Designed in 1935, the B-17 became a force to reckon with by 1942 when the F model was introduced. It had a total production run of 3,405 – 2,300 by Boeing, 500 by Vega, and 605 by Douglas.

This release by Hasegawa features a new set of decals, but the same basic moldings which this kit had 35 years ago: overall good fit, lightly raised panel lines, light grey plastic, and some sink marks expected in an older kit. It has 98 parts and comes in a nice box with a sturdy cardstock bottom and a nice glossy top.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by what has come to be known as the 1946 Luftwaffe, or Luft ’46 – the seemingly inexhaustible blizzard of drafting-table designs the German aircraft industry produced before and during the Second World War for aircraft that were never built. The what-iffyness of these proposals that could have been flying against the Allies had the war continued for one more year has always deeply intrigued the science fiction fan in me. I first became aware of the phenomenon in 1967 when I bought Aireview’s German Military Aircraft in the Second World War, which included a series of line drawings of aircraft I’d never heard of before. As the decades passed, more and more information about these fanciful designs has come to light from declassified government files.

Once again, I’ve chosen MiniArt’s 1/35 diorama series for my conversion project. Like the other kits in this line, the walls and base are thin vacuformed styrene. The air ductwork is also vacuformed in halves, like the walls. This requires a lot of putty-work to clean up the gaps as usual, so I do not recommend this kit to beginner modelers. However, despite the extra modeling work required for these kits, the results can be very rewarding. I used half a tube of Squadron Green Putty on this kit, and the putty and sanding took longer on the ductwork than the walls.