Little Boy

[cdavenport]

What scale is the bomb?

[piginapoke]

The book mentioned Shockwave is a fascinating read telling the tale from both sides. Another very interesting read about the race to develope an atomic weapon in Germany is a book called Time Bomb, I forget the author at moment, but very interesting nonetheless.

I hope one day to go to the atomic museum in Haigerloch near Stuttgart and of course Los Alamos.

Excellent model.

Anyone know of info on the third bomb variant Thin Man ?

[Uyraell]

Gen. Leslie Groves makes extremely brief mention of Thin Man in his very informative and authoritative book: "The Manhattan Project".

Unfortunately, the entire reference base regarding Thin Man is less than two pages in total. Within those pages is contained information that Thin Man was intended to be a variant Uranium Atom Bomb, incorporating a third form of detonation mechanism, which however, remains substantially undescribed.

I wondered why this was, at the time I was reading the book.
It may have been mere coincidence, but at the time the 2nd generation Neutron Bomb had just been successfully put into production, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was one of the "children" as it were, of Thin Man. Which would in part account for Groves being so sparse with info on that weapon whereas he was relatively generous with plentiful information on the two Atom Bombs as tested and dropped.

I'd seriously recommend Gen. Leslie Groves' book to anyone with an interest in the topic. Not only is it an interesting read, well worth one's time, but it is also very well written, in a very layman-friendly style.

Kind and Respectful Regards, Uyraell.

[piginapoke]

there is a brief mention of Thin Man in Shockwave. i haven't got the book now but maybe someone can precis the relevant points from it ?

i recall some photos of Thin Man stockpiles somewhere, maybe in Shockwave?

[nando]

Originally Posted by cdavenport

What scale is the bomb?

Sorry, i forgot to mention this information.

I developed the model at 1/24 scale, not too small to put on it a good degree of details and not too big for the room I have at home.
I used Inskape, a SCALABLE vector graphic (.SVG) software, so it wouldn't be difficult to scale the model bigger or smaller.

Originally Posted by piginapoke

there is a brief mention of Thin Man in Shockwave. i haven't got the book now but maybe someone can precis the relevant points from it ?

i recall some photos of Thin Man stockpiles somewhere, maybe in Shockwave?

I don't know if you are aware of it but there is an interesting article about Thin Man on Wikipedia .

The Thin Man was intended to be a plutonium version of the gun-type nuclear bomb, but the background fission rate of the plutonium was so high that the bomb would be too long and the bullet speed too high to avoid a pre-detonation. On july '44 the plutonium bomb research was re-oriented at the implosion-type (Gadget and Fat-Man).

Best, Nando

[nando]

Originally Posted by cdavenport

... I wonder if the two models are in the same scale. ...

I did a quick and dirty (very dirty ) build of the "FG" Fat Man, just to compare the scale of the two models.

Here a picture of the two, side by side



I printed the jpg to fit an A4 page at 300 dpi. I had to reduce the image at 69% of the original size. Comparing the length of built model with the real one, I have a scale of 1/37. If I had printed at 100% on a A3 page i had have a scale of 1/25, near to 1/24 of my model.

Happy Easter to all
Nando

[cdavenport]

Originally Posted by nando

I did a quick and dirty (very dirty ) build of the "FG" Fat Man, just to compare the scale of the two models.

Here a picture of the two, side by side

Attachment 124532

I printed the jpg to fit an A4 page at 300 dpi. I had to reduce the image at 69% of the original size. Comparing the length of built model with the real one, I have a scale of 1/37. If I had printed at 100% on a A3 page i had have a scale of 1/25, near to 1/24 of my model.

Happy Easter to all
Nando

So Fat Man was huge!

[hancocp]

Here's the real size (1:1 models) and a human for reference. Big bomb indeed.

[nando]

I nearly completed the model design and I colorized it, but looking at the pictures that Hancocp posted, I noted the dark blu color of the bomb. I saw other pictures of the replicas and the color vary not only for the light and the quality the images. Below a collage



Too many colors: green, light green, brown, blue, dark blue …

I looked for footages in videos on Youtube and I found only a sequence when the people is tugging the bomb out of the Tinian hangar. Some videos, all poor quality and again different colors …. In one it seems dark blue and in an other dark green.




I didn’t find mention of the color in the books, and only in a modellers forum I found a discussion about the color, and the thesis of the dark blue and dark olive drab colors are mentioned, but the second one seems to me more likely because that was the standard color in the ammunitions, while the blue was used for the training version of the weapons.

Then I looked for the palette of the dark olive drab: a nightmare!

I found in the Federal standard palette an Olive Drab color (OD) that I could use on the model



FS34087-99 could be the one for me, but in this comparison it seems to me that the FS34130 is better, even considering lighting.




Could someone help me with more information or an opinion about wich color is better?

Thanks, Nando

[mbauer]

Nando,

I watch the video Hiroshmia again, if remmeber correct they have some actual footage of it being wheeled towards Enola Gay. The they use a replica in other parts of the DVD.

Get back to you real soon....

Real easy to say that Fat Man is bright yellow.

Mike