You can find a brief history of Bachem's Natter in my preview of the Encore double kit,   as well as a "what if" operational history in my build review.

 I have seen photos of stationary Natter launchers, as well reading accounts of mobile ones. Then there were last-minute expedients, such as using pine-trees stripped of limbs for launch rails. Such was the desperation of 1945. Other strange ways of launching a Natter have appeared online; they are as notional as the "Pound Coin" I mention in my fictional history; no readers caught that gaff, but the Pound Sterling was not issued in coin form until 1983. A six pence in my ear for that error!

So if a giant rubber-band launcher suits your Natter, I am certainly not going to come after you to say it was not possible. I don't build much Luft '46 stuff, unless the object came at least off the drawing board and someone bent tin to make a prototype. One advantage of such subjects is that you can pretty much make up a paint scheme and story to suit your mood.

Finding myself with the trolley for a different "whiffer," a He-162 / Mistel combo from Dragon, I thought about how a launcher might have been fabricated to hide a Natter in deep shelters, such as von Braun’s infamous V-2 factory's caves in the Harz Mountains. The rocket interceptor would be hauled out, the launcher stood up, and if the Natter did not explode from its volatile fuel combination, rocketed into the bomber streams making the rubble bounce in Germany.

I doubt that any number of Natters would have stopped that apocalypse, but this scratch-build proved a good test of modeling skills. It also gave me something more interesting for displaying the Natter than the wooden cradle from Encore's kit.

I used the Mistel trolley and everything but our kitchen sink for this build. More on that in a moment.

To haul out the Natter, I first thought of a half-track and bought Hasegawa's 1/72 Sd.Kfz.7/2 AA unit with a 37mm gun. Then I read of old panzer chassis being repurposed as haulers, so an ESCI PzKw II joined my stash. Here too, I fabricated a great deal as the tank would have lost its turret for its new duties.

Vehicle

The halftrack and tank fell together beautifully, with no fuss for the former and a bit of filler on the upper and lower hull-joints for the Panzer II. The halftrack comes with a number of handy small figures for the diorama I'd planned. I found a civilian-looking figure from an Airfix Lysander kit and painted him up as an engineer climbing onto the tow vehicle before launch.

It seems that beyond ammunition carriers for the Wespe self-propelled gun, some PzKw II hulls got modified for towing or other rear-area duties. To make such a mod, the ESCI kit lost its turret. I put a plate of Evergreen plastic over the turret opening, added a blast-shield for the operator, a round hatch for getting into the interior, and topsides, a crude seat of styrene. For the driver’s controls, I hauled out a PE instrument panel from a P-35 Seversky kit as well as a length of jeweler’s silver wire. The Natter's bright red nose-cap rests on the hauler now, as the tiny rocket-plane is ready to go!

Launcher

The launcher started with the rails, using sections of report-cover spines and Evergreen tubes. I added strips of Evergreen atop a cradle made of V-shaped sprue, connecting these the rails by bits of bent wire.

Then came many crazy odds and ends: 1/6 action-figure smoke grenades and braided hose for a fire-suppression system, plus lots of Evergreen sheet and fine stainless screen for the launcher's base. Then ingenious moving rods and pistons from Dragon’s Mistel trolley raise the launcher and lower it onto the cradle.

Having failed out of Engineering school nearly half a century back, I can advise this: don't try to build this contraption in 1/1 scale. It would probably topple over and explode while being pulled out of the cave. It toppled a lot just shooting the photos, raising some curses in German that I learned from Sgt. Rock comics, decades ago.

I made a few tiny tweaks to the Natter itself; the Encore kit does not include C-Stoff decals, so I painted yellow squares ahead of each wing-root and placed a C there. The tiny Natter, which had already taken a lot of time per square millimeter, was done.

The vehicles got late-war camo airbrushed with Vallejo Air paints, then some weathering of mud and grime. They’d be outside more than the launcher itself.

The launcher got the same camo common to German AFVs, and I washed things down well with Flory grime. I added soot around the blast protector with dry brushing. I didn’t do more weathering as the launcher would likely stay indoors more than the support vehicles, at least until a P-47 or Typhoon came along to blow it to smithereens.

This inexpensive project rid my parts box of many weird things. It also let me practice building with dissimilar materials, employing several types of adhesives. I enjoy scratch-building immensely, and with this subject there is no right or wrong. Try a similar subject yourself. You will end up with something no one else has in their display case. A better modeler than the author should enter such things in a contest.

Building 1/72 armor was a first for me and I really enjoyed making these little kits. I plan to build more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_II

Joe Essid

15 April 2025