Model Aircraft Scales For Wargaming

 From left to right - Scotia-Grendel, Warlord Games, Revell, Airfix.

Warlord Games introduction of their innovative Blood Red Sky has kickstarted WWII fighter games; a genre that has been in the doldrums for some years.

However, aeroplane miniatures are based on traditional model scales rather than wargame miniature sizes so I have pulled some planes out of my collection to demonstrate what's available. These are all ME bf 109 models.

1/72
The most popular aircraft scale with a vast selection of aircraft on offer. There is ferocious competition between manufacturers keeping prices down. You can expect to pay about £7.50 per fighter.
Pros: Large, detailed, look great, good value, many prepainted.
Antis: Large, take up space, expensive per model.
Equivalent: Usually reckoned to be 20mm to 25mm wargame scale, but they take up much the same table space as a 28mm vehicle model - planes are big.

1/144
This scale has languished in recent years but it has taken an upswing in recent years as Far Eastern manufacturers and diecast model makers have adopted the scale. You can expect to pay about £5 per fighter.
Pros: Large enough for reasonable detail, small enough to have a small footfall on the table, many prepainted, good value.
Antis: Restricted range in west, expensive per model.
Equivalent: Usually reckoned to be 8-10 mm but they take up as much room as a 15mm vehicle model.

1/200
This was the scale chosen by Wings of War/Glory and has been adopted by Warlord Games. Very few other models available. Expect to pay about £15 for a prepainted WoG model or £20 per six planes unpainted from Warlord Games
Pros: As 1/144 but prepainted are expensive, unpainted good value.
Antis: Very restricted choice of manufacturers and models.
Equivalent: Similar to 1/144

1/300
These are the classic metal wargame models. Expect to pay about £1.50 per plane.
Pros: Small so don't take up much room, cheap to buy, metal so tough.
Antis:Limited range of planes and manufacturers, small so undetailed, metal so heavy.
Equivalent: 6mm

Other scales

1/48: Are you mad? The classic model makers scale. These are big so good for play across a tennis court floor for demo games. Great range, all levels of detail and price.

1/100: The classic 15mm, these are rather rare.

1/285: Can be used more or less interchangeably with 1:300.

Review: Warlord's Blood Red Skies

New boxed game

Some time ago I pitched an idea for a new airgame to Warlord. My theme was that it was time for a new approach to airgames. Warlord politely replied that they agreed.....and, in fact, they had already given a contract to some bloke called Andy Chambers to do just that!

From this you can draw two conclusions: (i) freelancers such as myself have to be always on the make and (ii) timing is everything.

I am a great fan of Andy's work so I was pleased to buy an advanced copy at Salute: here are my initial thoughts.

Let's start with what you get in the box for £40.

Bf 109E

There are twelve soft plastiky-resin 1:200 Battle of Britain models in the box. Detailing is good for soft plastic. The tails on the 109s are slightly bent. I tried the old trick of dipping them in a really hot cup of tea (makes for interesting weathering) and the plastic softened and could be reposed. The material did seem to have a memory and gradually change back overnight to some degree but this is really pretty trivial.

The models are supplied unpainted. I washed them thoroughly as I would any soft plastic or resin model, and the acrylic paint went on without any problem at all.

Close up of detailing

The upper camoflague rather hides the detailing but this shot of a spitfire miniature underside in light grey with black wash shows how good it is.

Achtung Spitfeur

The above photo shows the six Spitfire 1/II models included.

The stands slot in and out of the models to allow the card markers at the base of the stands to be interchangable, X-Wing style. The stands have three position click-hinges - that have nothing to do with banking or climb/dive. More about this later.

Markings on the stands show the aircraft 'front', and four quarters. The colour and number indicate pilot skill, varying from 2-5.

Rulebooks

There are three rule booklets, standard, expanded and scenarios.

The rules are written in a minimalist style so bear careful reading. A single sentence can have a vast impact on play.

Expanded rules are mostly about the various doctrine, theatre and plane ability cards with are played to give special impacts.

'Cheat sheets'

Included are two double-sided summary sheets with all relevant information commonly needed during pay.

Terrain

Flat terrain works well with airgames and the half-doz thick card double sided terrain markers with clouds on one side and balloons on the other are welcome.

