Focke Wulf Ta 183 "Huckebein"

Comment and Pictures 

Comments

"None of these fantastic aircraft were ever completed because on April 8, 1945 British troops captured the Focke-Wulf facilities. But now you can rewrite history because Paulo Morais and Christian Mosimann have delivered to you the Ta 183 in all its glory! And such a beautiful sight she is."

All original content and graphic by Eric Sutton © 2000 and beyond.

 

Progress steps of the model

Mig 17 from Fleet Defender - That's the look of the plane after a first Ta-like skin is attached to it. Note the unpaintable cockpit, exhaust area and underside, plus the hard-coded condense stripes on the wingtips. A closer look to the wings shows overlays for national insignias of the Mig 17.
The whole skin is distorted and the model is almost as big as a B-26 in EAW.

New cockpit and details - A full transparent cockpit with pilot figure was added, the whole shape comes closer to the Ta 183. The tail section is entirely different from the beginning.

Finished Model - Compared to the first picture, the changes are obvious. Now a first basic-skin was made with elements that are shared on all future skins, like fuselage structure, flaps, etc.

Last details - During the skinning-process, some new things came up for the model, like overlays for the Swastika and the squadron-emblem on the tail, a reversible panel for individual codes near the cockpit, improvements on the landing gear plus texture-projection enhancements.
After the final work on the 3d-model, the skin variations became possible.

Based on the model, many new things were made around it, like screens, sounds, skins, etc. First plans were just a new plane for EAW, but more and more it developed to a full add-on.

All these steps took much time, patience, nerves, and more than 200 e-mails from Portugal to Switzerland and to the other involved people.

Cockpit

Cockpit of the Ta 183 - new modelled 3d-cockpit from base of the Me 262, shared texture-elements and cover panels for second engine instruments. The instrument-artwork is done by Migge.

 

Wings - new modelled 3d-wings based on the Me 262 with new texture-elements.

Loadouts

R4M missiles

 

WGr. 21 Rockets

 

2 x 250kg Bombs

 

Drop tanks

 

First "Flight"

Ulrich Stampa prepares to launch a 1:10 scale free-flight model of the Ta 183. Kurt Tank's assistant, Willi Käther, looks on from the far left and Ludwig Mittelhüber, a Focke-Wulf designer who was not convinced of the model's ability to fly properly, stands to the right of Stampa.