V2 Color Scheme

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Swissyhawk

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I've looked at lots of pictures, and I'm just not sure. Regarding the typical black and white paint scheme that many people use on their V2s, as you go around the body of the rocket, is it half white, half black; or is 1/4 white, 1/4 black, 1/4 white, 1/4 black; or is it something else?
Thanks.
 
It depends on which version you're patterning - there are several different white/black roll patterns that were used. By the same token, there are also different yellow/black patterns that were used at White Sands. Some of them did have half/half sections, while other areas were quarters and still others solid. Basically, all of the above applied in different examples. I've got pictures of the example in the Air & Space Museum, I'll have to find them.

I've found these sites helpful: www.postwarv2.com & www.v2rocket.com/
 
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I've looked at lots of pictures, and I'm just not sure. Regarding the typical black and white paint scheme that many people use on their V2s, as you go around the body of the rocket, is it half white, half black; or is 1/4 white, 1/4 black, 1/4 white, 1/4 black; or is it something else?
Thanks.
The first few German prototypes were half black, half white; but half way down the body, the black and white swapped sides.

Someone else has already pointed at https://www.v2rocket.com/ - the specific page on markings is https://www.v2rocket.com/start/makeup/markings.html, including views of opposite sides of two black and white specimens.
 
These are several photos taken at the A&S Museum in DC. I tried to find shots that showed all sides, but the back is hard to capture because its up against the balcony.

http---airandspace.si.edu-webimages-previews-2006-2099p.jpgV2 at Smithsonian.jpgP1340725.jpg

You can see that the upper body and nose cone are 1/2 & 1/2, the mid section to upper fin can are inverse of that, and lower fin can and fins are a bit more varied. On the "front", both fins & can are black, with a white band across it. On the "back", its white with a black band. The "sides" are checked, inverse of each other. The "front" is partly obscured by what I think it is a WAC Corporal (also black & white) in front of it.
 
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I've looked at lots of pictures, and I'm just not sure. Regarding the typical black and white paint scheme that many people use on their V2s, as you go around the body of the rocket, is it half white, half black; or is 1/4 white, 1/4 black, 1/4 white, 1/4 black; or is it something else?
Thanks.

This is my favorite as documented in Secret Wonder Weapons of the Third Reich.

kj

redv2.jpg

IMG_1081.jpg

v2launchsmall.jpg
 
Thank you for the replies and the links. I'll start painting this weekend.
 
Why don't you look at the Russian and Chinese versions of it? those red stars look pretty good :)
 
I think I'll poke my nose in here for a minute. I'm actually kind of in the middle of sorting out some V-2 paint schemes for the 5th edition of RotW. And the more I look, the more perplexing it is. I've actually been able to sort out maybe a dozen schemes, but I don't have all of them properly illustrated yet. And it's pretty clear that there are dozens more variations. And I've caught some mistakes in my book on top of that.

There is that Smithsonian scheme, for instance, which is presumably the same as the first successful German launch test, except there was pin-up tail art on the original. Other German tests had different schemes, not all well-recorded. There were at least four different German camouflage schemes, one of which, the "ragged" or "Splinter" scheme has been documented on all sides. Another German scheme was simply olive drab green.

Then there was the black and white English "Operation Backfire" scheme, which looks a lot like Swissyhawk's model. I kind of suspect that Kjohnson's paint scheme was actually a black and white Backfire rocket, misinterpreted by the author of the book he cites.

The Russian R-1, Korolev's V-2 clone, had a different black and white roll pattern scheme.

The first V-2 flight at White Sands had a pattern similar to the Backfire rounds, but with yellow replacing the white, and the second was yet another yellow and white roll pattern. Both flights were well-enough documented for me to draw them up in "Rockets of the World."

And now I have to go offline before I finish this rant with the various later White Sands Schemes!
 
OK, just to follow up, I have been working on German V-2 paint schemes. These seem to be three or four schemes that are (mostly) verified on four sides. The first, flight V-3, (just one drawing but some verbiage that I hope fills it in) is verified on *most* sides.

The second, V-4, comes from all four sides of the Smithsonian's V-2, backed up by G Harry Stine's drawings of all sides, available from NASM.

The third, flight 38, is from a Stine drawing, which I recall he described as being based on a failed flight that went into a roll before the crash, giving him views of all sides. (I did the same with the WHite Sands flight No. 11).

The fourth is just a note, that in later tests, the Germans painted the upper portion of the rocket Olive drab, and used No- 38-style test scheme on the bottom. I haven't verified any of those later flights on all four sides, but the pictures I found in Dieter Hoelsken's book agree with that scheme.

