Historical Board Gamer Decals

After a tip from one of the chaps on the Wings of Glory Aerodrome, I thought I had a solution to the 9mm American and Russian roundels I need to dress up some Shapeways RAF colored prints, but alas the decals sold by Historical Board Gaming are actually for 1/285 and smaller scales. If there was a company making quality 1/285 or 1/300 scale quality World War One planes (at reasonable prices), I would be tempted to paint up a slew, but there does not seem to be. CinC - fiddley to assemble, range is limited, and prices are now stupidly high. Hostile Aircraft fail from a quality point of view (and landing gear...yuck). Heroics & Ros, no pictures means no buying from this gamer. Anyway, my search for 9mm American and Russian roundels continues, although these HBG offerings look rather nice. There is a wide variety of decals to be had from HBG, and there are MANY roundels/insignia of various sizes on each sheet. The sheet I believe is one large decal, so one does have to trim around each roundel/insignia.

Hmmm, one option is still available - Mike at Table Top Flights will scale WWI planes at 1/285...maybe that is the ticket! At this point I could use all my Check Your Six "stuff" along with the Colorful Skies WWI mods for CY6. Then there is also Canvas Eagles, which could work. Seemingly when I used to play Blue Max, which is what Canvas Eagles is derived from, there was something about the rules I did not like. Might have to go download Canvas Eagles and give them a lookover.

Well, to further the story, in chatting with Mike at TTF, scaling his WWI aircraft to 1/285th can be done, but the frailty of such a small print, when doing biplanes, is a concern. So still a bit thwarted in my desire to use 1/285th scale aircraft.

The Blue Devil

Completed! I'll let the pictures tell most of the story. Plane - Table Top Flights. Base and climb counter ring - Rival Sky Games. Colors - Foundry Bavarian Cornflower Blue (73B), Vallejo flat brown for propeller, pilot, outer struts, and wing and tail skids, Vallejo natural steel for machineguns and pistons, Vallejo white for rudder, and Vallejo black for tires. Decals - Aviation Wing crosses, Miscellaneous Miniatures skull and crossbones. Varnish - Vallejo gloss acrylic and matt acrylic. Gaming mat - GripMats. And I have the base upside down!

Der Blaue Teufel

I have been wanting to create a hypothetical paint scheme for a Fokker Dr.1 for a spell. I decided to order a few aircraft from Table Top Flights, including a Fokker. Mike at TTF I believe has gone to a new printing device, because the quality, which was very good on my Ponnier and Ansaldo A.1s, has become even better. The material is a bit different - the previous planes felt like plastic in a way, and were easy to work with, but also left a few noticeable striations on the surfaces. The new material is more resin in feel, and perhaps then a tad more on the fragile side, but the prints are amazing. Extremely clean, with really very little prep work. The propellers do come on their own "sprue" but are easy to remove. There were just a couple of little nubs to clean off the plane, but beyond that, these are perfect prints! Unlike Shapeways that had a gritty texture, the TTF planes are smooth as a baby's bum.

So, back to the scheme - I have three pots of Foundry paints that I was going to use on some Franco-Prussian Bavarians - I am, after all, fond of my Bavarian ancestry - and so I am going to use one of them as the basis for a very basic all blue Fokker (code 73B Bavarian Cornflower Blue). And having seen a beautiful radio controlled blue and white Fokker (von Raben from Jasta 15) this past weekend at the Dawn Patrol Rendezvous, I decided it was time to start working on this project.

First up a picture of the plane in its basic form. I've clipped the propeller from the "sprue."

Then I applied two coats of the blue. It looks a tad darker in the picture than in person. The rudder will be painted white, and the external struts a brown color to simulate wood. Most likely I will go with balkenkreuz for the national insignia, and I have some Miscellaneous Miniatures Russian white skull and crossbones of various sizes I can add to the fuselage, and perhaps one on the top wing.

I think Der Blaue Teufel will shape up nicely!

Rehabbing Rickenbacker, or Not

Not having the luck I have had with other repaints of Ares planes. The areas where I painted over numbers and roundels is not coming out smooth, as if the decals are causing some less than grand paint adherence and flow (I had that issue, to a lesser extent, with the N.16 repaint I did for the Escadrille Americaine - the end result wasn't . So I have decided to forego the rest of the Rick repaint. I was also having some issues with a couple of the colors I selected anyway, but I believe I now have that sorted. Instead, in order to give Luke a wingman from the 27th Aero, I am ordering a SPAD XIII from Table Top Flights s paint seems to go on those planes rather well. So goodbye Rickenbacker! 

Rehabbing Rickenbacker

Yuck, yuck, yuck!

We hates it, we do! Nasty little hobbit...er, hideous Wings of Glory SPAD XIII of Eddie Rickenbacker. It has one of the worst, if not THE worst, color scheme of all the Ares/Nexus planes for Wings of Glory. And in their infinite wisdom when Ares had a chance to correct the horror that is Rickenbacker when they re-released the plane, they chose to keep the same incorrect colorations in place. Pink? Really, pink? Okay, maybe more like mauve. Lime Green? Seriously? It is to this day one of the most common planes you will find on eBay and some retail sites, and usually for a good price. Why? To be honest, it's a crappy looking plane! Not only that, but the SPAD XIII has been woefully under rated within the construct of the rules (more on that in a later post) and so while it was a very common plane in 1918 gamers avoid using it.

