Mike that is good info. The only problem is the $135 price tag. Anyway color is a strange thing. For stand off scale and profile scale (15' judging) I feel that true color is not as critical. In these classes the aircraft will be judged against the color photo supplied in the documentation package at 15'. The color photo is an artist rendition down loaded off of the internet (or copied out of a book) and printed on my local printer. If you want true color you need a standard light source to view the paint chip etc, etc, & etc. Also color has two componets, frequency and saturation. So a given red can look anything from red to pink depending on saturation. Also I suspect even the USSR didn't get it right on every aircraft. It was war time and if a batch of paint was off color it got used anyway. Through in sun fading, war damage, and a lack of color photography my philosophy is make it look like the available artiest rendition and don't worry about the small stuff.
Mr. John, great post and attitude. Love it!
This thing that has developed about "color" for scale toy airplanes has probably driven more would-be scale modelers away form scale competition than any other item I can think of. It started many years ago and is somewhat funny.
Experiences: 1. I have a book here, "
US ARMY AIR FORCES. Aircraft Markings and Camouflage 1941-1947". 350 pages of politics and keeping a whole lot of people out of combat deciding daily what to do with paint, numbers, etc., etc.
Reality: I had a good RC Friend, George P., back some years ago that spent several years in Europe during WW II and his job besides aircraft mechanic was keeping up the paint jobs on P-47s and P-51s. He said that the Tech orders required specific mixtures and such for shades of color. They simply went to check the available paint, mixed up enough to paint whatever, took brooms and broomed it on. All those fractions of an inch about numbers came out of a paint brush and slopped on.
2. Another Friend, Tom S. was invited to the first-ever Top Gun to fly his B-17. Once there they wanted his "COLOR CHIPS". Well, Tom had a letter from then Confederate Air Force certifying the model was painted with the very same paint used for the subject B-17. He was still severely downgraded because he had no chips. Tom said to "L" with that business.
3. Another thing that amuses me is Platt's "Realism of Flight". While there is some general items, there is little connection from a model airplane to its counterpart in the 1:1 scale arena.
Reality: Another friend, Richard F. was a scale judge at a contest that I was running back in the '70s in Chicagoland.
One guy came up and was P&Ming about this judge having no clue about realism of flight, which was a relatively new item in Scale at the time. The contestant said that he was a private pilot, had almost 100 hours in a couple small airplanes and did know such. I had problems controlling myself. RF had several thousand hours with time in both the P-47 and P-51, was wounded, and finished the war as a B-17 pilot. He then transferred to Ferry Command and spent several more years ferrying different aircraft all over the world. IIRC he had some 65 different types in the log book. Nope he did not know realism of flight. HA HA Ha.
I lost track of Richard back in the early '90s. Sad.
Yes, I think this Scale thing goes a tad far in color and how the real machine flew. But then what do I know, just did it for 41 years and stopped counting somewhere around 20,000 hours.
Topic: WW II USSR White. (Read 1421 times)