The aircraft engine air intake is in the nose.
A little aerodynamics for you guys:
The air entering an engine has to be treated right or else all sort of separations, boundary layers and inefficiencies occur. So the simplest way was to wrap a nacelle around it and sling it under the wings like an Me-262. That OK for a twin engine configuration, but for a single engine it has issues. A example of a single engine with a nacelle is the Heinkel He-162 with the engine on top. The problem with an engine on the top is that if the pilot has to jump out ( there were no ejection seats back then ), he would be sucked in or hit on the way out. Engine pod on the bottom also had issues. That placement made a good vacuum cleaner ......
So for a single engine aircraft, you had either a nose intake, or side intakes. There are examples of both. The nose intake being very simple however meant that the pilot had to be on top of the air duct. Also, you want to keep that duct short. Therefore you got a tubby and pudgy looking plane. Later on when further developments of the jets came out, the pilot sat in a tub and the air past on either side of the cockpit like the Mig 15 / 17 / 19 / 21 or the Suchoi 7/9/17/22 series planes. Also the early Dassault Ouragan and Mystere ( must have been noisy ? ).
Sample of intake routed around the cockpit is this Suchoi ( taken by me at the Cracow aviation museum in Poland. The round cone in the nose was a fairing to house a radar ( the TA-183 did not have one ).
OK, done with the lesson. Here is the build
The extreme nose is a grouping of conical like sections. I glued them first. Then there is a rounded bulkhead in the nose. Its center is removed for the intake sub assembly.
I decided to glue the nose minus the intake sub assembly to assure a better fit.
Once dry, I glued the intake. There is a very thin ring that is added to the intake. The inlet will need some treatment later to make it smooth
. For now her it is.
Isaac