A little more like it!

So, what do we do with the pair of Rickenbacker SPADs that I own? REPAINT! I recently ordered some Tamiya paints that are purported to be pretty darn close to the colors of the French five color camouflage, and already owning a more properly done Frank Luke SPAD, I decided it was time to give Luke a wingman, in this case Joseph Wehner's #8. 

This is the first of a few posts showing my progress as I move forward with this rehab of a piss poor color scheme. I've never tried painting a five color camo scheme, but with proper colors (or close to them) at hand, and 27th Aero Squadron decals from Miscellaneous Miniatures, the first step, painting the undersides of the SPAD, has been completed. Tamiya color XF-57, Buff. As you can see it is a much more subtle shade, the paint flowing nicely onto the model. The shade is actually about the same as the wheel carriage, which Nexus/Ares should have used for the undersides of the SPAD as a whole.

I have never used Tamiya paints before, but am quite happy with the ease the paint moves from the brush and the smoothness of the paint once applied. I am actually happy that the single coat did not cover the American roundels as now they will serve as a guide as to where to place the decals.

Der Drachen

While Ares, after a promise of a few years, finally did re-release their balloons, I have shied away from purchasing one. But, with planning a Frank Luke scenario, I decided I wanted to obtain a balloon. Instead of going with the Ares offerings, I had come across a 1/144 scale Parseval-Sigsfeld Drachen, manufactured by Pig Models. While more expensive than Ares, it is also far more realistic in appearance than the Wings of Glory models. Finding a decent price online, I received the balloon today and set about with assembly. Now, I have not put together a proper model in years, and while the amount of pieces and parts are relatively small, I did not consider that the various guidelines and ropes are photo-etched parts, something I have no experience with.

 

I have taken care of the first few basic steps, using just five of the plastic parts thus far (and only four left). The pieces fit together nicely, with some raised portions within the balloon itself to ensure proper alignment of the two halves. Next steps include adding the various etched lines, so we'll see how that turns out in a future post.

By the way, the Parseval-Sigsfeld has several nicknames. One is Drachen, or dragon. Another is sausage. Yet another, a bit on the unsavory side, is Nulle, which I will leave to your imagination.... 

Two Short AARs

Yesterday a few of us gathered at a local comic book shop to play a couple of Wings games. The owners were nice enough to allow us to the use the "Dungeon Room" free of charge (and had they known the nefarious nature of our group his decision to place us there was apropos). I forgot to take many pictures, so only a few here to illustrate the action.

The Albatros's fiddled with Dan, while I was sneakily diving down for recon.

Later in the game The G Dog closed in...luckily he also jammed!

Passing ships in the night...

I keep tinkering with all sorts of house rules and so in both games we used my diving modifications (see previous post). The first game featured two Belgian aircraft against a pair of Albatros D.IIIs. The Belgians had to recon a predetermined position with a B.E.2c, and for some reason that task fell to me, being escorted by camelbeagle (Dan)  in a Sopwith Pup. I gave the Pup pilot an Ace skill while one of the Albatros players (Bill - Old Guy) had Frommherz with two skills, and The G Dog (Ray) received one Ace skill. I was expecting another player to attend and give him a Nieuport 23 to balance things out, but he could not make it so the Belgians, outgunned and out skilled as they were, had quite the challenge.

Starting at three pegs, the maximum altitude for the B.E.2c, and seeing the Germans starting at four pegs, I immediately went into a dive to create more vertical space between myself and the Boche. I was now at two pegs and four climb counters (see the House Rules file to the right). The next turn I plotted yet another dive to drop down to two pegs, no climb counters. It took the Germans a couple of turns to realize that to get to me they had to come down to play. Frommherz stayed high to tangle with the Pup, while The G Dog came after me. By this time I was closing in on the target. Successfully taking a series of pictures of the target (a brothel I believe), and seeing G Dog starting to close, it was high time to bugger out. I fooled him into thinking I was going to continue on a right turn, but instead I reversed and made a series of left turns and headed back to friendly lines. I continued to dive until dropping to one peg. The pesky Albatros finally closed in, and layered a total of four damage points on the B.E.2c, with my gunner inflicting a bit of damage in return. But it was too late for the Hun, I was off the board!

Dan had a bit of a tougher time of it, dueling it out with Bill and taking some decent damage along the way, but he was also able to get off the board without losing his Pup. 

Nice looking Nieuport...be a shame if something happened to it...

Leaving The G Dog behind to go join the other fight

Yep, something is happening to that Nieuport...

And something indeed did happen!

The second game was a variation of my Hat in the Ring's First scenario - a pair of Nieuport 28s facing off against a rookie in a Pfalz D.IIIa and me taking an Albatros D.Va, the planes all starting at one peg. The G Dog maneuvered away from me, which was fine because I turned towards Bill as Dan and he were exchanging moves and damage. Dan hit Bill with smoke, and then I hit him with a fire result, and Bill kept taking a beating from the fire damage cards. Dan used some modified cards for the Pfalz, reflecting its ability to spin to the left (as evidenced by the remembrances of German kanone Max Holtzem), which helped him against the more nimble Nieuport. With Bill shot down, Ray choose to maneuver off the board. I took a few damage cards, but they were ll zeros.

It has been awhile since I have had a couple of really good games like that, and again the rules changes seem to work well.