CRICKET NIGHTS On the first night of the first test against South Africa I finally took my courage in my hands as started work on the Planet 1/72 resin kit of the Arsenal Delanne 10. I’d opened the box and gazed at the contents on several occasions but the scope of the problems to be…

The Sopwith Triplane was top dog in the skies over the Western Front in the final few months of 1917. Before its arrival the German Albatros D.III had been the best fighter over the Front but the superior manoeuverability of the Sopwith Triplane gave it the edge. By the end of 1917, however, the Triplane…

In the autumn of 1943 Japanese officials in Germany witnessed a demonstration of the Messerchmitt Me163 rocket interceptor but the technology seemed too advanced and different from Japanese capabilities to be of interest. However, in 1944 when American bombers were beginning to reach the Japanese homeland, the idea of a rapidly climbing interceptor was more…

Experiments into rocket propelled aeroplanes were conducted in Russia around the same time as in Germany and the Bereznyak-Isaev BI flew for the first time on 15 May 1942. It was perhaps the first rocket powered interceptor to fly but, unlike developments in Germany, it lacked the aerodynamic sophistication necessary for the new power plant…

(Development of the MiG Ye-152 began with the Ye-150, a technology demonstrator optimized as a short range interceptor with a single Turmansky R-15 engine of 10150kg thrust, possibly capable of intercepting the U-2s that the United States had begun flying over Russia. Only one Ye-150 was built and it flew for the first time in…

One of the things that makes going to Swap n Sells worthwhile is what you find lurking in the boxes of leftover stuff that dealers often have under their tables. You can’t get to them straight away because there are too many bodies pressed together trying to find bargains on the tables themselves, but later…

Even before the Messerchmitt Me163B entered service it had become apparent it had many problems that made it very difficult to use operationally. Two of the most important were its very short endurance which gave it a maximum of only two and a half minutes in which to engage enemy bombers after climbing to intercept…

After the German authorities had been so impressed by the high speed of the Messerchmitt Me163V-3 in October 1941 they approved its development into an armed interceptor designated the Messerchmitt Me163B named Komet, and ordered 70 of them. Redesign commenced almost immediately and the first prototype flew without an engine on 26 June 1942. However…

The Messerchmitt Me163 was the result of two separate technologies coming together to create a new kind of weapons system. Although the system had great potential its complexities, along with the accidents of history, meant that promise was never realised. After its defeat in World War I Germany was prohibited from manufacturing powered aeroplanes so…

From the mid 1950s the United States and the USSR competed to be the first to put a man into space. The German V-2 had shown that rockets worked and the development of the atomic bomb led to rapid advances in rocket technology. Both the US and USSR took over as much German technology as…

In October 1945 the USAAC sought proposals for a new missile system and a contract was issued to Consolidated Vultee (later Convair) to develop a system called MX-774. Three important innovations were a thin skinned rocket in which the pressure of the fuel in the tanks kept it from collapsing, a detatchable payload section and…

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the tank. It took several nations a while to figure out what a successful tank was and how to use it, and at the end of World War I the most successful and the most produced tank was the little Renault FT. (Perhaps…