by Michael Kaintoch
1/250 Sopwith Baby, German war prize (Roman Vasylev)
The Sopwith Baby was a single seated scout plane developed from the pre-war racers Sopwith Tabloid and Schneider, and was mostly flown by the Royal Naval Air Service during WW I. Last examples served in Norway until about 1930.
This particular plane (#8153) was part of HMS Vindex's air group that attempted a first attack on the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern on march 25th 1916. The attack failed and #8153 in particular was captured after an engine failure. Not wasting a perfectly good plane this Baby was then flown by the Imperial German Navy. However, I have no specific information about the rest of her career.
The model was built from Roman Vasylev's 1/48 scale paper kit (->http://ecardmodels.com/product_info.php?products_id=446). I've reduced the scale to 1/250, to make the plane compatible with my cardboard ships. The construction was straight forward and almost out of the box (though there never was such a thing like a box!). Rigging was done with stretched sprue. The original rigging plans, available at http://www.finemodelworks.com/arizona-models/reference/Thumbs/Aircraft/Great_Britain/Sopwith/Baby/Baby.html, were very helpful, though I didn't replicate every single wire.
