15000 Views!

Hey all,

this blog has just breached the 15000 pageviews mark, so I wanted to thank everyone who´s shown interest and support for my little projects so far. To celebrate this little occasion, I´m throwing in a mix of things from the last few days.


I´ve been painting my selfmade Taliban up to presentation standard, here´s one of the figures I´ve been working on today. Still have to finish one more.

 On Friday, Special Forces here trying to save a downed helicopter crew and snatch a weapon dealer who was being transported in said helicopter and tried to escape -  while testing the FoF-Improvement Project.  They got swarmed by Taliban and suffered several seriously wounded due to leadership issues and bad die rolling.

On Saturday, we took off into the air at a local convention, my MiGs hunting two F4 over the skies of Vietnam. Unfortunately, after turns of maneuvering my opponent into a deadly downward spiral, almost ready to take the kill, the second F4 blasted my skilled pilot with a missile, effectively ending th game. I now hate rockets and claimed I would only play Korean Air War, where I can finish planes with guns, like a real fighter Ace!   >:-(

We also had Marines rescuing another team of human relation personell out of a combat zone. Running the scenario twice, we had one clear victory for the Americans and one clear victory for the Taliban.

It´s always the chicks getting into trouble. This time with an escort of Afghan Policemen.

And while I painted my Taliban, my friend (the same who did the Su-27) worked on this awesome Mig-29 digicamo. So he is now in charge of painting my planes... unfortunately he will not be visiting me again for the next two months. :(

So that´s a quick review of my long wargaming weekend!
Hope you enjoy, if you aren´t already a regular reader, subscribe to make sure you don´t miss anything. And spread the word so we reach the next 15000 even quicker!

Have a good time! 

Fighting Falcons

Good evening,

after a long way home I used the last light of day to paint up some more airplanes, hoping to finish something to match the Su-27ers my friend produced lately. I do have F-18s at the ready, but these are navy fighters and not suitable for every scenario. As I knew I still had some F-16s around, I decided to finish those to put something the other aviation branches could throw against the russian planes.

Remember these are 1/600

I spotted the camouflage scheme on the wikipedia page on the F-16 and immediately thought it would be a nice and distinct painting. Probably most suitable for desert environments, these can be used for anything Middle Eastern (probably proxy as Israeli F-16s as well) and more arid regions of east asia as well.

Everything you see on them is painted, no decals no nothing. The color patterns are not 100% accurate and probably slightly to accurate, but I didn´t have that much time today to experiment around until everything was right. Good enough for now :)

In addition to the airplanes, I was able to finish another Fireteam + 2 Support Groups of US Marines, but these are reserved for a later entry as I still have to take suitable photos of these guys.

I also noticed that my tin mountain has shrunk considerably since I last checked:

To-Do box for Rifles and Muskets... running low on supplies O_O

I still have more plastic insurgents, but I have grown to dislike the plastic figures as the colors behave differently than I´m used to and they´re just a pain to paint. As you can see, there are some more jets left, another two USMC Fireteams, some Insurgents and a few civies. That´s about all that´s left from my stack of stuff for this blog.

However, there´s the entire French Navy in 1/6000 waiting to be painted AND I have figures arriving from the casting service, hopefully within next month. I have to paint samples for the website, the french ships AND all of the above.

So, my nascent plans to order another set of jets to keep me busy has been immediately canceled, as I will have enough to paint for the next months, even with good weather and sunshine on the balcony forcing me to paint more often. :)
 

Su-27 Dogfight

After my friend had painted two awesome Su-27 in camo scheme, we decided to do a small testgame of Check Your Six Jet Age after we didn´t have the time to play a demo game in our club last saturday.

To demonstrate the game mechanisms, I put the two Su-27 on the board, equal height, equal speed but with a difference in Pilot Skill: I took the Skilled (+1) Pilot, having played two games of CY6:JA before and gave my friend the veteran pilot (+2) to show the impact of the different skill levels

The game started with a BVR missile fight, my friends veteran pilot achieved a lock on & fire result and fired off his first AA-10 immediately, while I was barely able to get a lock on. His missile streaked by, unable to hit my plane due to the difficulty to hit the front angle.

While closing in on each other, I went into a dive to make the lock-on harder with all the ground clutter below me, while me friend climbed up into the sky, trying to build up more energy before going into the dogfight.

