As per a comment I left on the PS blog recently, I thought I'd send along a few pix of Soviet Paper Rocket models, that I got from a very nice fellow in Russia some years back. They are from the early to mid 1960s, and I am sending just the covers (for now), as I think the illustrations are very "Swordy." I'm not sure these are too far off the mark for the blog, but thought I would offer anyways.
These paper model books were ubiquitous in the region for decades, primarily from a company called Maly Modelarz out of Poland. Most of their line was warcraft - tanks and airplanes and ships - but they also had some very nice civilian cars and other misc items - including these very cool spacecraft. The pages inside the book were the "parts" of the kit, printed on card stock.
I tried one of the Maly Modelarz tank kits a couple of years ago, and gave up in frustration - paper models are HARD! Hard to build accurately, at least. Plastic models seem a snap in comparison!
If anyone wants to see the "inside" of any of these books, I'll be happy to oblige.
Finally, I think all of the spacecraft depicted are fictional, but I could be wrong - that space capsule might have been from an actual Soviet design, and the satellites might have been real as well. Blog readers might be able to ID one or more of the ships.
Enjoy!
Rob C
USA
Wow - these are amazing! Id love t have some scans of the model pages! The first on is a Werner Von Braun design or a moon rocket, then a simplified version of Sputnik 3,the next one is called 'Vostok' but is actually not accurate and may in fact be a missile design. Next we have a Zond series Venus probe and finally Lunik 3, which photograped h lunar farside. Fabulous stuff Rob!
ReplyDeleteI recognised the shape f the 'Vostok' craft and it is in fact part of a disinformation campaign to disguise the actual launch configuration of the Vostok spacecraft. Heavily retouched photographs and mock ups of the top secret craft were promoted by the Soviets to celebrate the propoganda victory of the first man in space, but they were very keen not to disclose the actual nature of the spacecraft to the west, so the craft was shown in various images as having the annular 'wing' at the rear of the craft.
ReplyDeleteFantastic Soviet space art. I do like these A great post, Rob :)
ReplyDeleteOnly just saw this.
ReplyDeleteBack in the very early days of the internet there was a website in Russia that had scans of Maly Modelarz kits. Sitting on a slow connection because each page took half an hour to download. But I had a spare computer in the office so it could do that in the background (real-life background, not virtual :)
I got WW2 armour and airoplanes mostly iirc, but should still have those on a disk somewhere. Anybody interested lmk and I'll go see.
Best -- Paul
Or even simpler: I've found that site again (or something very similar :)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mm-archive.narod.ru/fly.htm and the spaceships are at the end at right. Clicking on a year will get you a list with that year's issues, with images of the covers. Computer symbols are kit pages, text symbols are instructions (in Polish of course).
Had a look at the Sputnik (the second kit shown in the article above) which is the one before last on the contents page (I could read "спутник" :) Resolution isn't as high as I remember, but enough to build I think.
And Wote: there's a Snecma Coleopter kit on the 1961 page too. :)
The first item in the menu at top (pale green line) are tanks and cars, the second link are ships btw.
Best -- Paul
A Coleopter? Amazing! Just hope my download speed is up to the task.
DeleteI think that website might have been where I obtained these beautiful reprints some years ago. A very nice fellow runs the site, and he kindly supplied me with preprints on card stock for a very reasonable price. Easier than downloading in my case, as I don't have a color printer. These "kits" are so cool, I can't tell you. We had paper models in the US back in the 60s, but I don't think anything this cool or unusual or "spacey."
ReplyDeleteIll deffo have to check this out, if only for some screen shots of some of the kits. Rob is very kindly helping me out with the Sputnik 3, but I would be really interested to see how the others look.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, another trove of paper space model goodness:
http://www.ninfinger.org/models/papermodels.html
Got onto that site Paul and with a little help from Google Translate, found the Coleoptre! Some of the satellites look hellishy fiddly and one or two are printed off register, but itll be fun to try!
ReplyDeleteGlad to be of help, Wote.
ReplyDelete@Rob: paper kits are still around and there's some sublime examples to be had from specialist publishers. Or reasonably simple ones as souvenir postcards. Though they do take a bit of finding sometimes. They're popular in my native Holland (google 'bouwplaat' to see pictures) and Germany (try 'baubogen').
I also have a few which are antique (meaning 100+ years old) by Pellerin from Epinal in France, which I colourcopied to build. (Do an image search for 'constructions pellerin épinal' to see some)
And the same goes for Maly Modelarz - an image search will show some lovely models built from those kits
Best -- Paul