Godzilla vs P-38 Lightning

I'm working away on the Revell P-38 kit. I suspect this isn't considered one of the best models of that airplane. Part fit is not that great, and I can see a lot of filling and filing and fitting on the horizon. You can see many issues in the photo. I'll need to make a decision about how far to go with that work.

Although it's not the greatest kit, this project is sort of a sentimental journey. The P-38 was one of my father's favourite planes, and in a post at the long defunct retroDynamics from back in 2009 I included a scan of one his P-38 postcards in a story about Godzilla and disk planes. It's a little hard to explain, so here's the old post.

From 29 April 2009:

Early last summer I stumbled across the comic book reprints offered by DC and Marvel in their DC Showcase Presents and Marvel Essentials series. Basically, these are 500-page volumes of reprints of selected comic books in black-and-white form. Well, I dove in and bought and read a number of titles that I either was forbidden to read as a kid or missed entirely. I readily admit there was no intellectual value in this comic reading extravaganza, but it was fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the Marvel Essentials series is a one-volume collection of all the comics in Marvel’s Godzilla title published in the late ‘70s. All I can say is that it is one weird, absurd and hilarious read. The storyline does appear to run out of steam near the end of the series, but it was probably tough to dream up things to do for two years for a character whose main attributes are stomping around and breaking big things.

[The cockpit is huge]

There’s an incredible collection of strange flying machines in Godzilla, but the ones that caught my eye were the seemingly circular wing interceptors used by S.H.I.E.L.D. From my haphazard reading of comics, it seems that flying things whose primary feature is a disk are usually some sort of alien spacecraft: classic flying saucers. Atmospheric airplanes flown by human beings whose wing is a disk or circle seem almost nonexistent, so I was surprised to see these.

[The wing planform looks elliptical - that's gotta hurt !]

When I was looking up the pictures for this post, closer examination suggested that the wing may be actually a rather fat ellipse and not a circle at all. I think I jumped to the circular wing conclusion because I was biased that way, and I figured the perspective views of the planes were just distorting the circular planforms into ellipses, but they really do look like rather fat elliptical planforms when you study the drawings more carefully.

[A P-38 postcard, from the 1940's I think] 

As well, their twin boom design and large cowls instantly reminded me of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. However, unlike the P-38s, these S.H.I.E.L.D disk-planes can also hover. How they might do this is obviously a quirk in the physics of the Marvel universe.

[It can somehow hover - and no downwash!] 

Mr. Herb Trimpe and Mr. Tom Sutton are attributed as the Pencillers or Artists in this series, so I assume they invented these airplanes. They did a great job; the planes have a ring of truth to them.