Gloster Goblin - FINISHED!

[Weaver]

well........what did you expect from a pavla kit?

Never having built one before, I didn't know what to expect from it - the last time I was building kits, Pavla didn't exist.....

It makes an interesting contrast with the Bedford from the refuelling set. The latter might be a complicated little beast but that's in the nature of the subject. The kit however, is really well designed: you get the impression (not always the case) that it was designed by someone who actually built kits themselves and knew what you needed. Other than it's unaccountable lack of a steering wheel (what's that all about?) it's a great little thing to put together.

[Weaver]

Progress:

Dirtied up Bedford chassis and nice clean tank with nice clean valve gear. I'm only putting one of the booms on so it only needs one internal feed, because the Goblin can only be filled with LOX from one side.



RPs are in place in the nose (FFAR pod front and a spacer made from slices of two Evergreen tube sizes). It'll have a Natter-style clear cap over the nose, so the fact that the RPs don't fill the section won't be apparent. That filler along the leading edges conceals strips of .010 Evergreen that I had to insert to give the upper wings a ghost of a chance of matcing the root fairings.



You can see how one upper wing doesn't match the lower around the tip.... The white things in the undercarriage bays are stowed airbags which will be visible because the modified u/c doors will form the runnerS that attach to the rails. I carved the airbags from blocks of Evergreen: they'll stand up and fill the bays more when fitted, and will also have straps around them. At the moment they're just dropped in.



The right rear wingroot joint didn't even vaguely match up; not sure how much I can do about that to be honest. The new spine (parachute pack cover) is now a much better fit. I don't want it to be too good a fit though, since it will be pretty battered by dangling on a lanyard during landings.

[GTX]

Looking promising.

Regards,

Greg

[Weaver]

Plane has a coat of aluminium undercoat drying. The basics of the tower have been built and look good. The LOX tanker is coming along nicely. Pics later.

[Weaver]

Okay, so "pics later" got hijacked by a bottle of beer and a comfy sofa, but then "got to run errands" has me out of bed relatively early for a holiday day, so over breakfast, we have these. Sorry about the shadows: I was trying to use the unaccustomed excess of natural light, but the angle's a bit low....

Core of the tower's built. It needs rails and maintenance/boarding platforms yet, but I can't do those until I have the runner on the plane (to get the spacing) and I can't stick them on the plane until it's got it's spray paint on, so it's all getting a bit chicken-and-egg at the moment:





Tommy the tatty tanker. The tank itself is still going to be pristine, but I decided to modify it a bit (single boom)so it needs repainting. When I am going to learn that pre-painting never pays.....




It doesn't look any better from this angle, does it?  The light blue bits are supposed to be nicked from a commercial vehicle to keep the RAF one running: if you're desperate enough to be using Natter-style rocket planes, you're past the point of caring about appearances. I've put a steering wheel in (nicked from an M16 half-track) and while researching what the wheel looked like, I was chuffed to bits to find a load of pictures of commerical QLs in exactly this kind of light blue:




Der plaaaane boss! It's so tempting to leave it in silver, but not even a desperate defence is going to put thumping great mirrors up to attract the jabos. Anyway, that glitch on the wing root LE just won't do:




Aaaand the underside. The new ventral fin/ski is now fitted and looking good:

[Weaver]

Okay, more progress. Here are the launch rails, made with the neccessary unnerving precision (no that is not a typo...). Amazingly enough (not least to me) I got it right!  




Here are the fittings on the plane. The two modified u/c doors ride the rails and the ventral fin rests in the centre one. Note the airbag packs in the former u/c bays.




Mocked-up proof that the rail system works!  




Mockup of the whole diorama:



Obviously, the guy who drew the short straw won't be standing on a blue box. I was going to make a free-standing, wheeled platform on this side of the plane, but now I'm thinking of going back to the original plan, namely having a lower version of the tower-mounted, retractable boarding platform that's going on the other side (and doesn't exist yet).

The Tatty Tanker has now gained a coat of paint and a coat of varnish on it's shiney new tank. You can just about see from this angle the shadows of the "LOX" stencil on the side which the crew immediately pulled off for security reasons. They subsequently put some more effort into vismods to avoid the prowling jabos: the boards on the side and the hoops are there to support a canvas cover that nopefull makes it look more like a normal truck. The rolled-up canvas will be strapped on the side. the fuel boom is white because it's frosted up from the LOX passing though it. I'm going to do all this frosting properly with bicarb. Something I've just reslised it needs is blackout covers on the headlights...

Ohyeahand: did my first vac-form canopy, and it's pretty much okay - currently in paint.

