COBI V2 Rocket (Vergeltungswaffe-2) Set 3121

COBI's V2 Rocket is a 1:35 model built from 560 blocks, 38.5 cm long, with a removable casing revealing the engine, fuel tank and warhead, plus a launch platform.

The ancestor of everything that followed

Strip away what the V2 was for and what is left is the first working long-range ballistic missile, and the ancestor of every rocket since.

It burned liquid oxygen and alcohol through a regeneratively cooled combustion chamber — fuel circulated around the chamber walls to keep them from melting, a technique still used today. It steered with graphite vanes in the exhaust and with fins, under gyroscopic guidance, at a time when nothing else flew itself. On a test flight in June 1944 one reached 176 kilometres, making it the first object built by people to cross into space.

After the war both sides took the hardware and the engineers. The American programme that reached the Moon was led by Wernher von Braun, who had designed this; the Soviet programme built its first rockets from captured V2s. The line from this object to Sputnik and to Apollo is direct and short.

What it was built for

Around 3,000 were launched at London, Antwerp and other cities from 1944 and killed roughly 9,000 people. Manufacturing them in the underground Mittelwerk plant, using prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, killed a good many more than that. It is the rare weapon that cost more lives to build than to use.

In the COBI range

Set 3120 is the Executive Edition: the same rocket with the Meiller transporter that raised it, a figure of General Dornberger, and 1,191 pieces.

Specifications

Pieces: 560 · Scale: 1:35 · Removable casing with modelled interior · Launch platform included
Model dimensions: 38.5 × 8 cm (15.1 × 3.1 in)