1/144 Northrop NBX-1 "Manta Ray"

[dy031101]

Bomber!  Flying wing!  Forward-facing engines!

This is some fresh (well the forward-facing engine arrangement kinda is) and awesome stuff! 

[bluedonkey99]

nice use of the G-38

would make a good companion to a whiffed spiders wing!
http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/SPIDER'S%20WING%20PAGE.htm

[GTX]

Top notch!!!!

Regards,

Greg

[kitbasher]

Brian - your best ever.  Well done, just great (and more convincing than the donor aeroplane!).   

[Weaver]

Brian - I've just picked up a G-38 on the cheap (MZ sale) and with your permission, I'd like to use your very excellent idea of joining the wings together to make a flying wing. I certainly will NOT be copying your model closely, just the basic idea of the wing join. It won't be any time soon, either.

It doesn't matter if you're not happy with this: the G-38's such a glorious '30s monster that I can't see it languishing on the shelf......

[Brian da Basher]

Brian - I've just picked up a G-38 on the cheap (MZ sale) and with your permission, I'd like to use your very excellent idea of joining the wings together to make a flying wing. I certainly will NOT be copying your model closely, just the basic idea of the wing join. It won't be any time soon, either.

It doesn't matter if you're not happy with this: the G-38's such a glorious '30s monster that I can't see it languishing on the shelf......

Borrow freely my friend. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Brian da Basher

[Tophe]

Wonderful!
just... could you confirm this is imagination and not (secret) truth?

[Weaver]

Brian - I've just picked up a G-38 on the cheap (MZ sale) and with your permission, I'd like to use your very excellent idea of joining the wings together to make a flying wing. I certainly will NOT be copying your model closely, just the basic idea of the wing join. It won't be any time soon, either.

It doesn't matter if you're not happy with this: the G-38's such a glorious '30s monster that I can't see it languishing on the shelf......

Borrow freely my friend. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Brian da Basher

Cheers Brian! 

Well there's plenty of things higher up the list, so don't hold your breath....

What I'm thinking is this: to work as a pure flying wing, it would need more sweepback (the elevons need to be a decent distance behind the CofG), so I'm going for tails. To keep it "flying wingish" though, I propose to add a boom behind each engine, with a tail fin at the end of each, and a pair of high tailplanes linking the left and right boom pairs. I have a Heller 1/160th Noratlas who's booms don't look bad, and is cheap enough to buy another one and plunder the pair of them, although I can't help feeling that maybe they should be square section instead.

Then to make the undercarriage work, my though was to fit long spats to the undercarriage struts so that the twin main wheels are a long way apart, so far that it doesn't need a tailwheel, in the manner of those huge Daimler-Benz carrier aircraft projects from late in WWII. However, it then struck me that they'd be almost like floats, so that's another option.

No idea whether it should be civvie or military, but if the latter, I'd use soft toy eyes from the LHS for "Germanic" turrets: they're not perfect domes, you see, but have a parallel "skirt" section.

[Captain Canada]

From the " How'd I miss this ? " files comes.....

Wow ! I have to agree with Kitbasher....this is your best ever ! Love the camo/ colo(u)r combination, a real winner there ! The humo(u)r in your story was pretty darn good as well. What a sight that would have been, flying cross country like that ? People would have thought aliens were invading !

Now, I'd like to see a wee man beside it, so we can get an idea of the size.

Great job, Brian !