Well, since this intended side-project seems to have taken flight ( :oops: ) and actually has a gaming purpose, I suppose I'd better catalogue my musings in 1/200 aircraft.
This all started last year with my desire to join in with my mate's Wings of Glory stuff, but lack of desire to pay the prices for the (somewhat toy-like, prepainted) miniatures. Instead, I reckoned I could scour the catalogues for some obscure 1/200 stuff not made by Ares to field alongside my mate's "official" fleet, fudging the stats as I went along.
The first bargains were the obvious Zvezda Blenhiem and Ju-88 for about £4 each, and a pack of Trumpeter TBD-1 Devastators for about £6 for five.
The Blenhiem and 88 went together quite quickly, very basic models with little detail, and an equally workmanlike painjob, before work ground to a halt prior to me sourcing proper flight stands for them. The TBDs were equally quickly assembled, with ideas forming in my head for how to control a flight of five, again prior to the inevitable attack of the Ooh Shinies...
Fast forward a few months, and a chance Pendraken ad on FB for new Litko flight stands in stock, and it was chocks away once more!
Blenheim and 88 now looking much more usable!
The Blenheim was roughly mocked up into a NF variant, with a very crude representation of the gunpack mounted far too far forward...
While my mate has since acquired an official Ju-88, which while frustrating, does at least mean I don't have to fudge my own stats for it.
The discovery that Trumpeter actually do some Wildcats, which I'd never seen before, inspired me to get on with the TBDs. The potential for different colour schemes on the Wildcats got me thinking on the TBDs, and rather than do all 5 in one, Midway-era scheme, I could do a couple in the earlier scheme for Wake. Not only would this probably be easier to play, using smaller groups of aircraft, but it would also keep my interest in the painting, rather than just having 5 clones. After all, part of the joy of WoG is collecting all the obscure variants of the aircraft!
So the first 3 TBDs for Midway have begun...
I'd rather have had a flight of two for Midway, two for Wake, and one oddball, but the curse of the TBD is no other bugger used it! There's not even the usual footnote of most pre-war American monoplanes of "7 were ordered by Belgium/ the Dutch East Indies/ The Vatican" or similar that would let me do something really funky :
:
I've decided to concentrate on Midway for the time being, to keep my monkey brain hopefully on some sort of target. As such, I've pulled the trigger on some more Trumpeter boxes (5 kits per box give great value for money and potential for different liveries) which should let me do the following-
•5 SBD Dauntlesses
(2 for Midway, 2 for Wake and one as a US Army A-24 Banshee for the Solomon Islands campaign)
•5 F-4 Wildcats
(2 for Midway, one for Wake and 2 as FAA Martlets in the North Sea, which will be my next theatre)
•5 Vought Kingfishers
(One for Midway, one for Wake, one RAAF version for the Solomons, and one FAA example for the North Sea)
However (there's always a "however"...) as I have no willpower, I have got distracted into "targets".
First up a Ju-52.
Easy enough choice, and at £2.99 I should really have got more, however, I did a bad thing...
I'd pondered getting ships as targets before, but shied away. This time I couldn't resist (frustratingly the Japanese Auxiliary vessels have since disappeared) and I picked these up. Tiny ships are another thing that's long fascinated me, but I can't quite bring myself to get into. These are considerably smaller scale than the aircraft, but this should work in my favour, as it'll look more convincing when seen from above (this is how scale works, not the other way around as one comonly sees with smaller scale aircraft than ground elements...)
Annoyingly, just has my froth for the hobby has returned, as has the warm weather, so that'll probably curtail productivity more than I'd like for the next wee while...
02 May 2014, 06:30:21 PM