Next turn, my locked on AA-10 had a malfunction while the veteran pilot failed to achieve a lock on at all. So we closed in on each other without scoring any missile hits.

After two more missiles that all failed their target, we where in gun range and went close up into the dogfight. Anticipating that my friend would try to push down on me, I started to climb and overshot him two or three altitude levels above him, which meant that he could not shoot on my due to the extreme angle.

My plane in the foreground

Following that maneuver, I turned into a Split-S while adjusting slightly to the left, while my friend executed a steep immelmann, coming up way above me with almost no speed left. I turned right to get into his rear, he turned right to avoid that and get his sights on me, and while I climbed he power-dived into the following head-on gun run:

Head to head on the same altitude level...  my plane on the right

Both pilots fired their main guns.
I needed a 9+ to hit (6+ base on the given range, roll modified by -1 pilot skill difference and -2 head to head or deflection shot), my friends veteran needed a 7+
He rolled a seven, I rolled poorly. With the long range heavy cannon bullets ripping through my plane, I suffered airframe damage.

Though not immediately destroyed, I was now unable to execute extreme turns or special maneuvers without risking the plane to break apart - with more than a 50-50 chance of immediate destruction, I tried to break away left and into a climb, but of course the veteran pilot was able to reverse his course by a special maneuver (power Split-s) and ended up in my rear.

Beep Beep Beep - Missile Warning!

Not much I could do, the game was basically over the moment he hit me with his cannon fire. Fortunately, the missile was a proper proximity hit, ripping the plane apart and ending the misery of hopelessly trying to escape a veteran pilot...

Boom!

And that was it. The simulator screen turned black and both russian pilots got out of the cockpit to drink some vodka together ;)

Hot Chicks and Airplanes

Hooray, finally a painting entry again!

I´ve got a visitor today and for the next few days, who´s been conscripted for wargaming a long time ago - my best friend and campaign-opponent. He´s staying for a few days, and not only did we finish the Khardala Road Ambush Test Scenario but we´re going to play some more games in the coming days! We´ve also been painting today on the sunny balcony, and this is what´s been produced:

F18 Hornet painted by my friend

A Hornet for Check Your Six Jet Age, blatantly photoshopped by me for a better impression!
All the while I´v been working on Marines, Insurgents, and finished this hot HumInt-Chick!

Human Intelligence Chick making contact with  the locals

Let´s hope the locals aren´t too envious about the cool appearance of that lady, otherwise the mission might backfire!

Closeup Portrait - ain´t she beautiful?

So far, so good. The roadside Ambush will get a proper evaluation in a later blogpost, it´s been great fun to see the new command system at work and it actually produced a decent result!
Just a few minor flaws and hypothetical issues that came up need to be fixed (so far).

MiGs!

"Bandits at 3 o´clock!"

Somehow I found myself impulsively buying Check your Six Jet Age and corresponding Aircraft last week. I´ve been tempted to try this ruleset for some time, but managed to resist the urge to give in. However, somehow I got caught in a weak moment... Anyway, I´m expanding into the aerial theatre of modern combat, at least into the part of the fight that is not beyond visual range engagements. I´m doing most of the building myself trying to keep the additional expenditure as low as possible - I´ve purchased several types of Aircraft of the  1/600 Oddzial Osmy range from Fighting 15s (excellent service, I can wholeheartly recommend buying there!) and the rulebook. I´ll try to make the hex-mat myself, as obtaining them from elsewhere seems to be pretty expensive and there aren´t a whole lot of european manufacturers around. I´m still tinkering with the flight stands, not sure how they´ll turn out.

However, I´ve painted the first few aircraft, while I´m still reading the rules.

As you can see, I´ve tried differenct color schemes for the MiGs, on the left more traditional, silvery-grey, and camo in the middle. The style on these is pretty impressionistic, can´t paint 1:600 aircraft with much detail. However, I´ve painted the stars on wings and tail by hand, just as I did with the numbers. No decals no nothing.

 

I have some more F18, F16 and F4 (to cover some earlier conflicts as well in case modern airwar is too deadly and no fun) and MiG21, MiG23, MiG29 and Su27 for Opfor. That is more than enough to play a wide variety of engagements in the air!

MiGs over Malongo might well be an interesting scenario to prepare the country for the ground intervention :)