COBI V-1 Flying Bomb (FI 103) Set 3135

COBI's V-1 Flying Bomb is a 1:35 model built from 265 blocks, 22 cm long, with a transport trolley, a display base and a printed nameplate. The warhead rotates and the trolley wheels turn. Two figures are included: a Luftwaffe sentry in a greatcoat and a mechanic working on the weapon.

The sound is the thing people remembered

The V-1's engine was a pulsejet, which is about the simplest jet engine that can be made: a tube with a shutter at the front that opens and closes as the fuel inside detonates, roughly fifty times a second.

That produced a loud, rattling drone audible for miles, and it gave the weapon its British names — the buzz bomb and the doodlebug. It also produced the detail that everybody who lived through it describes the same way: when the fuel ran out the engine stopped, and the silence meant the thing was coming down. People on the ground learned to count the seconds.

Guidance was crude by design: a gyroscope held the heading, and a small propeller on the nose counted the distance flown. At a preset number of turns the controls pitched the machine into a dive. It was accurate to within about twelve kilometres, which is why it was aimed at cities and nothing smaller.

Around 9,500 were launched at England from June 1944 and some 2,400 reached London. It was cheap — a fraction of a V2 — and it is the direct ancestor of the cruise missile.

In the COBI range

Sets 3120 and 3121 are the V2 ballistic missile, the other half of the German V-weapons programme.

Specifications

Pieces: 265 · Figures: 2 · Scale: 1:35 · Transport trolley and display base included
Model dimensions: 22 × 15 × 7.5 cm (8.7 × 5.9 × 3.0 in)