Warlord \ Zvezda Tupolev SB2 for Blood Red Skies Part2 - paint

For clarity I'm going to keep calling these "Zvezda" kits even though they are reboxed by Warlord. As I mentioned in the earlier post the kits went together well and with little problems. I decided NOT to use the conversion "plug" that they come with that allows you to mount the models on the Advantage bases for Blood Red Skies - I'm using Hawk Wargames "widgets" which are a bit smaller and work well for smaller bombers like the SB2, and I have a bag full left over from Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander.

I was now in a hurry to get them done and table ready. The Zvezda kits have clear canopies and front and rear glasshouses. I toyed withe the idea of leaving them clear and painting the frames etc - then common sense took over - all the other planes will have painted canopies so why bother with these? I stuck them down and undercoated everything in a white primer - so far so good. Once the primer was dry I sprayed the upper sides a suitably "Soviet" green. This was pretty much my first error. Looking at the various sources it became clear that many (most?) SB2s were left in bare aluminium until the war broke out, and camouflage was applied by the ground crews, in many cases by just painting wavy lines or "squiggles" in green leaving quite a bit of the aluminium showing. I think this would have looked quite "cool" but couldnt face it - the plan being to keep things simple*. I finished blocking areas with green and light blue gray undersides, then went to have a look at panel lines....... but there are none on the model. This is no real surprise. Panel lines are going to be invisible at this scale, however I have to admit I love painting the Warlord models partly because the exaggerated scale of the panel lines makes them "pop". The only lines on the Zvezda kit are the flaps and rudder, which I painted a darker green. I also painted the exhausts etc and added some prominent exhaust marks on the tops of the wings. I still have the undersides to complete but I was hoping to get them on table asap so left that for "later". I did add a "panel line" around the rear fuselage as the joint between the tail unit and fuselage was pretty obvious - I didnt want to have to start filling and sanding on such small planes, so a line happily hides that joint.

Decals were "interesting" too. I didn't use the ones in the kit but I replaced them with some from Mehusla I had lying around. I had intended to paint the rudders a contrasting colour but then thought - CBA for the moment.

Here's where I am now

I still need to attach the props - or rather the spinners - I'm going to cut the prop blades off as they are clearly going to snap in use anyway. I was thinking about using some acetate circles - depends on how I feel later. Once the undersides decals are on and some minor detailing done I think I may go back and paint some panel lines on the wings.

As you can no doubt tell I'm rushing this build and cutting corners where maybe I should not. Even so, I think they look OK. Next post I will try and sum up, and maybe compare them with "the competition" third party models that I have lying around.

*as an aside it looks like even the more "professional" 2 and 3 colour camo schemes were applied ad hoc by individual units - which has the advantage of making it difficult to go wrong.

Double Barrel Russian? Warlord \ Zvezda SB2 Bomber for Blood Red Skies

I've picked up the Warlord Games SB2 Bomber box for Blood Red Skies - available from Warlord games for £20 from the Warlord shop or in my case from my local games store Asgard Wargames  where I got it for £18 and got a free cup of tea. Nice*.,

Now to avoid confusion I have to say the models are the EXACT same models as made by the Russian firm Zvezda for their Art of Tactic game, but reboxed with some supporting bits to make them usable for Blood Red Skies. This can cause some confusion if you didn't know.

In the new Warlord box you get a flight of three, plus Advantage Bases, Base extensions, skill disks and a stat card.

The models themselves are designed to be push fit \ snap together but I would strongly recommend using glue. They're made with what I would call standard plastic and go together very well. I only had one issue with assembly and that was the tail unit - TOP TIP - DRY FIT THESE FIRST to make sure you have then the right way up as the instructions seemed fuzzy to me. Other than that it was easy. You get the option of undercarriage in the up or down position -  I suppose for strict historical accuracy down would be OK as a large percentage of SB2s were lost on the ground in the first wave of Blitzkrieg attacks on the Russian airfields but mine are up so I can play them in BRS :-). Other than that the propellers are to scale, meaning they're probably going to snap off in use - so mine are being made pre snapped. There is also a fragile looking antenna underneath that I'm leaving on but more in hope than expectation of survival.

Next up - painting

* to be honest I had to make it myself but the facilities were there

Muddy River Brown Water Blues Part err, well technically part 2 but there is no part 1.....