Light bombers

Three double sided thick cards represent Do17s and Blenheims.

Markers

And the box is stuffed with markers, player aids, cards and D6 dice inscribed as victory bars - a nice touch.

Luftwaffe over Kent

I played a basic game using just the standard rules with no cards.

Have a look at the planes. The left four are horizontal - No Advantage.

The two right planes are tilted nose up - Advantaged.

The whole game hings on Advantage.

You can only shoot at a plane that has  a lower Advantage level than the shooter. And only a nose down, Disadvantaged plane, can be shot down. So the whole game hinges on forcing a plane into a disadvantaged nose down position and then shooting at it and getting a hit.

You can push a plane down an Advantage level by (i) scoring a hit on it - this doesn't damage the target - or (ii) by making an enemy plane within 9 inches take an agility test. Getting on a planes tail forces it right down.

The nose-up-level-down looks a bit odd but you get used to it. Advantage actually represents height, position and energy abstracted into a three position index.

Der Englander pig-dogs

Aces are best used to close within nine inches of a lower pilot-skill opponent - who can be at any o'clock - and automatically forcing it down a level - so follow up planes can kill it.

I made a bad error by using clouds as cover, forgetting that they would force me into Normal. I then discovered that the Spitfire had a speed advantage over the 109 - they move the same number of inches. This meant that my opponent always went first, so he could keep me down by shooting at me and forcing agility tests.

This game is all about forcing your opponent's aircraft into Disadvantage.

Splash!

It was a bad day for the Luftwaffe. they lost three to the jubilant Spitfire pilots.

The game took about two hours to play.

Conclusions

This game works.
It has very good physical components with everything you need to play 'in the box'.
It looks simple but it is actually highly intricate and requires a great deal of skill.
It is imaginative, novel and beautifully crafted.
It is highly abstracted, noticeably in its handling of height/position/energy.
It felt chess-like in that subtle positioning of your aircraft in a team on an opponent is the key to victory rather than heroics or cut and slash.


So should you buy it?
Well, that depends on whether you are a committed airgamer. Air-tekkies probably won't like the abstraction but people looking for a fun game based on the Battle of Britain should seriously take a look. They might prefer this to Wings of Glory.

One point: If you buy and don't like the game then the wargaming components - the models and the clouds etc. - are easily worth £40 so you haven't lost anything if you throw the game away. WoG fighters now cost about £15 each! There are plenty of air rulebooks out there, including some free on the web.

So: Recommended both for airgamers and casual players.

Air Support For My Bolt Action Japanese Forces

Three Japanese Army fighter aircraft. Imperial Japan had no independent air force and the Army and Navy treated each other as enemy powers. The IJN procured land-based planes that were completely different from IJA planes, right down to the minor fittings.

I use 1/72 models for Bolt Action air support because of their convenient size.

From right to left, we have:

Type 1 'Oscar'
The most common Army fighter, nearly 6,000 were built, it soldiered on to the end of the war despite increasing obsolescence: light, manoeuvrable, fragile and under-armed.

Type 2 'Tojo'
A heavier armed interceptor, the Tojo was faster and less manoeuvrable than the Oscar. Poor performance at high altitude impeded its use against B29s. Over a thousand built.

Type 3 'Tony'
The most 'European' of the main three IJA fighters, the Tony had an inline engine. Over 3,000 built.

Navy Bomber 'Frances'
A fast, long-ranged, land-based, multi-role bomber, the Frances was too sophisticated for Japanese industry to manufacture in bulk and the thousand or so built were notorious for unreliability. A good medium bomber, the Frances was an utter failure as a nigh-fighter.

The First Jets - Spider Crab and Flitzer

Models by Revell, painted and photographed by author.

The ramshackle mess that passed for government in Nazi Germany could not bring itself to admit that they would soon need air defences so fighter aircraft had a low priority and the Me 109, a 1934 design, soldiered on in increasingly hostile skies.

Meanwhile the German fighter designers amused themselves by churning out ever more exotic designs, each seemingly trying to outdo the other in bizarre innovation. Focke-Wulf had two promising jet fighter designs among the myriad paper studies of 1943, the type 5 & 6. The Type 6 was nicknamed 'Flitzer'.

