a research of Alexey Matvienko translation by Alexander Ruchkovsky |
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The MiG-3 information had been scarce, represented only by scale
drawings in the Modelist Konstruktor magazine and data from V. Shavrov’s
legendary “History of Soviet aircraft construction”, before a sensational
“Soviet Fighters of Great Patriotic War: MiG-3, LaGG-3, La-5” album
was published in 1986 by DOSAAF publishers, which was a real gift for Soviet
aviation fans.
This album by V. Voronin and P. Kolesnikov had superb drawings
as well as color profiles by M. Petrovsky and historic photos.
It should be noted that the quality level of the drawings was absolutely
unique.
The book has been answering all questions on design of the production
MiG-3 airframes, however, in light of newer publications on this plane,
a
few arguable points in the drawings have appeared that seemed immaculate
before.
Specific attention was drawn to the early and late MiG fuselage
length issue.
All published sources unanimously quote to 8250 mm the length of
the MiG-3 plane, which overtly conflicts with V. Voronin’s drawings
where the late MiG is shown noticeably longer than the early one.
The album suggests the drawings are in the 1/50 scale and the scale
strip basically coincides with the announced scale.
I verified the real scale of the drawing and saw the wingspan was adequate
(10200 mm in scale), the length of the early MiG is shown as 8250mm and
the length of the late one of 8350mm.
Even more curious is the fact that you actually find a “LENGTHENED
MIG-3 (1941)” item in the MiG development picture in the album’s text,
apparently targeting the late production MiG.
Studies of published stuff and discussions with fellow modellers did
not add any considerable clarity, however, an interesting assumption emerged:
what
if early MiG-3s were as short as MiG-1s, i.e. 8150mm rather than 8250mm?
Late ones, according to this assumption, were lengthened to the
“sacral” 8250mm. This interesting assumption seemed too dubious to
me. MiG was not a piece of cake to fly, an unforgiving plane with over
200kg added in form of an extra tank in rear fuselage… should you fail
to compensate this weight in the nose, would the plane stay balanced at
all?
For other things, Soviet air industry has seen lots of unbelievable
things happen, so why not again with the MiG? At any rate, this assumption
would render Voronin’s drawings “good for nothing” or would at least necessitate
their major corrections because of no span/length correlation.
Another opinion insisted on the common length for both early and
late production MiG-3 – but which one of the Voronin's profiles should
we believe to be correct?
In assessment of these opinions, it was important to find out if those
drawings could be used to build a model. No problem if the drawing is just
out of scale unless it presents distorted proportions. I actually
suspected the latter and decided to forget, for the time being, about any
announced and published lengths because of no firm knowledge which of those
is the correct one.
Rather, my task was to use photos to compare proportions of real
planes and Voronin’s drawings.
Having no suitable top or bottom views, I restricted myself to analyzing
profile photographs. I selected two sets of photos of early and late
MiG-3s, three suitable pictures in each. Preference was given to pictures
taken from a distance as their line distortions are smaller. Zoom percentage
for each shot to match the drawing’s length was calculated.
This done, I measured fuselage distances on the photos, applied the
zoom rate and marked the corresponding distance on the drawings to see
how close the match is. To illustrate the results, I have superimposed
the drawings on the photos.
Comparison of the photo of early MiG to Voronin’s short MiG drawing
revealed serious distortions of proportions:
you see either a too short nose/too long tail... | |
... or you see the canopy/wing/radiator sit too much ahead on the drawing. |
Here and further on, color lines on my pictures mark noticeable fuselage
panel lines. The sliding canopy on the photo is a bit moved back, this
has been considered.
The question what this length was remained open, however.
On the basis of this, an act of plastic surgery was applied to the
drawings.
This shows the original condition of the drawing | |
this shows the result. Here we go! | |
To check myself, I imposed the corrected drawing onto the photo. Quite a match! |
Suggested conclusions:
1) Early and late production MiG-3s had the same length, 8250 mm,
and differed by the location of separation line between the engine cowling
and the cowling behind the engine, as well as by some other minor elements.
2) To correct Voronin’s profile drawings, we have to consider
its scale to be 1/49.4 rather than 1/50, to lengthen the profile drawing
of the early version, and to zoom the wingspan into the new scale.
This done, we can hope to make a model that would be proportionally close
to the original.
I am in hope that the new MiG-3 book announced to be published soon
will shed more light on the history of this outstanding aircraft.
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