MiG-15 musings

[upnorth]

I'm writing up the story of post WWII Socialist East Austria and have Airfix's new 1/72 MiG-15 to hand as an eventual representative of the East Austrian air force.

I want to keep it MiG-15 enough to be recognisable as a derivative of the family, but with enough differences to set it apart a bit. The Austrians built their own variants of it.

I have heard that the Airfix kit is actually too long in the fuselage. I suppose, sitting on it's own this wouldn't matter, but if I put it alongside a MiG-15 model that was closer to right in length, the difference would become apparent.

I thought, perhaps I could cover the length discrepancy in the backstory somehow so that it would be accurate for the Airfix kit. The following occured to me:

1:
Austrian industry develops it's own engine of axial flow design, perhaps also primitive turbofan technology. so extra length is incorporated into the mid fuselage to accomodate compressor stages and bypass ducting.

2:
Austria develops it's own afterburner for the MiG's engine, requiring extra length at the back of the fuselage.

I'm leaning toward the afterburner option as that would actually show on the outside.

With the afterburner option, East Austria bypasses the MiG-17 entirely in it's inventory and holds onto the MiG-15 until the MiG-19 becomes available.

Holding the MiG-15 on the front lines in lieu of the MiG-17 opens up a host of things that I've been pondering as modernisations to the design. A few ideas:

1:
Cannons removed from nose, replaced by one 27 or 30 mm cannon in each wing root or possibly further back in the fuselage with the muzzles below the cockpit somewhere.

2:
Replacement of mast and wire antenna with a more modern blade antenna fit

3:
Specialised interceptor variant armed with IR seeking missiles of Austrian design. This would of course give me the latitude to incorporate some sort of obvious IR sighting system on the nose. An IR "fishbowl" is always cool.

Those are my initial ideas, how plausible do you think they might be for a mid-late 50s timeframe?

I'm open to any an all insights and opinions.

[Geoff]

Sounds like a good idea.
The Czechs had an IR sensor in place of the 37mm cannon with 2 Atoll AAMs. But it never went into production. They also had a radar nose on some trainer Mig-15UTIs for training.