The Silbervogel (Silver Bird) was a 1940s proposal for a sub-orbital “Amerika Bomber”. It was to have been launched off a sloped ramp some 2 miles long using a rocket boosted sled. Once airborne, it would use its own rocket engine to climb past the atmosphere and begin a series of shallow “skips” to extend range. After its payload was released it was to glide down to a friendly airfield for recovery and reuse.
That was the plan anyway, and needless to say the concept exceeded the state-of-the-art in materials, aerodynamics, controls, and navigation. Although the German brass were cool to the proposal, some prelimnary wind tunnel testing using a scale model was conducted. In hindsight, the idea was (eventually) technically feasible, and post-war the US Air Force developed a simialr project known as the X-20 Dynasoar. Although nothing came of the X-20, the Space Shuttle could be said to have been the direct descendant of these early proposals.
So back to the kit! I have known of the Silbervogel for many years now, and filed the idea of scratchbuilding one in the “to-do-someday” file. Sharkit made a 1/72 resin kit a while back, but after inspecting a friend’s example I was less than impressed. So once again those crafty Ukrainians have somehow siphoned off my dreams while I sleep and produced yet another irresistable injected kit.
To be honest and up-front about it, this is a low pressure limited run kit. Flash is heavy in places, and I do not expect anything to fit perfectly without some adjutment. Some kit engineering is questionable as well - the nose assembly and stabilizers are butt joined to the fuselage. The stabilizers concern me, as I feel it will be necessary to engineer a spar to keep them from being easily knocked off.
On the positive side, the entire upper nose is molded as a single part in clear plastic. Combined with the included die cut masks, making tidy looking windows should be relatively simple. 3-D printed cockpit instrument console decals are provided, which is the latest rage in the modelng world. The regular decal sheet has some nice “Silbervogel” emblems which I will definitely use.
AMP/Mikro Mir’s Silbervogel will require a bit more effort to build than a mainstream kit, but the oddball subject calls to me. They have been at it again with their Dream Siphon machine, as their latest announcement is a 1/72 Martin XB-51(!!!). I’m gonna need some caffeine pills to stay awake to build all this wonderful stuff!
Subjects like this are worth the effort when they coming around. Like you i have been aware of this project for some tie and hopped there would be a plastic kit of it. Will be watching this.
Fantastic stuff. I had no real knowledge of the program.
Antipodal fight, i.e. flying to a spot on the opposite side of the globe via the shortest route; was new stuff when 4,000 miles was considered a difficult range for an aircraft.
Assuming it took off from Peenemunde and flew to the northernmost of the Japanese Islands, I think Hokkaido; flight would be nearly directly over the North Pole. That calcs at about 9,000 miles but involves no targets past Oslo. To bomb NYC would add about 3,000 miles to the flight. 12,000 miles is a very long flight. It would be a certainty that the crew knew they would either crash or somehow bail out over the Great Lakes.
And as was learned in the STS missions, re-entry is not a certain thing.
Also interesting there are no Swastikas in the decal set.
I don’t think they had anything figured out at the time. A sub-orbital hop would not get you back to Germany. And the launch would be harrowing, with swarms of Allied jabos overhead and the crew blacking out while accelerating to 1,200 MPH while still on the ramp. And how they intended to calculate the release point for the bombload while doing 13,000 MPH at the edge of space is quite beyond me. And the landing. How do you coordinate what is basically a Space Shuttle landing without the benefit of a worldwide communication network? So yeah, technically feasible, but not in 1943.
Still, it’s a neat looking model. [:D] Maybe Mikro Mir will do an X-20 companion kit?
Oh wow! Never even knew this aircraft existed although I’m not surprised by it. The Germans were coming out of the woodworks with technological advances by the end of the war. Looking forward to seeing this one hit the bench.
In my defense Greg, the Cup Noodle wasn’t me! [:D] But yeah, finding weird model kits is sort of my hobby within the hobby. [:P]
And so without further ado, here is the latest find on the chopping block.
The Ukrainian model consortium (Amodel, Mikro Mir, Modelsvit, AMP, et al) seem to have tiers in their kit development. While some of their recent kits have marvelous fit, some don’t. The Silbervogel is not the worst of the bunch, but is not at the top either. The clear nose was not the same length as the solid plastic floor, so a shim was added to the floor to line things up. The aft bulkhead with the rocket engines fit only after thinning the walls of the fuselage. The long fuselage bottom needed to be trimmed so that it would not foul the rear bulkhead. Some strip plastic was added to the insides of the upper fuselage to help position the bottom piece.
So at this point, things look pretty ugly, but some filler and primer will make things better. And typical of these Ukrainian kits, it no longer fits in the box!
After the fuselage is dealt with, I’ll have to figure out a way to secure the horizontal stabilizers, which have no locating pins or tabs. They are thin, so it’s going to require a bit of thought. Here is the model with the flying surfaces placed next to the fuselage.
I am still mulling landing gear options, as I feel the mains are waaaaaay too far forward to allow proper rotation on landing.
Lufthansa markings and windows would be a perfect counterpart to the Pan Am Orion shuttle in 2001! [;)]
Yeah, the whole Nazi UFO conspiracy is implausible to me. Not that I would dismiss any serious German research into anti-gravity, high energy systems or whatnot.
Yeah I really don’t know how plausible a lot of that was. The Germans were very cutting edge for sure and ahead in many ways, but even Lockheed had a jet fighter desigh in 39. The L 133 was considered to outlandish and probably wouldn’t have been feasible anyway due to materials and the knowledge at the time.
Awesome project, didn’t Revell(?) or somebody, do a kit with a similar concept (one way bomber)?
The only thing that comes to mind is the fictitional US stealth bomber by Revell that kinda looks like the actual stealth bomber, you know, boomerang shaped.
My theory is that there was a secret cabal of scientists and engineers in Germany that were determined that they could defeat Hitler by pouring resources into projects like this.
