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A Brief History
The Wasserfall was one of a number of German anti-aircraft missiles (SAM) designs explored
during the war as an attempt to defend German strategics target from growing Allied bombing
raids.
Initial design and specifications for this missile was worked on through 1941-1942, with prototype
launches starting in March of 1943. The airframe was much like a small V-2 rocket, with extra fins
located approximately mid-fuselage. On the early prototypes (W1 series) these fins were quite
large and were offset 45° from the steering fins at the base. The fins were later reduced in size
and mounted inline with the rear fins (W5 series). A smaller version, reduced in size by
approximately one third, and using more non-strategic materials was planned (W10 series).
The rocket motor used two fluids for fuel - Visol (vinyl isobutyl ether) and SV-Stoff (RFNA 'Red
Fuming Nitric Acid' - 94% nitric acid, 6% dinitrogen tetroxide), forced into the combustion
chamber by pressurizing the fuel tanks with nitrogen gas released from another tank. These
liquids are hypergolic, igniting upon contact to provide thrust. Steering the rocket was by manual
command to line of sight (MCLOS), where the operator employed a joystick to guide the rocket,
tracking its flight via the exhaust plume. Radar was also being developed for night time and poor
visibility operations.
A warhead of 100 kg was originally planned, but because of accuracy concerns it was replaced
with one of 306 kg to provide a larger blast radius.
It appears that no Wasserfall missiles were ever launched operationally. The Brengun instructions
claim that a battery named Rheinland A was captured by American troops at Hartz, though I have
found nothing anywhere else to support this claim. Captured examples of the Wasserfall were
used by the United States after the war in their Hermes project.
Contents
The kit comes with 39 parts, all on a single sprue, and molded in a medium grey semi-hard
polystyrene plastic. The plastic pieces are fairly well molded with next to no flash but having some
seams due to mold misalignment. No decals are included.
The instruction sheet consists of 6 separate steps outlining the construction sequence. The
second page has the parts layout. There are 8 parts are not used and they are greyed out. Four
of the parts are for a set of smaller fins for which I'm not sure why they are there. I would seem to
me that including the larger fins of the earlier prototypes would have made more sense. The other
four unused plastic pieces are for a single stand and the cross member of a second. Why they
are there is another puzzler, though I suspect that someone goofed during the design of the
sprue layout and omitted the set of uprights for the second stand, and when the error was noticed
Brengun had to supply another set of stands as an additional 6 resin pieces. Whatever the
reason, the resin parts are well cast. There is also an etched metal fret containing three parts for
two straps and an octagonal mount that goes on the trolley.
Construction
The instructions would have you start with building the trolley. This may be appropriate if the
missile is to be mounted horizontally on its stands, but for a vertical mount that I wished to do, I
felt the trolley would be best left to the last. This way any alignment issues that may cause the
missile to not stand vertical could be addressed before the glue set. So I moved on to the body.
The body is completely hollow. I added a plastic tube inside the rear to remove the large void look
and to allow me to push a stick up the rear to use as a handle during painting. With careful
aligning during gluing the seam along the body is easily dealt with and next to no filler will be
needed.
Both sets of fins (parts 3 & 5) need some sanding and scraping to remove the slight mold
misalignment seams and to adjust their bases to better fit the curve of the fuselage. Brengun has
conveniently added lines molded into the hull to help with placement of the fins. Make sure that
before the glue sets to align the fins with each other.
Holes were drilled into the bases of the vents (part 6) and they were then glued to the body. Once
again Brengun indicated where they should be placed with engraved lines in the body. Next I cut
the pieces marked (1 - exhaust control vanes) & (2 - control vane supports) from the control
surfaces (part 4) in preparation for their replacement later. What little I could find in my references
showed the Brengun representation to be questionable. The control surfaces were put aside to be
added later.
The step to assemble the stands was skipped and the parts tossed into the spares box.
The trolly was assembled at this point. The octagonal mount (part PE1) was folded at each of the
joint lines and the ends were glued together. This was done first to allow the cyano glue to
thoroughly set before I tried adding it to the base. Next I drilled out the six holes in the wheel
hubs. It must be noted here that I could find no corroborating evidence for six holes. All photos
that I could find showed a spoked wheel with only four holes (refer to period photographs below).