Buggeration! Just realised I forgot to put the pivot plates on which explain how the tower dismantles....

[Weaver]

Okay, it's not going to make the deadline:

1. The plaster of Paris diorama base which I made is resolutely refusing to dry, despite the PoP itself having dryed in the mixing tray within 20 mins -  

2. There's a flaw in my design for the retractable platforms on the tower, which means I need some different Evergreen. The shops are now shut and I won't get a chance to get some before next weekend.



However, the plane itself, which was the actual Secret Santa gift, will be finished shortly, and the tanker probably will be too. In the meantime, here's some shots of the gunsight I made for it. No idea if it's historical (looks more German to me to be honest), but then how many air-to-air rockets did the RAF fire in WWII anyway?







There's a slogan on the side in that last pic, but you can hardly see it because it's painted in brown cammo paint and heavily weathered. Here's a colour-saturated version that brings it out:



Put down that pitchfork - it's not really that colour! Pilot's name is "Tupp", obviously.....

[Caveman]

That name is genius

[NARSES2]

This is turning into one great build 

[Weaver]

Heh - got an evil idea to save this in time for the deadline: watch this space.....

Thanks for the encouragement folks.

[Weaver]

Okay, colour me dumb - I had it in my head that the 1st April deadline was Wednesday, but of course, it's Thursday....     Doesn't actually make much difference to the emergency alternative diorama, but the extra wriggle room is nice if something goes wrong (again).

Meanwhile, stuff has been made, other stuff has been painted and things have been thought about.....

[proditor]

I'm really looking forward to this one. 

[Weaver]

Just bought some "hand painted" railway figures from the only shop I could get to in my lunch hour (sort of - sorry Boss...). Jeeeeeeeez: elbow-painted would be more like it. Our cat could do better.....

Oh well, it's only sleep......

[Weaver]

<Yawn>....... Well, everything's written up, painted up, printed out, mostly stuck together and ready to go. Now my instant diorama pack just needs to be assembled in accordance with the instructions (the ones in my head), which will, of course, go completely smoothly, and photographed.

[Weaver]

6. Gloster's Wobblin' Goblin

As the war inevitable turned against Britain, the criminal Churchill regime became ever more desperate to stave off the long overdue accounting, and turned to Britain's "Boffins" for increasingly bizarre "wonder weapons" to counter the overwhelming superiority of the Third Reich's forces. With the four-engined bombers of the Luftwaffe roaming freely over their islands, escorted by decisively superior jet fighters, it became a matter of urgency to come up with new methods of attacking them, given that the overrated Spitfire was now hopelessly outclassed and constant jabo (fighter-bomber) patrols were making what airfields remained virtually unusable.



The only surviving Goblin in Britain is on display in the Reich Victory Museum in London. The aircraft was captured on the ground during the liberation of Glasgow.

One solution was offered by Prof. Walter Vernon Brown, Britain's leading expert on rocket propulsion, who was responsible for the motors powering the infamous "V-Weapon" ballistic missiles (named after Churchill's famously obscene gesture). Brown conceived a small fighter which would use a rocket to match the jet fighter's speed, a rocket battery to achieve massive firepower despite it's small size, and rocket-boosted vertical take off to dispense with the need for airfields. There was not time to develop an airframe from scratch, so ingeniously, Brown proposed to use the Gloster E.28/39 airframe.



The aircraft is displayed on a partially complete launch tower, together with a Liquid Oxygen tanker lorry, one of the protective suits worn by the refuelling crews, and a 3" rocket.


The E.28/39 had been designed by Gloster as a testbed for Britain's abortive and hopelessly backwards jet engine program. Brown realised that it's barrel-shaped fuselage, designed for Whittle's inefficient centrifugal turbojet engines, would be ideal to house the liquid oxygen tank of his rocket motor, and the rocket battery could be fitted into the now redundant air intake space in the nose, and thus was the Gloster Goblin Mk.1 born.



Top left: the Goblin prototype performs a low-level pass.
Bottom left: the E.28/39 on which the Goblin was based.
Right: a Goblin launch. The aircraft appears to be veering to one side already!


The Goblin's proposed operational technique was extraordinary. Launched vertically from a tower made from existing bridging components, which could be quickly dismantled and moved from place to place, the Goblin would accelerate straight upwards using the power of it's rocket motor and four strap-on booster rockets. Once speed and altitude had been gained, the pilot would then dive his craft at the attacking bomber formation and fire his battery of 76.2mm (3") rockets at the nearest target. His fuel now nearly expended, he would then fly to a pre-arranged landing site, and once over it, deploy a large parachute which would bring the aircraft down, relatively gently, to land on airbags deployed from under it's wings. The aircraft would then be recovered and re-equipped for a further mission. RAF experts expressed profound misgivings about this plan, but they were overruled by Churchill, who ordered the aircraft into production on his personal authority.



