While I have always known of the Messerschmitt ME163 rocket plane from WWII, I never knew much about it. Then, a few months back I read an article about these tiny, ineffective things and so I decided to build a model of one. Here it is:

What really got me is the fact that though the Germans built a few hundred of them, by the end of the war they had shot down a not-very-grand total of just nine (9) Allied bombers. That's it.
They had several design flaws:
One was a total flight time of 10 minutes, so that's hardly a lot of time to get in amongst it.
Another was a huge speed differential between its 500+mph speeds and the 220mph speeds of the bombers it attacked. The rocket plane absolutely whizzed past its prey, with only a second or two to actually shoot at its target.
Another was the slow rate of fire of its 30mm cannon, hardly a great feature when it had so little time to fire.
And finally, once it was out of fuel, it turned into a glider which slowly returned to base. Allied fighter pilots quickly learned to hang around near German airbases, waiting to shoot down the 163s as they slowly descended.

The whole thing is rather tiny, as that's a 10ml pot added here for scale.

The kit (in 1/72 scale, made by a South Korean company, Academy) has the special tractor/trailer which hauled the ME163s around the airfields. As soon as I saw that little extra I was hooked on the idea of building a model of this spectacularly unsuccessful little attention-grabbing plane. (The ME163s were fitted with little detachable wheel sets. So they were towed out to their runway on the trailer, offloaded from the trailer on their dodgy little wheels, pointed in the right direction, fired up the dangerous rocket engines, and as the planes took off at high speed they jettisoned their wheels above the runway).

Here's the wee beastie on its own.