***The drawing here was inaccurate! I've replaced it with an accurate one further down this thread***

I'm now working up some camouflage data. The first thing I will say is that the principal camouflage pattern was very specifically laid out, and not just a jumble of greens and earthtones.
 
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The references I've seen, including the full size replica at Peenemünde itself, show V4 to have a completely black nose tip. The fins all have Roman numerals, going up clockwise as seen from the rear of the rocket. The left-most of the drawings of V4 shows fins II and IV, with III edge on and I hidden behind the body. Between fins II and III is the tail art, a woman sitting on a crescent Moon superimposed on a rocket marked "V4"; this was inspired by the Fritz Lang film "Die Frau Im Mond". You can see the image here, showing how it is placed on the V2. A better version of the image itself is here.
 
OK, I've got the best I could do with German Camouflage patterns. Don't trust the exact shades of the colors, as I'm having trouble nailing those down, and getting them to stay consistent as the drawing changes format.

The scheme at the top is pretty well defined, both in a document on the Deutches Museum website, and with a nice set of photos in Dieter Hoelsken's "V Missiles of the Third Reich."

One scheme, the Batik version at the bottom left, seems to be pretty willy-nilly. Of three missiles with that pattern shown in Hoelsken's book, each looks a bit different. But they all have those hard-edged cream bands around the tail section and guidance sections.

The bottom center "wavy" scheme has hard-edged patches of color, and is pretty much based on Hoelsken's reconstruction. The only photo I've seen showed just a sliver of the scheme.

19303494032_1277c54337_c.jpg
 
The references I've seen, including the full size replica at Peenemünde itself, show V4 to have a completely black nose tip. The fins all have Roman numerals, going up clockwise as seen from the rear of the rocket. The left-most of the drawings of V4 shows fins II and IV, with III edge on and I hidden behind the body. Between fins II and III is the tail art, a woman sitting on a crescent Moon superimposed on a rocket marked "V4"; this was inspired by the Fritz Lang film "Die Frau Im Mond". You can see the image here, showing how it is placed on the V2. A better version of the image itself is here.

I'll have to look at my sources for the black nose tip. I know that there are small roman numerals on a lot of fins that are kind of too small for the scale of drawings I'm doing. I'm aware of the tail art on a number of flights, which I'll be working on in time.
 
The references I've seen, including the full size replica at Peenemünde itself, show V4 to have a completely black nose tip.

Aha! I've been looking through my sources. Flight V1, the Smithsonian rocket, and G Harry Stine's drawing have the black/white split going all the way up to the tip of the nose. But you are correct--photos of flight V-4 and V-2 show the warhead section is all black.
 
OK, so I've been doing a lot more work. I've found a new drawing of the tail section paint scheme for the later test flights on the Deutches Museum site, and I spent a couple of days working on tail art (photograph a photograph, photoshop the photo to remove distortions, trace a printout, photoshop a photo of the tracing, and paste it into the drawing). And I actually think I have an understanding of *all* the German paint schemes. Anyway, here are the first test flights. On the top are flights V2 and V4, the first and third launches. Several other tests had that same scheme. At the bottom is flight V3, the second test.

***The drawing here had a bad link. I've replaced it with a more recent and accurate version further down the thread***
 
OK, here are a couple of later test schemes. G Harry Stine documented one that seemed a bit different, based on movie footage.

***The link for this image was bad. I've replaced it with a new, more accurate drawing sown the thread***
 
Here are the camouflage schemes. The Ragged scheme on the top is exactly documented, but the others are not so well. I left out an early version of the Ragged scheme that had a finer pattern of splintered edges, but to my knowledge, all the others are covered here. Note that only one, the Batik scheme, has green and earth tones sprayed on willy-nilly, and that the splotches are much smaller that the patches most people spray on their V-2's (even Estes sold a couple of kits with a wrong, large-fuzzy-patch scheme).

***The link to this image is bad. I've replaced it with a new version further down the thread***
 
Finally, I have the first of the post-war paint schemes. These are from Operation Backfire, the British project to fly 3 V-2 missiles in October of 1945. I only have the tail art for two of the flights, but I have the third at low resolution on video, so I'll try to get that one figured out. The press was admitted to that launch, so the tail art is less racy. I have a bunch of later White Sands schemes already available in RotW, but I'm working up some more.

