In the past, I've thought about building a B-36. Now, not so much, certainly not one in 1/48 scale! Here's a B-36 story from my youth in New Mexico; I was no more than 10, maybe 12 years old one summer day in the early 1950s when an apparently endless succession of B-36 bombers directly flew over my small village of Arenas Valley in Southwestern New Mexico. They were so low that I felt like I could count their rivets.*
As you know, the B-36 was a huge and ungainly hybrid of a plane, with six turboprop engines mounted on the trailing edge of the wings and four pod-mounted turbojet engines, two each slung near the wing tips. In other words, “six turning and four burning”. Its name, the Peacemaker, today seems ironic to me.
The combination of the turboprop and jet engines created a unique sound that I would recognize in an instant, but of course I never will again, not in real life: the B-36, like so many other species, is extinct. This YouTube video does a good job of representing that sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN2gYduKeW0.
The B-36 had been designed and built as a supposed deterrent to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but it probably did little but foster the nuclear grandstanding that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in then and still engage in. Since the bombers I saw were headed straight toward the huge Kennecott open-pit copper mine at Santa Rita, just seven miles due east of Arenas Valley, I've always assumed that those B-36 flights were a nuclear strike exercise. However, if the flights were such an exercise, something was wrong: even at cruising speed, the B-36 would reach the mine at Santa Rita in only a couple of minutes, and would have to climb another thousand metres (3281 feet) just to maintain their absolute altitude. Even a small nuclear bomb would have blown them out of the sky. Regardless of the reason for those flights, I was thrilled.
Bob
* There might have been only one B-36 making circuit after circuit. As I recall, there were about 10 or 15 minutes from one overflight to the next.
On the bench: A diorama to illustrate the crash of a Beech T-34B Mentor which I survived in 1962 (I'm using Minicraft's 1/48 model of the Mentor), and a Pegasus model of the submarine Nautilus of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas fame.