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Then I moved on to the base core (part 12) and its spokes (parts 10 & 11). Here's where the first
real difficulties emerged. The end of the spokes that abut the base are longer than the
corresponding attachment points, meaning that the spokes should be replaced or you will have to
decide whether the extra length is acceptable and mount the spokes as is, which will result in a
small jut above or below the base. I chose to mount them as is and have the extra length jut
below the base core where it would be hidden from sight. After this assembly had set long
enough that it wouldn't fall apart during handling, I added the outer frame rails (parts 8 & 9). Again
we run into another size difference, where the end of the spoke is taller than the diameter of the
frame rails, resulting in another choice as to where the rails should mount. I chose to have the
rails sit at the bottom edge so I could put the whole assembly on a flat surface in an attempt to
get everything level. I used slow setting Testors liquid cement to allow time to adjust the parts
before the glue totally set.
After this I added some missing detail. The spokes on the base that run parallel with the wheels
need to have a lip added, which I did with some thin styrene strip, and a set of loops found on the
front and back frames were also added. Lastly, the brass octagonal mount was glued to the base.
Moving back to the rocket, the control surfaces were glued to the rear fins and then the rocket
was perched on the base to see how well everything sat. Then I added four new control vane
supports fashioned from some square styrene rod, glued them to the rocket's butt end and added
small sections of round rod between them and the control surfaces. To ensure that the rocket sat
solidly on the base, I once again placed the rocket on the brass mount and marked the spot on
each of the four faces where the rocket rested. Then on the opposite side of the marks (i.e. on the
inside of the mount), I glued a small section of square rod so that it sat flush with the top edge of
the mount. These small sections of plastic will provide a wider surface where the new control
vane supports will sit and a spot where I can put the cyano glue to attach the base and rocket
together.
It would have been nice if Brengun had included a small section of rail as a display option. Since
they didn't I built a small rail section and display base for the trolley, all fashioned from pieces of
styrene sheet and T-beam rod.
Painting & Markings
Four colour schemes are presented on the back of the box:
- Prototype (versuch) scheme in black and white.
- Pre-production scheme in what I assume is overall RLM02 grey with two silver (i.e. natural
metal) bands where the stowage straps are located. This appears to be the colour scheme
of the rocket seen in the Youtube video [reference 5].
- Production scheme in overall armour sand-yellow.
- Production scheme in overall armour sand-yellow with random patches of brown & green.
Options 3 and 4 are probably speculative, but this did not deter me from painting my rocket as
option three, along with some artistic licence by adding the silver stowage strips. Since it appears
that the rockets were kept protected from the elements most of the time, I applied no weathering.
I did weather and heavily chip the transport trolley on the assumption that it would be reused
between launches. The base received lots of staining as well.
Conclusion
Outside of the accuracy issues with the trolly this is a very nice kit indeed. It appears to scale out
quite closely to the measurements found in my references. I hope that Brengun will continue
down the path so admirably started with the Wasserfall and give us more of the late war German
surface-to-air missiles like the Enzian, Rheintochter and Schmetterling.
References
[1] German Secret Weapons: Blueprint for Mars, Brian Ford, Ballantine Books, New York 1969
[2] German Secret Weapons, I.V. Hogg, Arco Publishing, New York 1970 SBN: 668-0-2337-6
[3] German Guided Missiles, Heinz J. Nowarra, Schiffer Publishing, Atglen 1993 ISBN: 0-88740-475-8
[4] wikipedia
[5] youtube (German Wartime Newsreel footage)
[6] luft46.com
[7] b14643.de (defunct)
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Two pictures of a prototype rocket. The V
(for versuch) and what looks like the
number 2 (though it could be a 7) are found
near the tip of the nose cone. This appears
to be the inspiration for markings option 1.
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A still image from the German Newsreel video on Youtube.
Though it's not the best of pictures, if you look at the front
wheel of the transport trolly (yellow arrow) you can see that
it has a four spoke design of some sort with four
corresponding holes between the spokes. This does not
match the kit's wheel, which is flat faced and has 6 circular
openings.
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Another still image captured from the
German Newsreel video on Youtube. This
shows that the outward facing sides of the
trolly are not flat sided as per the kit, but actually have a lip.
You can also see that
the wheels appear to have only four holes
as opposed to the six found on the kit
wheels.
Also notice that if you decide to mount the
missile on it's stands, the rudders should
have some deflection.
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And a final still image again captured from the German
Newsreel video on Youtube. This shows a few of the other
discrepancies with the kit's trolly. First there's the missing
half-circle loops. If you look at the bracing/spokes running to
the corners and compare that with the kit's representation,
you can see that the kit is nowhere near correct.
Also, on the missile itself, you can also see four large
circular/octagonal (the exact shape can not be determined
as they are covered with something cloth like) objects in line
with the control surfaces. The kit only uses a simple
rectangular and flat extension from the control surfaces to
represent these.
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