Miranda |
Unknown! No. 3 |
by J. Miranda and P. Mercado |
Reviewed By Fred Horky, #6390 |
Despite sixty years having passed since the end of WWII, aviation enthusiasts
are more fascinated now than ever with the subject of that war’s prototype and dead-end designs, airplanes that “almost” made it to
production, and even those that were never much more than a gleam in the eye of their designer. Today, even the casual history buff
has available an ever-increasing History Channel series of special TV programs, often showing computer generated fantasy missions
like “Luftwaffe bombing raids on New York”. Meanwhile, model contests have added special “hypothetical” categories for aircraft
which were never built. This book is the third of a series on this genre by Spanish authors Miranda and Mercado. In each they have taken what is known about several specific hypothetical types, and added a judicious amount of “educated guesses”, the resulting text (in slightly fractured English) is combined with excellent line drawings, mostly in 1/72nd. The result is a book comprised of several monographs profiling those types. This “#3” features several of the Horton Brothers’ fighter proposals, developments of the French MS 406 which never came to fulfillment, a carrier version of the Hawker Typhoon, German airborne rocket anti-armor shaped charge “grenades”, possible jet versions of the P-47 Thunderbolt, planned attacks on the Panama Canal by Japanese rocket powered “Okha” suicide attack planes, and much more. The sixty-four page, soft cover book has color on front and back outside covers, the latter suggests several speculative schemes for interesting conversions for special category models like a “hooked” Typhoon, a “jet” Thunderbolt, etc. If you’re interested in “what might have been”, this book series is for you. Available directly from the author (30 Euros in Europe, $32 everywhere else) by writing: Justo Miranda, C/Tutor 53 BJ C, 28008 Madrid, Spain. |
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