New Aircraft

This blog has been sadly neglected for weeks now. This is mostly because I went on holiday for a week, came back and then had a few more days off. I've been playing games on and off, but they've all been boardgames and I didn't document anything. I was too busy having fun.

I also haven't played much since I came back from my break because I've been busy painting. Inspired by my scratchbuild efforts from a few weeks ago I ordered some more aircraft from Tumbling Dice. They recently expanded their range of French aircraft, so I decided that would be a useful expansion to my forces and ordered one of everything. Once I got back from holiday I made a start on them. I chose three packs to start with - some Morane Ns to go with my early war collection, and then a shift forward to 1918 with Salmson 2 bomber/reconnaissance aircraft and the wonderful Caudron R11 escort fighters. 

Here's everything finished and painted. The late-war French aircraft took the most effort as I had to work out how to do French five-colour camouflage. I actually employed Gemini AI to suggest which paint colours to use, getting it to take into account that the models are 1/600th. The selections it came up with work pretty well. 

So here's the Morane N contingent. They're tiny models - possibly the smallest Tumbling Dice do in their WW1 range. Also a simple build - you just attach the landing gear. The rest of the plane is cast as a single piece. 

I painted two with French markings and two with RFC markings. They weren't used in any great numbers; only 49 were built, in fact. And they were considered difficult to fly so were given to competent or experienced pilots and, it appears, employed individually. So you probably wouldn't need more than a couple for a game. 

Moving forward to 1918, here's the Salmson 2 bombers. They were nice simple planes to put together and look sturdy and reliable. 

The Caudron R11s come as a pack of three, because they are big aircraft. They are an interesting concept for WW1 - a heavy escort fighter. They are twin-engined, and had a crew of three - a pilot, front-gunner and rear-gunner. The gunners each had twin pivot machine-guns. Basically the aircraft was a gunship. I'm looking forward to trying one out - performance-wise it isn't quite on a par with enemy fighters, but it's not actually that bad. It looks like it will be a tricky opponent. 

It looks like the Germans flirted with the heavy fighter concept back in 1915 with the AEG CII. It's a similar design to the Caudron R11 and was one of the 1915 solutions to effectively mounting machine-guns on a plane - a twin-engine plane gives you the option of guns firing forward. I can see my Friederichschafen bombers masquerading as an AEG in a forthcoming game. 

Here's the Caudrons escorting a flight of Salmsons. 

I have plenty of packs still to work through. And I'm already considering my next purchases; the RFC could do with some French aircraft for starters, and I can see a few gaps elsewhere that need filling.