Project 1186C

image: © Jared Zichek

In honour of The Royal Society of Putting Things on Top of Other Things I present to you: Project 1186C - a great what-if.

Back in the late forties, early fifties of the last century, the Cold War just had started. It happened to coincide with the birth of the jet age and also the birth of the space age, although the latter merely existed on paper by then.
Those times, it seemed, were the perfect playground for experiments in design and adaptations of techniques in the aerospace business. The military often came with assignments that were close to ridiculous, if you look at all the things they wanted.
The new aircraft had to be able to fly twice the speed of sound, and cover thousands of kilometers on one tank of fuel.
Not taken aback, the aircraft companies often responded with just as ridiculous designs. Huge nuclear powered bombers with parasite jet fighters under their wings, Jet engines bolted on aircraft’s fuselages at the weirdest places, flying pancakes, flying wings and of course, the most amazing designs.

Douglas came with this weird contraption. An X-3 Stiletto derivative mounted on top of a huge cruise missile. To guide it to its target and then unhook the bomb, ignite the huge engine and bolt back home. Of course, project 8611C never has been built. But it looks awesome. In reality, the X-3, meant to be insanely fast, was equipped with miserably underpowered engines. It could not even really reach the speed of sound. Only in a dive it just past mach 1 a little.The X-3 always has kept that look of fenomenal speed, even if it just stands still. And together with this long jet-engined flying needle/submarine it makes for a spectacular model:

I just took the liberty to change the nationality to Dutch because I think it would have been pretty awesome if the Dutch navy would have had these instead of the Sea Fury and Seahawk.
The only thing I really changed about the model was using metallic paper here and there. So I had to cut parts a little different here and there. I made the engine tubes deeper and used aluminium tape to give the leading edges of the wings a metallic appearance. The build was fairly easy and without any troubles. The Stiletto was a little tricky because of the thin backbone and the small breastbone part between which the engine section had to be shoved in. Also, the grey colours of its belly didn’t line up at all. It started good at the nose but the cockpit unfortunately was way off. I recoloured the model entirely blue.
However, I still think the model is a looker. And it was a fun build.

The model can be found and downloaded for free over here:
http://myhobbycraft.blogspot.nl/2011/12/douglas-model-1186-c-long-range-special.html

More images of the Stiletto and project 1186C after the jump.

I used a tiny circle saw of my powertool for the riveting lines.

I apologize for the quality of the images but I took them with flash because it was late and dark. I cranked them up a little in Lightroom but anyway, you get the picture.

PS. On another note: I have stopped with Planck for a while, there were some complications during the build. The reflector inside the baffle structure was misted over when I used some CA to make an inner structure.
I will continue it soon.