This nice little kit by Academy, in 1/72 scale, includes the special tractor/trailer used to haul these rocket-powered WWII planes around the airfields, so I built them both, and as it’s such an unusual combo it kind of stands out on my shelves, even though it’s relatively tiny.
That’s a 10ml Tamiya pot, not the 23ml, so the whole rig is kinda small.
Here’s the trailer on its own
And here’s the ME 163 on its own. I painted the plane using Tamiya rattle cans. I have recently bought an airbrush set-up, but I am frugal enough to want to use up all my leftover rattle cans rather than throwing them away. At least both the greens are Luftwaffe greens (the reddy-brown isn’t - it should be RLM 81 Violet Brown, but I didn’t have that one so I used the closest match that I already had).
The ME163 was hardly a successful design. Its flights only lasted 10 minutes, and though it had an enormous top speed for its time (almost 600mph) it was so much faster than the bombers it targeted that it swooped past them so quickly it barely had a few seconds to fire its 30mm cannon. Coupled with that, the cannon’s rate of fire was slow. By the end of WWII, all the ME163s Germany made had shot down a mere 9 Allied bombers.
I made my first attempt at a mottled paint scheme here. I watched several YouTube videos on how the airbrush masters do it, and I’m still kind of in airbrush kindergarten myself, and it all looked too tricky to attempt. So I opted for using lots of blobs of Blu-Tack to mask off the tail area, then sprayed this in the darker green colour with my rattle cans. I’m happy enough with the result for a first attempt, but I’ll start practising with my airbrush some time soon.
I’ve also ordered a Tamiya Weathering Master set, and I plan to practise very basic level weathering on the hard-working tractor. It needs to look a whole lot grimier than it currently does.
