Savoia-Marchetti SM.92

The SM.92 was an Italian twin-boom heavy fighter/light bomber design, of which only a single prototype was ever built.

The twin-hull design isn’t unique, but: usually such designs came from joining two “standard” planes together. The SM.92 however was based on the SM.91, which looked a bit like the Lockheed P-38… it wasn’t born from merging two single hulls, but from removing the center nacelle from a twin-boom fighter.

The plane was promising; with its two license-built DB-605 engines, it packed quite a bit of power and was therefore properly fast with a top speed of over 600 km/h. For a “light” bomber, it could carry a surprisingly large bomb load –although that made it somewhat less frisky of course.

The single prototype was unfortunately destroyed in a ’44 bombing raid, so all that’s left are some pictures. A nice piece of Italian design, nonetheless…

The build

Too detailed (and therefore lots of parts) as usual, I know. Can’t help it -I add stuff until the planes looks right to me. It has a full cockpit, flush decals, wheel wells and so on…

There only seem to be pics of the prototype with German luftwaffe markings, but I chose a simple Italian “Grigio mimetico” livery. Italian planes should look Italian -basta!

Controls

She flies relatively well, but watch out with a full bomb load; it doesn’t help the plane’s manoeuvrability I’m afraid. For takeoff, half flaps & full throttle; a slight correction may be necessary to keep ‘er going straight.

Standard controls –VTOL down for flaps, trim slider for pitch trim.

AG1 : Closes your canopy. Since the plane spawns with its canopy open, closing it may be a good idea before taking off.
AG2 : Opens the rear gunner’s canopy.
AG3 : Freezes the plane’s controls and activates the gyro so you can play around with the rear gunner’s station.
AG4 through AG6 : not assigned
AG7 : drop all your bombs in one go…
AG8 : toggles the lights

The sharp end of the stick

I gave the plane a nice weapons loadout, not too far removed from what was actually foreseen by the manufacturer;

• 3x 20mm cannon -the prototype had two in the center wing, and one firing through the propeller hub of the right hull. I just put all three of them in the center wing.
• 4x forward-firing, fixed MG’s (12.7 mm) -a pair in each hull’s nose
• 1x rearward-firing, fixed MG (12.7 mm) in a tail barbette. Useful only to scare off planes on your six, not so hot for actually hitting something.
• 1x rearward-firing, controllable MG (12.7 mm) -this wasn’t foreseen in the original design, but if there’s a gunner it makes sense to give the guy an additional gun, right? Just don’t shred your tail…
• 2x 500kg and 4x 160kg general-purpose bombs. And yes, I took the trouble to actually copy existing Italian WW2 aerial bombs.

Anything else?

Nothing special about this plane. I might think about doing the SM.91 as well, soon… after all, I have most of the parts already. And truth be told, the SM.91 just looks better.

Have fun