Yes, it was most heavily used in the 1960’s and 1970’s by poor countries when it was obsolescent, but I wanted to depict a new unit using the Trumpeter kit, ready to take on US nuclear bombers for which it was intended. Is the kit as is good for the purpose?
The Trumpeter SA-2 kit is a fine build. I sure enjoyed building it.
Same here!
By the way, how do you get the proper aluminum finish?
Are you talking about on the missile? Silver missiles are inert rounds used for parades. It’s just a metallic paint or lacquer. Live missiles are painted light gray or camouflaged to match the area with green, brown, or black.
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I did read that the earliest missiles were silver, presumably out of fear that darker colors would absorb heat from the Sun and cause the internal missile components to overheat and fail. And when you think about it, if you were to put missiles around a city or other place with a lot of roads and buildings, the aluminum colors would blend in better with the environment than any camouflage colors.
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yes, check eghiptian version…it is nice!
I do not know how they did in other countries but in Hungary such missiles and launchers were placed in the countryside (still some kilometers around sensitive objects or the capital) and not beside buildings etc…
Also tried to hide them from the eyes and cameras of the “western NATO spions”
I will ask local experts about the colour.
Tamás
Interested in more info on this. I have both Trumpeter kits (one with missile and launcher, the other with missile on transport carrier). Some day if I get to that point in my stash I want to do both that were in North Vietnam during the linebacker days. So far they were either in the color they showed up from the Soviet Union (grey ?) or actually camouflaged. It gets hazy on what the camo actually looked like.
As another piece of information, in the US Navy (ya I was there) inert missiles aboard ship were painted a very blue color and the fins were white. This info is centered around my time serving which was mid '70’s early '80’s
Cheers
I could imagine making it a point to conceal missiles around secret military installations, but the opposite case would be more likely against the cities, the message being that we are able to defend our city if you send a plane against it, and thus dissuade any possible foe from doing this. President Eisenhower did fear that missiles would be sent against spy planes, so he rarely sent any over the Soviet Union-and famously one got shot down anyway.
Yes, but SAM sites are usually placed around the approaches to cities, or other high value targets, rather than in the city proper. Why? Because by the time a high flying bomber reaches the “dome” of the SAM engagement envelope it can release its’ bomb and the whole point of downing the bomber before then is moot. Overlapping fields of fire applies to SAM sites. Not to mention the back last from launch would damage surrounding structures, and the booster stage dropping off of the missile after launch would be more likely to fall within the city and cause collateral damage. These considerations are less for later smaller SAMs, but for the early types like the SA-2 were likely taken into account.
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I should note that there was a NIKE missile launch site on the west side of Brookfield Zoo, near where I live. The NIKE served the same function as the SA-2. Yes, the zoo had long existed before the missile site, and the residential neighborhood long existed even before the zoo. We can assume the SA-2 missiles were not too close to the cities they guarded, but they couldn’t be too far away either.