1:48 Bf 110G-4/R3

A night hunter with a rebuilt nose

The twin-engine Messerschmitt found a second life as a night fighter. The G-4 version carried a crew of three, a radar with an antenna array on the nose and Daimler-Benz engines. The letter R in the designation points to a factory-supplied fit, and kit number three in particular exchanged the four light machine guns in the nose for two far heavier cannons of thirty millimeters caliber. A single hit from such a weapon was enough for a heavy bomber, which was exactly the purpose.

A covering tube is not decoration

The set adds to both barrels the tubes through which the weapons emerge from the front of the fuselage. On the real aircraft they protected the skin and the instruments from the pressure wave at the muzzle and from hot gases; on a model they are concentric cylinders, one inside the other, and it is precisely this annular fairing that a molding cannot manage. Two thin walls with a gap between them would have to be formed in the mold, so it is usually solved with one solid part with a suggested step. A metal version makes it possible to insert the barrel into the tube for real, and the nose thereby gains a depth that cannot be conjured out of plastic.

What is in the box

• the extensive glazing, covering outside and inside
• two sheets with masks for the national insignia
• barrels of thirty millimeters caliber, a pair
• tubular fairings for both weapons

The set is an accessory; it contains neither the kit nor the antenna array. The extent of the glazing is incidentally the main reason why a mask pays off on a twin-engine machine: there would be several dozen hand-cut strips here, and it is enough for one of them to come out half a millimeter different for the asymmetry to be visible across the whole cockpit.