MW Miniature Work

This is the Nieuport Bébé , or Nieuport 11 , of World War One. It was a very small aircraft as its nickname implies, and this 1:72 scale model is tiny. It comes from a Czech firm, Kovozávody Prostějov , which I'll refer to as KP . The aircraft type was a very important one, since it provided a template for most of the fighters of WWI and indeed most of the interwar years, right into the 1930s; namely a biplane single seater with an open cockpit and a forward firing gun.  The fighter aircraft as such was quite a long time coming, and it hadn't really gelled until this, the Nieuport 11. Prior to this Germany had introduced the most successful fighting type so far, the Fokker Eindecker, a flimsy monoplane constructed in typical prewar fashion, but it did feature a synchronisation mechanism for its machine gun, an interrupter gear. This allowed the pilot to fire straight ahead between the propeller blades. Since it was the only aeroplane to have this, for a while it threatened to ...