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WB-57F Canberra

A scrapyard recon plane.
⨴ Landing gear automatically retracts above 100m/s and 15m AGL. Slow down and descend to deploy them again.
⨴ The landing gear can handle some obscene vertical forces, so you can stall the plane and land comfortably. This is helpful for when the terrain sucks.


When the news of a 'hidden land' reached the town of Essentia, it also came with many people descending upon the nearby aircraft boneyard for parts.
Instead of immediately jumping on the bandwagon, the town's engineers decided to draft a proper plan and wait for the hype to pass.
Once the last of the crazy contraptions had disappeared into the distance, they used the excessive funds gained from parts sales to begin development of their own approach - a cautious, careful exploration rather than a mad dash for freedom.

(Naturally, being in a fairly stable and inhabitable region made such an approach possible.)

The plan had three phases:
1. Reconnoiter ahead and determine safe locations for supply bases and routes between them
2. Construct the supply bases
3. Set up ongoing logistics along the route
and called for some twenty aircraft to be eventually reactivated from the boneyard.

The riskiest of those was the first phase - charting unknown territory. To minimise the danger, the reconnaisance craft would ascend to ridiculous altitudes, thus avoiding weather and any hostile craft for the majority of their missions. Only a few of the boneyard's planes were capable of this, and the need to deal with bad weather and poor runways anyway narrowed it down to only one choice.

The two Canberra aircraft that were rebuilt for this purpose were also fitted with pressurised interiors for the long missions and turrets to defend against hostiles during ascent and descent.

Even with this approach it still wasn't without danger - more than a few missions saw them return with missing panels, broken wingtips, and punctured fuel tanks. One even had a wing spar break on the runway.


Built for RLM Contest #23: Post-Apocalyptic Planes.
I'm not quite that creative when it comes to kitbashing planes, so for me it was best to stick with a ridiculous-looking plane that actually flew.

I have tried to apply a 'logical' approach to what might be described as an 'illogical' premise. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The result is arguably effective, but not all that creative.

You might notice that the actual WB-57Fs have flat-bottomed payload racks in the fuselage. I can explain this away by saying that they used an original B-57 fuselage section there.

This is a plane which I had some thoughts of building around the time I finished my original Canberra replica, but this one is definitely not something I would consider feasible without using surfaces.

I'll be releasing another version of this plane with a proper historical description and NASA livery at some point.

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