UNLIKE KONSTANTIN KALININ, I CAN HONESTLY SAY Josef Stalin did not force me to build a Kalinin K-7. This, despite my usual GMax avoidance of such ungainly craft. On the other hand, how many airplanes can you name that carried an airfoil 7 ft. 7 in. thick or a complement of nine gunners? Ugliness can offer its own reward. Here in Part 2 we examine details of the Kalinin K-7, even to its oversize logo on the gear pontoons.
This and other images of my GMax Kalinin K-7 for Microsoft FS9.
A Particularly Complex Nose. Though the rest of the fuselage and its twin booms were simply rounded boxes (thus causing the real craft’s debilitating resonances?), the K-7 nose was complex indeed. The flight deck has an ample greenhouse giving the pilot and copilot great views forward as well as lower left and right.
Connected to the flight deck were two specialized compartments, a nose turret in which resided a gunner and, below it, a tight little compartment that I envision as the bombardier/observer’s position.
You Want Gunners? I’ll Give You Gunners. The K-7 certainly didn’t lack for firepower, with gunners seemingly at every possible location: in the nose, in mid- and tail-pods on the twin booms, and fore and aft on the gear pontoons.
GMax has a ready cloning feature, so all that needed modeling was a single gunner and his twin-barrel cannon. A “tick-18” feature (for rotating beacons) gives aiming articulation of the gun; GMax’s “link-to” connects each gunner’s hands, forearms, arms, head, helmet, goggles, don’t forget the lens, and torso to the gun.
On the second or third cloning, I realized all my gunners had the same aiming pattern. No problem: Each tick-18_gun could be articulated in a different direction.
Plenty of firepower, each suitably aimed and articulated.
A Crew from an Identical Litter?? Ha. But my pilot, copilot, observer, and nine gunners sure looked alike. No problem: I dug into previous projects to find a selection of faces, hair color, mustache or no, to relieve the family similarities. GMax scaling of size helped as well.
Overpopulation? Partway through arranging the crew, I encountered the dreaded GMax parts limit. I’d done this before with other highly detailed modeling; the only workaround I know is to diminish the parts’ complexity or number.
This time around, there were no parts-gobbling engine details to simplify (the K-7’s V-12s all reside within nacelles). The easiest solution was to discard crewmembers’ body parts that were not visible. Nine times gunners’ thighs, shins, and shoes gave enough space to add the final few bits and yet have the model still compile.
A Flight Deck View. I had no documentation of a K-7 flight deck, so cobbled up a Cyrillic instrument panel from earlier Russian projects. GMax has coding for a maximum of four engines, so my K-7 fires up in three pairs, left to right, plus the engine at the rear.
By the way, the real K-7 went through multiple propulsion options. A photo of an earlier version (see Part 1) appeared to have engines mounted at the front of each gear pontoon. Later, these two were moved upward into the wing. When the six-engine craft appeared underpowered (make that “overweight”), two extra pushers were envisioned, though only one of them centrally located ever showed up.
The flight deck greenhouse gives full viewing options to the pilot. I like the one showing the front gunner in the left gear pod.
The pilot’s view down to the left.
Flight Dynamics. By the time the graphical K-7 was completed, I confess I had stared at it long enough. Its flight dynamics set with an arbitrary four-engine CFG and Air files, the craft lumbers around rather like I’d expect of its 38,000-kg (close to 84,000-lb) fully loaded weight. Fine tuning its CFG, I suspect my K-7 could reach the real craft’s maximum speed of 225 km/h (140 mph).
Gee, even with those nine gunners firing away, what a lumbering target it would have been. And, what’s more, my K-7 doesn’t rattle its booms silly from engine vibrations.
Rear firepower.
Kalinin Coda. I’m more or less done staring at the Kalinin K-7. Finally. My GMax/FS9 log shows its construction began May 12, 2024. My next GMax time-gobbler will not be so prone to on-again/off-again bouts of enthusiasm.
On the other hand, in researching the K-7 I came upon another Kalinin, the K-12 aka VS-2 (Voyskovoy Samolet = tactical/troop plane), said to be the world’s first tailless bomber.
Image from globalsecurity.org.
Hmm… I wouldn’t mind staring at this one. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024