I started this 1/72 Ta-183 II (from PM - Pioneer Models) back in 2002. Around this time, I grew tired of seeing swastikas on my models and just didn't want to have so much looser NAZI crap on display, regardless of how cool their aircraft were... so the model went back in its box. I was pretty far along:
The engine is a resin copy of the engine/intake trunk from a Dragon/DML P.1011 kit. It looks better than the kit engine and it acts as a nose weight as well:
Recently I was reading about the Pulqui II, and wondered what would have happened if Kurt Tank had used Hans Multhopp's Ta-183 II design as the basis of the Pulqui, rather than hacking together a plane based on the Ta-183 III.
Reading up on the Ta-183 II, wind tunnel tests hinted that the full sized aircraft would have been susceptible to dutch rolls and other stability issues. I thought that a quick and dirty fix would have been adding wing fences to the wing (a favorite technique of Russian designers) to break the spanwise flow of air.
I wondered if anyone had made a large scale RC model of the Ta-183 and promptly found a long thread on a 1/9 (or so) flying Ta-183 model. Not surprisingly, the jet powered models had a tendency to roll and were difficult to control. The stability problems were mostly corrected by adding wing fences where the ailerons meet. Other mods included increasing the wing area from the wing fence to the tip (a sawtooth wing) and increasing the width of the vertical tail by adding an extension to the leading edge of the tail.
I'll definitely add the wing fences and I may add the sawtooth wing mod. I won't add the tail extension because it only slightly improved the RC plane performance. The biggest improvement came from adding the wing fences, so I'll assume that that's what Tank would have done.
Next - wing fences.
