Wednesday 28 July 2021

The Airfix Olympics

I understand there is another competition underway in Japan but the real struggle took place last night on our regular wargaming Zoom call.  We were meant to be playing a Spanish Civil War game run by Simon but his village had been hit with a power outage, taking his internet with it!  Hopefully we'll be able to do the game this evening.

After a chat about various other things I offered those gathered a brief quiz, it's subject being some of the old aircraft models I have been refurbishing of late.  The kits in question - all Airfix 1/72 were as follows:

Boomerang, Ju-87B, YAK-9D, Il-2 Sturmovik, Mitsubishi Dinah, Helldiver, B-25 Mitchell.

If you want to try this yourself here are the questions.  No looking up the internet or old catalogues now!  Let me know your scores in a comment.  I may award a prize if I believe you!


Question 1.  The oldest of these kits is the Ju-87, originally released in 1957.  Rank the others in order of release year.



Question 2. Three of the kits are in Series 1.  Which three? 



Question 3.  Which of the kits are in Series 2?



Question 4.  Which series was the B-25 Mitchell?



Question 5.  I chucked a very tatty Airfix B-29 Superfortress in the bin.  Which series was this kit?


Question 6.  In the catalogue pictured above (price 2 Shillings!) only one 1/72 aircraft was in a higher series than the B-29.  Name the aircraft.



At this point we added up the scores and I added a tiebreaker.

Question 7.  Name this kit (1 point) and the series it was in (1 point).






Answers:

1. Ju-87 1957, YAK 1963, Il-2 1964, Boomerang Dinah B-25 1965 (these three can be in any order), Helldiver 1968 (1 point each - max 6 points)


2. Boomerang, Stuka, YAK (1 point each - max 3 points)


3. Il-2, Dinah, Helldiver (1 point each - max 3 points)


4. Series 4 (2 points for correct answer)


5. Series 7 (2 points for correct answer)


6. C-130 Hercules - a Series 8 kit! (2 points)


7. F-4 Phantom (1 point) Series 3 (1 point)



The scores of my players were:  Graham (who denied all knowledge of the subject) 5; Tim C 6; John 10; leaving Martin and Jerry in joint first place with 11.  

The surprise here was Jerry whose aircraft recognition is generally limited to "Spitfire" or "not Spitfire" but like most gentlemen of a certain age he misspent many hours of his youth thumbing though old Airfix catalogues.  

He says this was mostly for the railway kits - shades of Kenneth Horne claiming he only read Nudist Monthly for the gardening pages...

UPDATE:  Jeffers claimed he got 14 points while John B, the donor of most of this stuff claimed 13. 

Calls for a full enquiry and drug testing I think…

3 comments:

Martin Rapier said...

That was a great quiz Tim, very entertaining.

Tim Gow said...

Martin Rapier
Glad you enjoyed it - completely improvised entertainment!

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...

9 Points
Must do better