Has anyone used black basing on late war RLM A.C. with motle finish?

[Wildsau]

Interested to see if this may be a good approach to Red 12 Me 262 B1-A. There's a lot of character in the paint work of those NJG 10 night fighter jets.

 

[Crimea_River]

I think you mean 10/NJG11 as the unit that flew Red 12. Those late war B-1a night fighters were practically new and so would not have shown much weathering. Rather, the issue would have been a low quality application at the factory and so you may have seen a very thin top coat showing the underlying bare metal and puttied panel lines. There were actually two Red 12's. The first, W. Nr. 110636 is thought to be a converted A-2 and was lost in it's first combat flight on March 27/28 1945. The second one, W. Nr. 111980 was received by 10/NJG11 in mid April 1945 and was surrendered at Schleswig-Land.

The wings on my Red 8 were intended to reflect the thin paint. I did not black base the model.

 

[Wildsau]

Ok it seems that the single seaters had much more weathering some were pretty beat up but the night fighters did look much cleaner especially noticeable on the engines.

 

[Crimea_River]

Be careful on what you are defining as "night fighters". 10/NJG11 operated many single seaters as night fighters when the unit was formed, as Kommando Welter, in the latter months of 1944 . There were also several converted 2 seaters used until the dedicated B-1a's came along very late in the game.

If I was doing the B-1a Red 12, I would do very little weathering. You could beat up the fuel tanks though as these took a beating! Note Red 8 with one grey and one black tank.

 

[Wildsau]