A 3" rocket and the 19-round launcher in the aircraft's nose. In practice, aircraft often flew without the frangible plastic nose dome.


Although it must be admitted that the Goblin's tactics did cause a degree of consternation to Luftwaffe bomber crews until they became accustomed to them, the RAF's misgivings proved all too justified. Both rocket motor and launching/recovery system were under-developed and had many potentially flaws, not least a distressing tendency to explode on the launch pad! What's more any imbalance in the booster rockets (which were notoriously badly made) would send the aircraft cartwheeling out of control, a tendency which inspired the aircraft's sarcastic nickname of "Wobblin' Goblin".



The four booster rockets clustered around the tail. Although the Goblin and the Bedford were genuinely recovered in the field and are displayed in original condition, the tower was reconstructed by museum staff who found the parts in a scrap yard. It thus shows none of the weathering visible on the vehicles, and is missing the boarding/maintenence platforms and the aircraft support frame found on operational towers.


If it did manage to launch safely, the short range of the Goblin meant that it had to be deployed near to bombing targets, thus making it's location and the timing of it's attacks predictable, but perhaps it's most significant failing was that it was extremely vulnerable on the ground both immediately before take-off when any camouflage had to be removed, and after landing. On the Fuhrer's brilliant personal orders, formations of jabos began to sweep ahead of the bomber formations, pouncing on any launch tower discovered and also responding to reports of Goblin attacks by seeking out the landed aircraft and strafing them. Thus the Goblin menace was contained: the losses among RAF pilots caused by both accidents with the aircraft's propulsion system and by the jabos far exceeded any advantage gained, but it was typical of Churchill to throw away lives in this reckless fashion to save his own neck.



The aircraft were originally to be supplied entirely unpainted, but following complaints from field units about their conspicuity, they were grudgingly supplied with a plain coat of green paint. Squadrons often augmented this with camouflage stripes of whatever paint they could find, and although the museum's example has mostly brown, it has been repaired at some point with parts from another aircraft which used a blue-grey colour. All the paint was of poor quality by this point in the war, and being applied without an undercoat, it weathered heavily and quickly, leading to a very shabby appearance.



On this side of the forward fuselage, the name "Stray Tupp" has been applied with the brown camouflage paint. Presumably, the pun implies that the pilot's surname was Tupp. Unfortunately, the wholesale destruction of British records at the end of the war makes it impossible to identify him precisely, but the tentative consensus is that he was Captain J.W.Tupp DFC, who was one of the men who died in the Aldershot internment camp in the winter of 1948, when the actions of the terrorist "resistance" caused the supply of heating oil to the camp to be cut off.


After the war, there were those who felt that professor Brown should have been put on trial for war crimes following the murderous V-Weapon attacks on the Channel invasion ports which cost so many civilian lives, but the Fuhrer in his infinite wisdom and compassion realised that there was a better way for the professor to atone to mankind for his actions, and decreed that he be taken into the Reich's own, entirely civilian rocketry programme. This decision once again demonstrated the Fuhrer's great foresight and vision, as Brown was instrumental in the triumphant programme which resulted in mankind's first landing on the Moon in 1972.



Camouflage was also applied to the Bedford QL LOX tanker. The crew have fitted it with fake side panels made from canvas stretched over wood, and tilt hoops made from scaffold pole. When not actually doing it's job, a canvas cover would be thrown over these hoops to give the vehicle the superficial appearance of a regular Army truck and thus hopefully avoid the attention of the prowling Jabos. Note that the crew have removed the "LOX" marking applied at the factory, presumably for the same reason.



Left: The fireproof suit worn by the refuelling crews seems to have scared this little visitor!
Right: Childish RAF humour.

It has become fashionable in recent years for revisionist historians to lionise the Boffin's last-ditch "wonder weapons" like the Goblin and speculate on what might have happened if they had had a chance to be properly developed and deployed. They even have a term for such speculations: RAF'46. Such attempts to re-write history must, however, stumble and fall against the simple fact of the Third Reich's victory, which was due to the development, under the Fuhrer's guidance, of the correct weapons and technologies for the future, rather than these dead-end ideas. After all, as the Fuhrer himself has said, "history is written by the victorious".

From Secret Weapons of the Boffins - Britain's Hopeless Wonder Weapons of World War 2, by Dr. G.Bunston, Senior Lecturer in Aviation History at Adolf Galland Aviation College, Cranwell.

They flutter behind you, your Possible Pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
-Pink Floyd-