***The link to this image was broken, but a newer version of the drawing is available down the thread***
 
OK, I'm most of the way through with the White Sands V-2's. The first pair of drawings are the first two flights from White Sands. Since Missle No. 1 was just static tested, they are numbers 2 and 3. The first one, borrowed the roll pattern from the Operation Backfire rounds, just changing the white to a more visible yellow. The second was also yellow and black. Notice that the pinup are for V-2 no. 3 shows a numeral 2. Apparently, White Sands hadn't quite standardized on "missile nimber" rather than "flight number" yet. I suspect the pinup girl was wearing *something* because the press were invited to the launch:

***THe link to this image was broken, but I've uploaded a new version down the thread***

The resolution of this "teaser" version of the drawing makes it hard to tell yellow from silver. The silver includes bands around a couple of joints on N0. 2, as well as its nose tip.

This drawing is only slightly tweaked from the version in "Rockets of the World."
 
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The next drawing shows flights 11 and 12. No. 11 had what I'd call the generic 1946 paint scheme--the missile was overall white, with one fin (fin I) painted black, and a sort of checkerboard pattern for the tail section of the two quadrants opposite fin I. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, had gotten a job at White Sands after WW II, and he pointed out that white actually created better contrast than yellow when reviewing tracking film, which was in B&W taken through a red filter.

V-2 No. 11 was a disaster, starting off with a roll, and crashing 13 seconds after launch. That was really helpful, because it nicely showed off its roll pattern, and I could identify the round number from the crash.

V-2 No. 12 was the first V-2 that successfully returned data. Partly this was due to luck, but partly it was because the most important instrument, an ultraviolet spectrograph, was placed in a conical fairing in fin II. Fin IV had a matching dummy for symmetry. If you have "Rockets of the World" the paint pattern is wrong, because I based it on a mis-captioned photograph. I recently found a document pointing out that the parts of the rocket visible to the fin-mounted spectrograph were painted black, indicating that photo could not be No. 12. James Duffy's "The V-2 in America" DVD has video of a rocket that was black in all the right places and had the telltale black areas, so that's the basis of this drawing. It's a unique paint scheme among the V-2's, and it represents the rocket that first explored the solar system from space, and that first showed us where the ozone layer lies.


***The link to this image is broken. I've uploaded a new version down the thread***
 
Sometime between V-2 No. 12 in October of 1946 and V-2 No. 17 in December, someone at White Sands realized it would be helpful to paint (spraypainted stencil--you can see overspray in some photos) the missile numbers on the fins. Both 17 and 20 show the standard early White Sands roll pattern No 20 carried a parachute-recoverable instrument canister in the nose--you can see its round bare-metal hatches in the drawing.

***The link to this thread is broken. I've added a new version down the thread***

As soon as V-2 No. 21, they started messing with this standard paint scheme. Both 21 and 25 had UV spectrographs in fin I, so that the sides of II and IV facing I were painted black. And in both sides, at least one side of Fin I wasn't black. But I can't figure out how fin I *was* painted from the B&W pictures I have. Unless some color pictures show up with fin I in them, I will actually remove No. 25 from "Rockets of the World."
 
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James Duffy's DVD actually had color film of these two, so I have their schemes worked out. The second one, V-2 no. 31, was a later version of the Blossom V-2, where they actually stretched the cylindrical portion of the V-2 by a full diameter (65.0") to make space for a parachute to recover the payload. That makes this a desirable model subject because the extra length makes a model more stable. Again the low resolution of the teaser makes colors a bit ambiguous, but There is no red on No. 31, and the red on No. 28 is in the form of 4-inch stripes.

***Link broke. Better on downthread.***
 
OK, I have one more drawing for today. The first drawing is another Blossom flight. This was a night launch, so they didn't bother with a fancy roll pattern. Which is nice if you are a lazy scale modeler!

The second is based on a bunch of photos which only show two sides of a very colorful V-2. The first two views are actually correct, based on color photos. But the fins in the third view are based on the patterns I've seen in other flights--Fin 1 is black on both sides, and fin III has the opposite black and white pattern on the other side. The last view, at the lower right, is pretty much a guess. I do know that the tip of fin II is orange, but beyond that I'm guessing.

Also, with the low resolution here, I'll point out that the nose of No. 41 is two shades of silver, and the nose of No. 43 is orange.

***Link Broken, revised version down the thread***
 
Aak!! I just found a major mistake in V-2's Nos. 11, 12, 17, 20, and 28. In the quadrants of the tail section that are black on top, the black ends at the top of the fins, not at the tail section-tank section joint. In other words, for those flights, the body just forward of the front corner of the fins is white all around. I'll be posting corrected drawings later.
 
Wow, excellent Peter! I am at the paint prep stage for my Madcow 4" diameter and I have all parts for a 11.5" dia. build also--the added detail shown here will help a lot.
 
I'm currently finishing a LOC R-2 (streteched V2), and looking for data and drawings for the Blossom tests. I see there were some pictures of these previously, but they are not available. Could someone re-post those or otherwise tell me how to get those?
 
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