The Flitzer adopted wing root air intakes and a short body reducing the distance from air intakes to  the jet exhaust. Early jets were extremely inefficient if fed by long tubes, which is why the 262 and Meteor had wing mounted engines. The tail plane was mounted on two booms clear of the jet exhaust. Increasing power allowed the use of one engine rather than two.

In July '44, not even the Nazis could ignore the daylight bomber raids and the order went out for the design to a new high performance jet fighter coupled with a cheap Volksjäger.

The Flitzer was one of FW's  bids for the high performance jet contract, using an auxiliary rocket motor to boost the plane to high altitudes quickly to intercept bomber streams. The concept was abandoned in September because the Flitzer required strategic materials in short supply and because it was considered too slow when compared to radical swept wing designs- more about them later.

The irony is that De Haviland in Britain was working on a similar design, the Spider Crab or Vampire as it was later known, in 1943. It was delayed until '45 when the allocated Rolls Royce engine was sent to Lockheed so they could experiment with jet fighters. The Vampire/Venom was a more robust design than the Flitzer and went on to serve in many airforces as a fighter, strike fighter, night fighter and naval fighter (as the Sea Venom).

Incidentally, the Vampire had a top speed of around 550mph, as against the Flitzer's estimated 600mph. But of course the Vampire flew whereas the Flitzer never got past the mock up stage.

The Vampire was armed with four 20mm cannon and had hard points for 1,000 lbs of stores. The Flizter would have had two 300mm cannon - plus two 20mm if it could have carried the extra weight.

The First Jets - Messerschmitt Myths

A fast moving Me 262 Sturmvogel overshoots a breaking Gloster Meteor.

This never happened, of course, except on the wargames table.

Messerschmitt Myth No 1: The ME262 was the world's first operational jet fighter.
Actually, no: 616 RAF Squadron was operational with Meteors a few weeks before the 262 started operational service with the Luftwaffe.

Messerschmitt Myth No 2: The Me262 was designed with novel high technology swept back wings to make it a fast subsonic fighter.
Actually , no: The 262's wings are slightly swept but no more so than many other aircraft of the period and the reason was to move the CG aft. This method of controlling CG dates back to some of the very earliest pre WWI  plane designs. The 262 was an aerodynamically clean well designed fighter that could get up to Mach 0.86 (circa760 mph at sea level) but it wasn't swept wing. The 1945 Meteor F4 was about 50mph slower but had better engines capable of faster break manoeuvres without flaming out.

A duel between a Meteor F3/4 or 262 would probably depend on position and pilot skill. The 262 pilot would have attempted a firing pass on a dive zoom, while the Meteor pilot would have tried to suck his opponent into a high speed scissors or similar.

The photo was taken by me using Oxford Diecast 1:72 models and Paint Shop Pro.

B17

Popped around to my friend Simon E for a most enjoyable game of Lion Rampant.

He has just finished a model of a B17 after 6 months work, including fixing some design flaws. Excellent for Bolt Action saturation bombing.

Another view. The pics is in high res so can be downloaded and expanded.

For people of a certain age.

SMER Piper Cub

A German patrol cautiously inspects an abandoned US Army liaison plane.

SMER are a company that buys up old, very old, moulds and rereleases them under their own brand name. The detailing is not exactly Tamiya quality, the sprues often need cleaning, and the scale can be a bit off but they are robust and oh so cheap.

Mine cost me about £7.

This 1:48 Piper Cub is perfect as a piece of terrain for a Bolt Action Game in the Med or Western Europe. It comes with nice decals for early or late war plus Normandy stripes. It would also do for interwar or post war in Africa, Asia or South America.

They were built from 37 to 47 and are still flying today.

Although I use 1/72 planes to represent bombing or strafing models one really needs 1:48 if the aircraft is intended to be on the ground as a terrain piece.

Perfect for a wargamers needs: Recommended.

75th Anniversary of Battle of Britain

Scramble: Spitfires take off over a crashed zerstroyer.

The celebrations of the great World War II victory of the Battle of Britain are underway.

