MIG Alley: F86 Sabre vs. MIG-15

As a child I spent a lot of hours playing flight sims. Mostly US Navy Fighters ’97 and European Air War, but also some others like F-22 Lightning 3 and Commanche 3. A few months back I picked up my joystick again - so to speak - and bought DCS on Steam.

While those old games had a bit of an arcade element to them, DCS distinctly does not. After quite a few hours of practice I can now - when realism is turned all the way down - just about land my F-16 without ending up a massive fireball. But only if the runway is long enough. Damn, does that plane have awful wheel brakes...

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to do some tabletop aerial combat. I already own both the World War 1 and 2 versions of Wings of War, but I thought having some jet fighters would be cool. The Korean War would be ideal, because the jets used during that conflict did not have complicated radars and guided missiles yet and aerial combat was still pretty much guns only.

I settled on 1/144 scale, because at that scale there is quite a bit of visible detail but the models are not so large that storage becomes an issue. At about €5 per kit they are also pretty cheap. I bought two F86 Sabres from Trumpeter and two MIG 15’s from Eduard.

The Trumpeter kits weren’t particularly high quality. The Sabres were meant to be built with the air brakes opened and it took quite a bit of sanding and filing to get them to roughly fit. The decals were also incredibly brittle, so I wasn’t able to give them the iconic livery with the yellow stripes. Furthermore, the roundels were made as two separate pieces to fit the opened air brakes. As I built the jets with closed brakes, aligning the two halves of the roundel and painting in missing/broken pieces was a massive pain.

The MIG’s went together a lot better. The only complaint there is that I could only find one single-seater kit, so the other plane is a two-seater trainer jet. I think the MIG’s ended up looking a lot better than the Sabres, because the silver paint I used on the latter covered very poorly and required a total of five(!) coats, which meant that the finish isn’t as smooth as it could have been.

I also made four flight stands using some old CD’s and four cheap magnetic pick-up tools, usually meant to pick up fallen screws and the like. The magnets provide for a very solid connection, easily strong enough to hold larger 1/72 aircraft. Anton’s Wargame Blog has a nice post on how to make your own.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt. I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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