Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'supersonic'.
Found 3 results
-
Hi all, (I don't really know where to put this - "Special Themes" or "Scale Modeling" - so if it's wrong here, please let me know... ) LEGO’s new Concorde is a fine set overall, but it has, in my opinion, some flaws which compromise its looks.So I had to decide whether to modify it or to build something different… and, as I prefer the more "brutal" appearance of the Concorde’s Soviet counterpart anyway, I chose the latter. The prototype The Tu-144 was the first commercial supersonic aircraft, its maiden flight taking place two months before the Concorde took off. Nevertheless, the Tu-144 is often regarded as much inferior to the Concorde, but that’s not the full story. Commercial passenger flights were only offered for a few months, that's true, but it was due to changing political circumstances rather than for technical reasons that the Tu-144 was finally withdrawn from passenger service. Indeed there were some technical issues (as perhaps with every completely new aircraft), but they most probably would have been solved had not the Soviet authorities lost interest in supersonic commercial aviation and thus ordered not only commercial flights, but the whole development programme to be terminated in 1983. And yet, while the first production variant Tu-144S was hampered by its inefficient Kuznetsov engines, the improved Tu-144D version (with Kolesov engines) had performance figures almost on par with the Concorde. Consequently, it was a Tu-144D (CCCP-77114, disguised as "aircraft 101" for unclear reasons) that set 13 official world records for speed and altitude with given payloads in July 1983, just after the cancellation of the Tu-144 programme had been announced. (For those of you who have a deeper interest in this matter: Yefim Gordon, Dimitriy Komissarov, Vladimir Rigmant - Tupolev Tu-144, The Soviet Supersonic Airliner. A very good reading about the Tu-114’s design, development and the political affairs behind it) The model To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its above-mentioned flights, my model bears the registration and "101" titles of the world record plane. I was originally motivated to design it by ungern 666’s Tu-144 sketch on Rebrickable, but, apart from some inspirations I took regarding the tail section, it has evolved into a completely different scale model. The plane consists of approx. 1900 parts an weighs ca. 1.3 kg. The "droop nose“, canards, rudders (yes, two) and elevons are moveable. While the landing gear is not retractable (I prefer a true-to-scale look over functions), it can be replaced with parts for the closed landing gear bay doors. Also, the tail cone can be replaced with a sub-model assembly showing the deployed brake parachutes. Unfortunately, at the moment there's only one photo of the completed model, which has a crudely photoshopped grey background. More pictures will follow as soon as I have found a sufficiently large, neutral, real background... Thanks for stopping by! Kind regards, Sven
-
MODEL: CREATED: SEPTEMBER 2017 SIZE: W : 29CM / L : 47CM / H : 11CM DESIGN: YORH EKIN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. - - - Photo: Copyright (c) Yorh Ekin. All rights reserved.
-
What happened to Racers? There was no announcement of it ending, and no one even seemed to notice. Was it the lack of sales, or ideas?
