the SHAPES of the SMER (fuselage and particularly the torpedo) parts may be less ACCURATE than in the Tamiya - assumed in all cases to be the more accurate and true to 1/48 scale - the former are certainly NOT smaller, but if anything in fact slightly larger! Likewise if, perhaps due some other innaccurate parts, the SMER model builds up with slightly undersized overall length and/or wingspan, this is merely a case for (relatively minor) accurization - not a basic incompatibility with 48-scale.
In my personal case, holding off building the SMER kit all this time has worked out well, in that I would have bashed it into Ark Royal's (wheeled) SwordFish which immobilized Bismarck - for which the Tamiya kit will now serve far (better and) easier. Meanwhile the SMER can be revert to its intended floatplane depiction - representing Warspite's historic first aircraft to sink a U-boat, in the Norway campaign.
In general, however, the moral to the above is clear: don't believe everything you hear on-line - presuming everyone with opinions must be the "experts" - until you can SEE it for yourself!
Cheers,
-Matty
Wow - who would have thought?
Posted by Don Murphy on November 20, 2011, 19:51:50, in reply to "Sizeable SwordFish"
I haven't seen a SMER Swordfish in a long time. The Warspite's bird sounds cool. This means you can dedicate ALL your Tamiya Swordfish time to doing a Taranto raider, yes?
How could I have forgotten about the Taranto StringBags?!! But I did, Donny - I earmarked my Tamiya kit for the plane (even though nobody knows exactly who it was) that hit Bismarck's rudders, thus turning her entire escape from the Sinking of the Hood episode into her own final swan song. How can anybody NOT build that SwordFish (at least once), in their lives? But then, the SwordFish was central to so MANY utterly paramount, historic events - I forgot about building one from Taranto - though I definitely have plans to bash together an Illustrious, launching that very deckload of torpeckers.
Wasn't it also one of Illustrious' SwordFish that poked the Italian Pola, allowing the Brits (again including Warspite) to catch and obliterate that entire (3-) cruiser squadron?
And wasn't it also a SwordFish that put a torpedo into Scharnhorst, during the Channel Dash, or was it a DD (or even a sub) did that?
In any case, my Tamiya kit is now packed away for moving, so you've got (at least) some time to talk me into building it as the bird you think most historic - or maybe into just building yet MORE SwordFish!
Local or somewhere further? Not sure about the Channel Dash, but Swordfish were pretty much involved in all but a handful of the RN's actions. Sad really, when you consider it was a bi-plane!
Cheers,
Don
Yeah - well, sometimes Simpler Is Better...
Posted by Matty on November 26, 2011, 22:53:03, in reply to "Where ya movin' to?"
The Swordfish' slow, 30s-biplane stall speed enabled it to operate - including floating off Ark Royal's pitching deck into the gale attending the crucial strike on Bismarck, IIRC - that many a sleeker, faster plane just could not have coped with. The Germans, other denizens of the North Sea, also totally "got it" about the StringBag - and designed their own version, in the slow and ungainly (but actually very well-engineered) Fiesler Storch. Just as, years later the Douglas "Spads" would remain highly effective - precisely due to some of their low-performance characteristics - over decades, into the "Jet Age".
And, actually, that's the same theme operative in my pending move: as nearby, and as little, as I can get away with. I haven't found a place yet, but I'll move next door - or one or two houses down, if I can arrange it. Because my "low-performance" lifestyle, and situation, are already just about as good as anything I could imagine!
Bismarck's golly-gee-whiz new fangled FC and new guns were tweaked/geared to handle fast targets and they couldn't accurately account for a slower target. Again, German presumption (kinda like Japanese) that the enemy will attack you EXACTLY in the manner with which you plan on him attacking you...
Several of the guns had to be "disabled" as the German builders were so proud of their "fast plane" tracking capability that they neglected to put a "manual" button on the set up.
For the Brit pilots - fully expecting in the finest Bushido tradition to "not be coming back" - they must have pissed their pants with laughter as they floated above the ship at 10 mph and the cursing Germans were unable to hurl anything heavier than insults.
Even the 300000 ton Pom Pom mount had a manual feature. Tho it would conceivably take 9000 men to turn it! The quad .303 mount was a similar bastard and one laughs imagining 15 year old boy first class Nigel attempting to swing the mount on his own. But hey - give the Brits their credit - it could track as fast as you could turn it. Or as slow as needed. Which is an option/luxury that Lutjens didn't have.
An epic example of over-engineering. Apparently folk don't learn as Korean War Sea Furies and Vietnam War Spads would knock mach-speed MIGs out of the air.
I can confirm also reading that, about the SwordFish being too slow for Bismarck's guns to track, Donny - in multiple sources that all say basically the same. And that by the time of the Channel Dash, the Germans had re-jiggered (something about) their FC mechanism, specifically to track the StringBag, of which they then took a heavy toll, accordingly.
I recently also read that the Germans failed to design their first EM-warning sets to detect precisely the centimeter-wavelengths which the British radars would use to tag U-boats at night, because calculations had shown that such radars were not the most efficient - so what kind of worthy opponent would ever develop one...??! That intellectually-elitist and STUPID attitude cost them a lot of U-boats, with all hands lost.
This business of being too high-tech - "too smart" for one's own good - also reminds me of the early '60s US DOD's "Missileer" concept: that the pursuit/(dog-)fighting aircraft would be completely replaced, over land and sea, by the radar-vectored, all-missile-slinging interceptor. Leaving quite aside the inconvenience that contemporary medium/long-range AAMs - namley, the Sparrow - apparently sucked big-time, the policy to deprive front-line jets of ALL guns produced (more than once, IIRC) the absolutely ridiculous situation of a hot pilot getting the drop within a hundred yards of his adversary's tail and not being able to DO ANYTHING to him! (Except maybe suicidally jam his nose up the other guy's a**-pipe. )
That was one of the stupidest "bureaucratic/egghead" episodes in all of American military history - second only, of course, to the pre-WWII US Navy's refusal to test "expensive" torpedoes, to see if they actually even worked right!