During WW2, the Nazis experimented with various new ways of building aircraft. Everything from helicopters, jet engines, flying wings, rocket planes and vertical launch fighters. So many projects, and many more that never made it off the page. One that captured the imagination more than most are the Haunebu flying saucers. There’s no evidence they were ever made, much less flew, but there is a mysterious research centre in Berlin that has, ait it’s core a circular spce, surroundedd by massive electricity cables and equpment, which had all the paperwork destroyed, and which is rumoured to have been the most top secret project the Germans ever undertook. I think it was covered in one of the Abandoned Engineering series, so well worth checking it out. But anyway, enough of myths and legends, back to the kit in hand. A few months ago, I started on the 1/72 Haunebu 1 kit, (wrongly labelled as the Haunebu II by Revell) and rather than finish it, thought I may as well double my trouble and build it’s larger sibling, The Squadron Models Haunebu II. Literally more than double every dimension, this is a huge kit that has some great details, and some not so great flaws. Like the Haunebu I, it was also something I wasn’t sure how to paint. Yes, I can give a base coat of German light blue, but after that I wasn’t sure. More of that later. The positives. A nicely detailed surfuce, top and bottom, with four rotating turrts on the base and one large turret on the top. The flight deck is also well done, with plenty of control panels, moulded rather than decals. In fact, the whole thing went together very well, (though a few pieces of plastic didn’t seem to want to adhere, but that was overcome in time. So the negatives. many revolve around the landing gear. Four double struts around the base, each sporting three wheels. But since each set is facing either one axis or the otrher, with no way of turning, exactly gow the wheels were supposed to move the saucer on the ground is beyond me. I guess they are supposed to look nice, but above that forget about it. Stranger is the wheel wells the landing gear is fitted to. Each is at one point a quarter war around the base, all have two doors which hang down, but the odd thing is the openning is too small for the landing gear to fit into. Again, I guess it’a matter of having the gear down means you don’t look above and realise the wells are too small, but since this was a brand new kit, it begs the question why such details weren’t thought through. Anyway, the building done, including the ramp, time to paint. As I said, a light blue base and then, after looking at the illustrations, photos of large aircarft near the end of WW2 flaing for Germany, I decided undernear would be the blue-white patches ontop of light blue, (as per He177) and on the top, well, to make a real rod for my back and create a truly fragmented camouflage Again, light blue base, two tones of grey and one of green and get to work on something that’s about as far fetched as the Haunebu itself. Photos as it is now, decals and details to add., oh, and a size comparison with the Haunebu 1.
@ Steven (Old-fool),
That camo is A+MAZING!!! 
—mike …
My want list includes a number of Haunebu models. They all look so silly. I sometimes enjoy reading ‘research’ articles written by nutters trying to explain their existence.
That camouflage is really cool.
Cheers, very much a labour of love as they say, after all, it’s not just painting each shape once but a few times until the paint is block solid. I’ll be trying something else when it comes to the still plaine Haunebu I. It’s also a matter of which decals to apply and to where. Who knows, I might even go Star Trek registry style with crosses, numbers etc.
Thanks, weirdly, until someone else actually saw it, you guys are the first, I wasn’t sure it was any good. After all, when you are trying something very unusual, it can go through your head that maybe only I think it’s okay. But as I often say, as long as I’m happy with it, who cares? 
What-if? models are often sort of Wacky Races versions of tanks and aircraft, after all, how would you even shoot at anything with a giant turret on top or four turrets underneath when there’s no real way of aiming them by sight, and the recoil on the main guns especially, how would that even work? Still, I love sci-fi, and military design, so for me they’re the best of both world. Hope you manage to find the Haunebu’s, they’re getting rarer. I have a second of each Haunebu which I intend to display on a purpose built stand, but I’m still searching for the civilian version of the Squardon Models kit.
I do wonder what those wheels are supposed to achieve that couldn’t be done simpler and cheaper with skids?
That camouflage is impressive!
I totally agree, and the Haunebu I does indeed have simpler, yet much more realistic, skids/landing pads. Now, do the wheels look good from the side, yes, and I’m guessing that was the whole point when designing the kit.
Thanks, glad it seems to have worked out well, it certainly took long enough to get to this stage.
I have used the same camouflage pattern in pencil drawings of creatures. It resembles some forms of lizard skin. What I really like about your application is that you started small around the rim of the saucer, increasing the size of the scales as they approach the bridge.
The person who designed the Haunebu saucers obviously had no knowledge of aeronautical engineering. It is still a fun design, perhaps because it is so preposterous. It makes me want to pull out and finish the Area 51 flying saucer I started many years ago.
In my opinion, wheels are way better than skids. A machine like Haunebu would be tasked with attacking allied bomber formations and then returning to a dedicated airfield. Upon landing, wheels would make it far easier for airfield tugs to move such saucers around. A dedicated tug was built for the Me 163, but that is a much smaller aircraft. Ground crew personnel could attach wheel blocks to the skids, as is done with many helicopters, but having wheels in the first place is easier.
