A question of scale

You may remember a couple of days ago, I talked about receiving Over The Channel, a campaign for fighting the Battle of Britain for the Check Your 6! rules, and I was undecided about what scale of aircraft I was going to use…

…well, after reading the book, it ended up being an easy decision.

The book contains a total of 18 scenarios. If you want to fight all of them, you need the following aircraft:

Royal Air Force:

• 9 x Spitfire I
• 9 x Hurricane I
• 6 x Fairey Battle
• 3 x Bolton-Paul Defiant
• 4 x Blenheim IF
• 6 x Blenheim IV
• 3 x Spitfire II

Luftwaffe:

• 10 x Ju 88
• 13 x Do17
• 12 x Ju 87
• 8 x He 111
• 8 x Me Bf 110C
• 8 x Me 109E
• 12 x BR.20M
• 8 x Cr. 42

…thats a grand total of 119 aircraft, including 65 bombers.

Much as I like 1/300th scale aircraft, considering that fighters cost £1 each, and bombers can be anything from £2-£3 each, from a purely economic point of view, there is only one decision to make – 1/600th scale.

Even then, you are still looking at a bill in excess of £50 for all the aircraft. Another project to complete in stages, I think…

New rules arrived

The postman was kind to me this morning and delivered 2 new sets of rules for my continued gaming delight…

The first is the 2nd Edition of Polemos Napoleonic. As you already know if you read this blog or listen to the podcast, I’m a big fan of these rules, and have been looking forward to the 2nd Edition ever since it was announced.

What are the differences over 1st Edition? Not a tremedous amount, although they have been tidied up and many clarifications made – but I’ll post my views on them in a future show.

The second set of rules I received were the Check Your 6! set of World War II aerial combat rules, along with the Over The Channel supplement from Scott Fisher of Skirmish Campaigns fame.

I’ve been eyeing these rules for some time now, and have been undecided as to whether to get them or not.

What finally made the decision for me was seeing the Pearl Harbour game at the Derby World Wargames Championships at the start of October. The game was using Tumbling Dice 1/600th scale aircraft and looked really good.

Also, since the game uses similar mechanisms to the World War I game Blue Max (which I play online from time to time) I was pretty much sold.

But of course, being a Brit, the Flying Tigers scenarios from the original rulebook hold only passing interest for me, so I just had to purchase the Battle of Britain scenario book Over The Channel to go with the original rules.

I’m really looking to playing this game – it just means that I now have to buy some more aircraft and a blue hex mat.

On the aricraft front, I’m sort of torn between 1/300th and 1/600th scale. I like the 1/600th Tumbling dice range of aircraft, but I also like the 1/300th planes because I prefer the size – it may simply come down to a matter of economics – it depends how many aircraft I will need to buy in order to play all the scenarios in the BoB book.

The hex mat could end up being more of an issue – I’ve looked around the web, and everyone seems out of stock at the moment…not good.

What’s this? Decent pre-painted models?

Following my recent purchase of the 2nd Edition of AirWar: C21, I have been  looking for some suitable models to game with.

Whilst I’m a big fan of the 1/600th scale aircraft from Tumbling Dice – I own quite a few US Jets and MiGs for Vietnam – (and the new modern jets are very nice) I wanted something with a little more visual impact. I had a look at the 1/300th scale jets from Scotia-Grendel at Hammerhead, and they were still not quite what I was looking for.

The aircraft used in the AirWar rules pictures look very nice, and whilst I was scanning through eBay I came across something similar – though maybe not quite the same – and these are 1/144th modern jets from the JWings range.

These are a set of pre-painted plastic models, which require some assembly (typically the tail-planes, hard-points and weaponry/extra fuel tanks need attaching) but actually look pretty nice.

The above example is an F14-Tomcat.

Whilst the paint job is nothing exceptional, it certainly beats the other pre-paints that I’ve seen from Revell before (their Star Wars and 1/100th Jets ranges) and it’s certainly good enough to game with.

The other thing that’s difficult to beat is the price. These come in at about £4.50 ($9.00) a plane – and that includes shipping from Hong Kong! QQmodels is also an excellent seller to do business with, and I’ve received all my purchases (yes, I’ve made several) with 3 or 4 days.

In comparison, I’ve bought some Academy, Revell and Minicraft 1/144th scale aircraft kits in the last few days, just to fill some gaps in the range, and I’ve paid £1.00 – £3.00 plus postage for these – and I’ve still got to assemble and paint them!

Two slight down points though.

Firstly, the scale. Though the entire range is advertised as 1/144th, it’s not entirely true across the range. Whilst the larger fighters (like the Tomcat above) are probably 1/144th, the rest of the range are more ‘box scale’ – which means that they are designed to fit the packaging, rather than exactly to scale. This means that the Hornet is the same size as the Tomcat, despite being a smaller aircraft in real life. This is especially apparent if you put the JWings aircraft next to a 1/144th model kit. My JWings Hornet is about 2cm longer than an Academy 1/144th Mig-29 Fulcrum, which can’t be right.

Whilst this is slightly troubling, and possibly even a show-stopper for the purist, when playing on the table I can’t see it being a huge problem.

Secondly, the range. They have just released their 3rd range of 12 aircraft for JWings, which focuses on the Vietnam Air War. The previous 2 ranges focus on more modern jets, but tend to be US focused, with F-14s, F-15s, F-18s and F-4s dominating the range. Other aircraft include the MiG-27, MiG-37 and Dassault Rafaele. There are 2-3 variants of all these aircraft, as they have different paint jobs (being pre-painted).

The lack of Russian kits especially is a slight problem. As I mentioned, I’m getting around this by buying some 1/144th plastic kits, but this is not a perfect solution.

 However, as something that is cheap, quick and easy to get on the table, JWings certainly hits the spot.