[Chock]

Now there's a question that will get some differing opinions LOL

As you probably know, Richthofen had quite a few Triplanes, and more than one of them went through several different paint jobs, for example 477, which partially retained its Fokker streaking for a while, apparently then got more red paint slapped onto it at a later date.

Quite telling however, is that 425/17, in which Richthofen met his end, is known to have been somewhat crudely painted in at least some places, since the (known to be genuine) pieces of fabric from it with the Balkan Crosses on, are very crudely amended from the earlier national insignia (one of these pieces of fabric is in the Canadian Military Institute in Toronto, another was sold in an auction in London a few years ago). So if the national markings were not treated with careful respect when painting, it seems difficult to imagine that the serial numbers would have been treated any differently, after all, one hardly needs to retain a serial number on a bright red Triplane to distinguish it from others in the squadron. One has to be a bit careful with that sort of analysis though, as paint fades with time, and we are talking about some paint that is approaching being 100 years old, having had a lot of exposure to UV light.

The confusion is not helped by the fact that photos of what is often claimed to be one of MVR's Triplanes, and thus used for the basis of some analysis, was an aircraft which for a long time resided in a museum in Berlin, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in WW2. It was in fact not an original at all, but one of two replicas made for a movie in the early 1930s. Also unhelpful, is the fact that there are probably enough fake pieces of fabric claiming to be from Richthofen's 425/17 doing the rounds, you could cover an entire Geschwader of Triplanes with them, so even the colour is doubt, let alone which bits were painted.

It is quite likely that if you paint an aeroplane with red paint, then the darkest markings it originally carried will still show though, unless you are prepared to slap tons of paint on; not a good idea with aeroplanes, since it adds a lot of weight. So I suspect the serial numbers on 425/17 would have been discernible at the time, if not very clearly. Others might disagree with that though, but based on pictures of MVR's Albatros, we can see the crosses show through the red paint pretty well, especially when you take into account that the film used at the time was not great at distinguishing between red and black.

Given that some of the painting on 425/17 was fairly crude, you should weigh up whether that is a good choice for a paint job on your model, since some people might be inclined to think you've just done a bad job of painting it instead of that being what it really looked like!

Al