In my opinion, it would not take much work to turn a Haunebu into something realistic.
Yup, wheels make movements easier
BUT
when the wheels can’t turn and the wheel
bogies are 90 degrees offset you will be dragging
at least two sets of wheels sideways.
Roll directions indicated by blue arrows, drag directions indicated by red arrows.
Roll direction for two sets of wheels are drag directions for the other two sets.
Wheel sets marked A can roll in directions which are drag directions
for wheels sets marked B.
The pinkish arrows indicate directions where all wheels would drag,
rotating the Haunebu II around its centre will also drag all sets of wheels.
Two sets of wheels, either A or B need to be rotated 90 degrees and the
other set of wheels need to be steerable.
With the current setup the wheels will act as skids, with more friction than steel skids …
The problem is that the wheels are two struts joining three wheels, two on the outside, one between them both. There would be no way of turning them to steer/ Worse, because they are at a diagonal, essential to support the weight of the saucer, if the struts were turned, 9the only way of turning the three wheels, they could end up all pointing the same way, leaving the sucer unsupported. Wheels for movement do make sense, but not in this arrangement.
Thanks for noticing the gradient of the camo pattern, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, have it gradually increase in size as the shapes went highet. Again, inspiration from the fragmented real life camo of German aircraft late in WW2. Did it ever make any difference when it came to the crunch? Who can say, but it did make the aircraft distinctive.
I totally agree. It’s best just to say the wheels are for decorative purposes only and no get hung up too much about the reality they’d represent. After all, as I said, given the dimensions of the wheel wells, they’d be too wide to be raised in any case. Given the thought put into sop much of the kit, it is odd they decided to go to lunch early when it came to some of the practical details.
As Old-fool pointed out in the first post, the landing gear on the model cannot fit into the wheel wells. They are nonsense.
Properly designed landing gear with wheels–the kind that allow tugs to pull aircraft around–are better than skids for aircraft that use airfields.
In my opinion, redesigned landing gear with wheels, allowing a tug to pull the vehicle around, make more sense than redesigned landing gear with skids. I never suggested that the nonsense landing gear that come with the model should be replaced by a different set of nonsense landing gear.
I will now argue for skids. In the final years of World War II, military targets in Germany were subjected to increasingly frequent bombing raids. Many of these raids were directed at known airfields. If vertical take off and landing aircraft could be flown from small, concealed clearings, it would make it very hard to target them with bombing raids. Aircraft flown from clearings do not need the ability to roll around. Rubber was also increasingly scarce in Germany at that time. Therefore, skids make more sense than wheels for all Haunebu saucers because they can be flown from clearings and it would conserve rubber for use by enormous tanks with battleship guns.
Edit: Reading the above, it may come across as somewhat snippy. That was not my intent. I find this sort of stuff very amusing.
No worries mate!
The wheel arrangement definitely needs rearranging.
I would change the bogies I labeled A into 2x2 bogies and turn them 90 degrees to align with the bogies I labeled B.
Convair B-36 landing gear could be used as inspiration:
I would also move them closer to the centreline to take more of the total weight. Retraction outwards with hydraulic ram in mounted in the middle of the wheel well.
The wheel well “lids” would be in two parts, one rectangular along the main strut, hinged at the inboard edge, and one large oval lid hinged outboard for the wheels.
The B bogies would be reduced to 2 wheels each and both of them need to be steerable.
Both should be facing the same direction to get the retraction movement forward in the direction of travel so the forward set would be folding towards the edge and the rear set folds towards the centre. Split hatches in both cases, don’t want the drag from doors perpendicular to the dircation of flight …
Since there is no obvious/visible way of propulsion the landing gear arrangement is a moot point unless the lift and movement is created by some aryan anti gravity unit (tilt for movement in the horizontal plane). Anti-grav would enable VTOL operation so the drag from gear well doors doesn’t matter.
All Haunebu saucers are anti-gravity machines. The usual explanation is that a revolutionary power source charges a ring of spinning liquid mercury to produce a field of anti-gravity.
Many years ago, it was common for science books to extol the virtues of super conducting fluids. In fairness, room temperature super conductors would make some really cool things possible. I suspect the person who invented the Haunebu saucers read one or more of those books and pinched some of the ideas postulated about fluid super conductors.
The wheel wells use the same technology as the Tardis. Through the warping of space and time, the Haunebu’s wheel wells are actually bigger on the inside than they are on the outside… The evil Time Lord Victorious was the technical advisor to the Haunebu design bureau.
LOL!
Brake lines? That’s some gangsta sh!t there.
A night of diluting and dabbing, wiping and tipping. Your typical winter’s evening 
Not wholly finished, but the panel lines and bolts, etc. are much more visible, which really adds to the feel of a bit of realism, albeit tempered by being on a giant Nazi flying saucer. Merry Christmas!
someone had fun with the camo here
I’m not sure the repeated evenings of blocking out the colours by hand is what you’d call fun but it was worth it.