Fictional history

Project Thor's Rage:

August 1945. Miserable and forgotten at war's end, engineer Henry Carter catalogues captured enemy aircraft at Misawa Airbase. The bizarre J7W "Shinden" fighter stops him cold—its blunt nose and engine crammed into its tail present a radical instability he'd never dared imagine. Why not push that idea further?

Haunted by the Shinden's unorthodox layout, Carter glimpses a broken P-51D tail section in the scrapyard. A wild, sacrilegious idea ignites: flip the Mustang's sleek design. Cut off its tail. Replace it with a heavy, reinforced nose section? The head would become the tail. Its whole nature would invert.

Obsessed, Carter secretly rallies a few loyal, disillusioned mechanics. Under the cover of darkness in a forgotten hangar, they begin butchering war-weary components. They weld a heavy, reinforced front fuselage onto the back of a salvaged P-51D frame, creating a crude mockery of a tail unit. The powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine is wrestled into this awkward aft nacelle. Tom Harris, the nervous physicist, sweats over calculations predicting an impossibly rearward center of gravity. They dub their Frankenstein monster D-15-P "Thor's Rage".

At dawn, Carter taxis the grotesque machine onto the runway. It looks profoundly wrong—a beautiful Mustang head awkwardly perched atop a swollen, pusher-propelled beast. Standard takeoff procedure seems impossible. Carter pushes the throttle forward cautiously. The tail-mounted Merlin roars, shoving him hard against his straps. At critical speed, he slams the throttle wide open.

Disaster strikes instantly. A muffled explosion rocks the rear fuselage! Thick, acrid black smoke billows from the engine compartment, engulfing the aircraft. Violent torque wrenches the airframe sideways. Ground crew shouts turn to panic. In the choking cockpit, Carter fights the bucking controls, feeling the monstrous center of gravity trying to pitch the nose straight down onto the tarmac. It's failing. It's dying.

Then, the memory of the Shinden, the deliberate instability, flashes through his terror. The nose is light. Feather-light. Acting purely on instinct, he does the insane thing—he yanks the control column back with all his might.

Instead of burying its snout into concrete, Thor's Rage bucks violently. Its swollen, smoking tail acts as an anchor point. The absurdly heavy rear slams down; the incredibly light, almost vestigial nose rockets skyward. The plane rips out of its own smoke shroud like a missile fired vertically. Prop torque wrenches its right wingtip downward violently, but the sheer brute force of the Merlin in its new position overcomes everything. Engulfed in its funeral pyre, the abomination claws its way, near-vertically, into the grey morning sky.

Leveling out shakily at 2,000 feet, smoke thinning but trailing like a bad omen, Carter looks down at the tiny figures of his team—Harris jumping like mad, big Mike the welder clapping Ben's back with a resounding smack. The beast flies like a drunken dream, vibrating, groaning, threatening to tear itself apart. It's unstable, ugly, terrifying.

But in that rattling cockpit, Carter finds not dread, but exhilaration. He wipes sweat, oil, and soot from his face, and a wild, unhinged grin splits his features. Against all logic, physics, and sanity, the inverted Mustang flies. Thor's Rage, born of desperation and a captured enemy's radical idea, has roared into existence.