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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Little Tanks & Tiny People

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