Praying Mantise |
Fictional Very Close Air Support Aircraft A-? Proposed Replacement for A-10 Thunderbolt II When the A-10 was the meanest thing around, I started to think about a replacement in form of an even meaner machine. Due to my (sick ?) fantasy this machine should be something which one could call a flying tank. To really fulfill it's role of close air support (and I thought of really close) it had to be a VTOL aircraft. And off course it should be able not only to withstand almost any kind of hit's but most of all it should have been armed with almost everything you could think of.: machine guns/cannons (for the trigger happy gunner)), anti-tank missiles, (against the bad guys in their earth bound vehicles) anti aircraft missiles (for those aircrafts who dared to come down that low) unguided rockets (just for the hell of it) and some kind of big gun for everything else not worse a missile. To make the whole monster even more frightening I added 2 sets of these weapons on swiveling arms which could turn and rotate in almost any direction, even backwards to check six or should I say to ruin everyones day who tried it from this direction? Sure the problem would be that these two arms could not hold a whole lot of ammunition so both arms could rotate and swing backwards to the wings and "dock" into a special designed box where they would be automatically rearmed. Do I now qualify for being totally nuts? The whole thing is made of balsa wood and LOTS of putty, some of the weapons came from Roco minitanks. USN 86 René Hieronymus Scale 1:72 Building time approx: 28 hrs.
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