DESCRIPTION

LaGG-3 Lavochkin Gorbunov Gudkov 

Fighter 1941 Year WWII Soviet Union

1:100 Scale

Manufacturer: DeAgostini

Material: Diecast and plastic

Condition: New in original packaging

Historical reference

The Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3 was a Soviet fighter aircraft of World War II. It was a refinement of the earlier LaGG-1, and was one of the most modern aircraft available to the Soviet Air Force at the time of Germany's invasion in 1941.

Overweight despite its wooden construction, at one stage 12 LaGG-3s were being completed daily and 6,528 had been built when factory 31 in Tbilisi switched to Yak-3 production in 1944.

The prototype of the LaGG-3, I-301, was designed by Semyon A. Lavochkin, Vladimir P. Gorbunov and Mikhail I. Gudkov. It was designated LaGG-3 in serial production. Its airframe was partially made of wood delta-veneer (a resin-wood multi-ply veneer composed of very thin, 0.35 to 0.55 mm, wood veneer and phenol formaldehyde resin, baked at high temperature and pressure) used for the crucial parts. This novel construction material had tensile strength comparable to that of non-hardened aluminum alloys and only 30% lower than that of precipitation hardened D-1A grade duralumin. It was also incombustible and completely invulnerable to rot, with service life measured in decades in adverse conditions. The full wooden wing (with plywood surfaces) was analogous to that of the Yak-1. The only difference was that the LaGG's wings were built in two sections. The fuselage was of similar construction to the MiG-3's. The LaGG-3's armament consisted of a 20 mm ShVAK cannon, with 150 rounds, which was installed as the motornaya pushka (моторная пушка - motor cannon) in the cylinder block split- between the "V" of the engine cylinders and firing through a hollow propeller shaft, and two synchronized 12.7 mm Berezin UBS machine guns with 170 rpg. Consequently, the combined weight of rounds fired per second was 2.65 kg/s, making the LaGG-3 superior in burst mass to all contemporary Russian fighters, particularly to the MiG-3. Most other Russian fighters of that era were considered under-gunned[citation needed] in relation to western contemporary fighters. This is somewhat true even for the Yak-1, which had a 20 mm cannon and two 7.62 mm machine guns, but not the later versions of the Polikarpov I-16, which had two cannons and two machine guns.

With love from Ukraine