With the advent of jet aircraft, the leadership of the Soviet Union began to express concerns about keeping up with the decadent Westerners. One area urgently looked into was the Jet Bomber. With this type of aircraft, planes could hit capitalists fast and hard, without fear of interception
One of the first attempts was basically a jet engined version of the Tu-4 "Bull", which itself was a reverse engineered B-29. It seemed simple enough, add some jets to an existingly fast aircraft, and quick like borscht, you'd have a new, faster plane. Well, almost...
It turns out the airfoil design used on the B-29 had a limiting Mach factor, so the addition of jet engines only added 50 knots airspeed. The thirsty nature of early jet engines also meant that a massively large part of the payload had to be given over to fuel, and range suffered drastically as well. It turned out, the Tu-4T was capable of a slightly faster attack, at only 25% of the range of a conventional Tu-4, with only 31% of it's payload. A fully fuelled Tu-4T, taking off from Moscow, could only reach Kiev before requiring refuelling. Needless to say, the plane wasn't put into production, with only three prototypes being built.
However, the ever busy CIA and MI-6 were able to photograph the Tu-4T at a Soviet airfield, and it was assumed to be an operational aircraft. It was designated "Bolshoi" under the NATO naming protocols, and remained in the west's Cold War planning directives as late as 1967.
I found this old Mechanix Illustrated and had to build the plane on the cover. I love the idea of supersonic Bomarcs actually hitting the targets to take them down, ah, the glory years of SAM technology.
Kits used were the Minicraft 1/144 B-29 and an old Revell DC-8. Kinda thought of doing it in 1/72, but honestly, I just got lazy. Oh, and this got dropped many times before being finished, it was a cursed project!
Alvis 3.1
