November painting challenge update and a strange rare bird

I set myself a target of painting 30 "engines" worth of Blood Red Skies models in November, and err, I failed. 

Ok not by much as I got as far as 28 but for some reason the last couple I just stalled. I think it was something to do with the fact they were going to be French Breguet 693 light attack bombers and they had that fiddly French 4 tone camo, but for whatever reason it didn't happen.

I did complete 8 Bf109fs and 7 Me262s and 6 Sturmoviks so that was not too bad a performance I suppose.

Today I have hit the target - ok 13 days late, but it is such a strange and pretty plane I thought I would do an update.

The plane in question is a Kyūshū Q1W Tokai , which translates as "Eastern Sea" but was given the much less prosaic reporting name "Lorna" by the Allies. 

I have to admit I had never heard of it before last week when it appeared as part of the Plane Printer Patreon that I subscribe to. It's a useful service where for a small monthly subscription you get access to models being released as stl files by the designer. Not having heard of a Plane Printer model is not that unusual as he tends to kick around in the long grass doing interesting but obscure, or at least not mainstream models. I regularly have to do a quick search to find out just what a particular release is, and this was no exception.

The Tokai is very interesting. Visually it looks like a copy of a shrunken Ju88, but it is nothing of the sort. This is the world's first purpose designed Anti Submarine Warfare aircraft. There is a lot of thought gone into the design too. Engines are optimised for low speed fuel economy, to allow the Tokai to loiter on station for longer, and it has a surprising array of black boxes, including Radar, Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD) and Electronic Support Measures (ESM) - basically everything you would expect in a modern Long Range Maritime Patrol aircraft such as an Orion. The problem was the Radar. Japan was pretty advanced in the theory, but less good at getting a set to work reliably. This caused a delay in the Tokai entering service from 1943 to 1945. The Tokai was probably a world beater, but the slow speed meant it was also an easy kill for any fighter, and by 1945 the Allies were dominating the skies around Japan.  

So here it is - still needs a coat of matt but quite cute, and finally 30 engines done :-)