The military use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, popularly known as drones, goes back to WW2. As long ago as the Vietnam War, the USAF used versions of the Firebee UAV for dangerous reconnaissance missions over the North. In recent years, military drones have been used for surveillance as well as for controversial targeted killings, typically with relatively slow and high-flying machines against adversaries that don’t have meaningful air defences. These machines are not yet a viable replacement for a full blown jet fighter. The Peregrine, built by Stijn van der Laan (Red Spacecat), offers a glimpse of what a future unmanned combat aircraft may look like, if done up in a particularly snazzy colour scheme.

The way the wings and canard foreplanes are angled makes the model look super sleek and I love how the wedges used to build the engine nacelles and the forward fuselage interlock. More angles can be seen in Stijn’s flickr Album.

Several months ago, Kenneth Vaessen built a Soviet MiG-23M ‘Flogger’, which we failed to blog at the time. His latest model is a German Marineflieger Panavia Tornado IDS. Both are classic Cold War warriors, but somewhat unusual as LEGO models, which makes them even more interesting.

The Marineflieger version of the Tornado was used for anti-shipping missions over the Baltic and North Sea, armed with two belly-mounted Kormoran missiles, while the ‘Flogger’ was mainly used for air-to-air missions. These missions may seem very different, but the jets’ configurations have a major feature in common: the swing wings. In their most forward position these improve slow-speed manoeuvrability and allow more efficient cruising flight; to reduce drag for high-speed flight they are swept back.

When these jets were designed in the sixties, this was all the rage. The variable sweep on the wings works, the models have detailed weapons, retractable undercarriages (certainly no mean feat on the MiG), opening canopies and other nifty working features. They look great in their excellent brick-built camouflage.

In the sixties, under president Charles De Gaulle, France started to follow a fiercely independent foreign policy that included reliance on its own nuclear deterrence force, often known as the Force de Frappe. Nowadays, its core is formed by a small number of submarines armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, but from 1964 to 1996 France also operated Mirage IV medium-range supersonic bombers armed with nuclear weapons. It took Dutch builder Kenneth Vaessen about a month to build his 1/36 scale model of this relatively little-known Cold-War jet.

In the logic typical of the era, these bombers were intended to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on France, by being able to destroy Soviet cities in retaliation. Few sane people would like to think about this sinister mission for long, but you’ve got to admit that the jet looks beautiful. With its tall undercarriage, sharply angled delta wing, and long and slender forward fuselage, it completely follows the unofficial rule in aeronautical design stating that, if it looks right, it flies right. The excellent model has a retractable undercarriage, opening cockpit canopies and working airbrakes and is built in a realistic two-tone camouflage scheme.