As an example of what you can do with pretty much just the internet and almost no print references, I’d offer up this. This is the research that I did for my current project. The vast majority of the information came from various on-line sources, and a large number of those were suggested to me by members right here on KM.
Searching for Soviet 2P19 Scud TEL Information
You can follow the time-stamps on the posts and see that this thread ran from 3 to 23 May before I posted up my final conclusions. I probably spent 2-3 weeks before beginning this thread looking for and collecting information. So, in total, I spent about 1-1/2 months of discretionary hobby-time doing research for this build.
If you go through the entire thread, you’ll see that I went down several dead-end paths of study and examination before I arrived at my final conclusions. These may still turn out to be wrong, but I feel that I exhausted pretty much every avenue of research that was reasonably available, and once that point has been reached, it’s either time to start building or time to shelve the project while you continue to do more study.
The final information has been made available to the entire modeling community (and anyone else interested in such details) here:
Modeler’s Guide to the SCUD Missile and Launcher
(I also uploaded the same guide to my FB account for those who can’t access DropBox.)
Finally, here’s the link to the actual build blog here on KM/Armorama:
Trumpeter 2P19 Launcher with R-17 Missile SCUD B
Now, this might be considered excessive or simply too much for many (heck, even most) modelers, and that’s just fine. As I mentioned above, I enjoy the research and study and get a lot of satisfaction out of solving the “puzzles” that sometimes exist when it comes many of our modeling subjects. This was a fine example of just that, a puzzle - really all about getting the cable and hose connections as correct as possible on this model. Those are hugely visible and key interest points for anyone looking at the model, and I now know one heck of a lot more about the SCUD missile and its launchers than I did when I started. In many ways, the model build is just “icing on the cake.”
I suppose that one lesson that can be drawn from this example is that you don’t actually need a large and expensive library of reference books (although I confess to having just that myself), and with persistence, time and effort, there is a surprising lot that can be learned just from the internet and careful study of photos.
I certainly don’t go to the level with every build. However, sometimes “cracking the code” or “solving the puzzle” is enjoyable in its own right. Sometimes, I’ll spend a lot of effort just trying to figure out a single - some might even consider small and insignificant - detail before I start a build.
Here’s the result of one such “single detail” research effort, again, published online for the rest of the modeling community:
Modeler’s Guide to US WWII and Korean War Tank Radios and Antennas
The point of this, from the modeler’s point of view is the possibility to add just a few touches of unexpected color to many builds (check out the antenna ferrules and clamps in the guide). I would also add that the vast majority of this information was, once again, found on-line in free, open-source documents and public websites. Most of it was taken from Signal Corps technical manuals that were down-loaded as .pdf’s. Again, a vast library of specialized reference books is not always needed.
This is actually an on-going interest of mine since I also collect militaria and have a number of US WWII radios, field phones and radio “remote control” devices. I’ve recently done some fairly in-depth research on the US SCR-300 / VRC-3 radio and will likely publish up these research results separately or up-date the Modeler’s Guide (much of what I’ve recently found concerns the VRC-3 radio which is the vehicle mounted version of the SCR-300 “Walkie Talkie”).