The battle marked the limit of Hitler's western expansion placed him in the position of Napoleon: dominant in Western Europe but facing a hostile and implacable naval power that had the ability to strangle his economy.

The victory was won by British, Commonwealth and East European pilots, notably the fighting Poles and is the first campaign to be decided almost entirely by air power.

Like Napoleon, unable to conquer or intimidate Great Britain, Hitler turned east instead and invaded Russia. But he did it with a Luftwaffe that was weaker than twelve months earlier.

I have put up a few artworks that I have swiped off the web (I do not own the copyright) that I think sums up the heroism of The Few.

ME109 Ace shoots down a Spitfire over Kent

Hurricane blows the tail off a Dornier bomber over London

109 escorts a damaged comrade to safety

To win a VC

Dusk landing

Homeward bound over the white cliffs

Hurricanes close for the kill

Spitfires triumphant

Swirling dogfight

JU88s streak low level for home

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few," Winston Churchill.

"He must have been thinking of our bar tabs," Unknown RAF fighter pilot.

Flying Into History

Kent reverberated to the sound of the mighty Merlins this afternoon after an air display by the Battle of Britain Flight: two Lancasters escorted by an element of Spitfires. It is very unlikely that anyone will ever see Lancasters flying in formation ever again.

The Lancaster was arguably the best bomber of WWII, capable of carrying bigger bomb loads further than anything else.

The Lancaster fleet grew to around one thousand aircraft by the end of '44. The night battles with the Luftwaffe over Germany pioneered modern air warfare. Lancasters were equipped with radio navigation, ground following radar, fighter warning radar and electronic countermeasures. The fleet bombed on illuminated flares placed by pathfinder Lancs controlled by an airborne command plane. In the bomber stream were wild-weasel electronic warfare planes to interfere with the Ludtwaffe's night fighter control systems.

Losses were horrendous as the wings were full of petrol. Few crews survived a tour of duty in the night bomber fleets. One was my uncle who flew as navigator in an Australian -crewed Wellington. They even survived being raked by a night fighter's 'jazz music' cannon over Berlin although the navigator's chair was blown out of the plane - fortunately my uncle was passing the pilot a course correction at the time.

The men who crewed this historic aeroplane fought and died so my generation wouldn't have to live in fear of the concentration camp and the gas chamber.

Last look.

Corporal Jones: Inspired by Hannibal

And this is one that Corporal Jones made earlier.

And you thought my paint jobs were dodgy

Have a butcher's at this.

Hurricane's and Spitfires in Kent

Popped in to the Headcorn Airfield for the Combined Ops Military Show. As you might expect of a Kent airshow there were Hurricanes and Spitfires on display.

Above a non-flying example of a 1940 Battle of Britain Hurricane.

And here is one in the air, delighting the crowds.

It had a duel with an old enemy, an Me 108 playing the role of a 109.

And a lady in costume on a static model of a Spitfire.

Air Battle for France

I have always been attracted to aircraft wargaming but somehow it always disappoints. I try a new system for a while, get bored, and abandon it. I have tried crating my own with the same result. The last system I bought was Bag The Hun, which I soon gave up as it was boring and a bit of a mess. The rules couldn't make up their mind whether they were a squadron-formation game or an individual fighter on fighter game: a bit like trying to play Operation Goodwood while recording individual tank damage.

I think the problem is that air warfare just doesn't lend itself to a tabletop game and the scenarios all end up playing the same. The lack of terrain is undoubtedly part of the problem and the issue of reducing three dimensions to two when one of those dimensions, the vertical, has a force acting through it that makes it completely different from the other two. Perhaps this is why the only airgame I play consistently is WWI skirmish. WWI planes don't use the third dimension to the extent that later, stronger, more powerful machines could and did.

However I did like the models in a display game I came across. French fighters, above race to intercept the dastardly Boche, below.

New Osprey Titles

 Osprey have some interesting new publications that caught my eye, Vercors '44 about the French Resistance and Gladiator versus Falco, the last great biplane confrontation.

Kent Bf 109

Came across this lovely model (in 1:32?) of the 'Kent 109' at War & Peace.

The original is show below. It came down in 1940 during the Battle of Britain. What I assume is a full size model (or is it real?) is shown at the bottom.