You may recall Dear Reader that there was much planning of a Stalingrad campaign for Chain of Command. We had penciled in a start date for April \ May but that slipped to June. Then our lead Russian Andy was advised by work that they needed him to work night shifts to deal with some production issues for a month or so - so Stalingrad has been postponed a little.

To fill the gap I was looking at some rules I picked up on Wargames Vault by the redoubtable Dave Manley - doyen of Naval Wargamers the world over. These were called "Dahlgred & Columbiad" (D&C) and were designed as small scale fast play American Civil War (ACW) naval rules. In addition to the rules I bought the accompanying "By Sea & By River" set which included a fairly comprehensive set of stats for both fleets of the ACW and also a small mini campaign designed to be played solo. As between me and my usual opponent Paul we have a fair selection of boats I thought "Why not?" I'm not a great believer in solo gaming so I decided to rope another person (Dave) into making the command decisions. It will pass the time for both of us.

I'll go into a bit of details on D&C later, but suffice to say the campaign revolves around a small flotilla of Union ships lead by an Ironclad feeling their way up an un-mapped tributary of the Mississippi looking for a Confederate Ironclad Ram rumor has it is being built upstream. Each campaign turn represents a couple of hours and five miles of river. the course of the river and any opposition are randomly generated by the campaign system itself, so no two games will be the same. To cut a long story short I received orders from Dave then played out the first day of the campaign, which saw his flotilla push past some shore batteries and sink two small Confederate Gunboats. It return his lead ship, the Cairo Class River Ironclad Carondelet suffered some light damage. I didnt take any pics as I never really intended to do anything with it. Dave tied up along the bank over night then ordered his ships upriver at dawn.....

Anyway this afternoon I had a cancellation at work. As the weather was beautiful I thought it a shame to waste it cooped up in the office sorting out paperwork so retired to the rear yard and run the next encounter. It turns out that the river in question looks remarkably like the table in my sun drenched back yard - who would have thought it?

The lead ship of the Union flotilla is the Carondelet. The flotilla is under orders not to waste time or risking damage by engaging in a long drawn out fight with any Confederate batteries but to push past them and locate the Ram

Batteries rather like this one "Battery Davison" which they encountered just before noon

Carondelet made all steam ahead and pushed on, followed by the "tinclad" Fort Hindman. The Fort Hindman had shown itself to be rather better at gunnery than the flagship the day before.

 The bottle tops are being used to determine initiative btw - a gold one is the Confederates, a black one Union. You are supposed to use cards but this was all pretty much spare of the moment and I could not be ar$ed to go looking for playing cards when randomly drawing from a stack of beer bottle tops was a viable alternative.

Carondelet opened up the battle - and as per the day before missed. The rules use a system of opposed & modified dice to represent gunnery. In the pics red is the firer. If the modified result is equal the target is harassed and suffers a shooting minus for that turn, if the firer is higher light damage is caused, twice as much heavy etc. As you can see, Carondelet cant hit a bulls arse with a banjo.

But Fort Hindman it seems can, causing some light damage to the battery.

Carondelet keeps up their abysmal shooting - in fact this is such a bad result it triggered a roll on the special effects table, resulting in a small self inflicted fire. Luckily it caused only local inconvenience.

Return fire from Battery Davison was inconclusive, the combination of damage to the battery and long range prevented them from getting any solid hits, and the Yankees steamed past at best speed.

There was a bit of an intake in breath as the battery switched fire to the vulnerable supply ships at the rear of the Union formation, but again the combination of range and not great shooting meant they escaped with only near misses.

The last transport moves out of range.

A victory of sorts to the Union as they have moved closer to their ultimate goal without taking further damage. They have however left another battery mostly intact in their wake that will continue to threaten any ships that pass.

Final shot of the cast and crew. Not sure when the USN went "dry" but in deference I had a non alcoholic beer. That was really the only blot on an otherwise excellent afternoon :-)

Captain Lakey and his flotilla are now heading further upstream. More action later....

View from the trenches to the Blood Red Skies above

I was reading a blog yesterday about some up and coming releases for Flames of War. Have a look here for yourself Miniature Ordnance Review  .

FoW has been going through a difficult period over the last couple of years and V4 was "not well received" by the player base. The reason was suggested as being the drive to shift the weight of product to plastic models over the more traditional resin\metal models that Battlefront had experience in, to all plastic, which they were quite slow to commit to. V4 was released with limited model range - the restriction being what they could provide in plastic. Players were used to a plethora of cool vehicle options now found their army lists restricted to three or 4 plastic product codes \ SKUs, and were "unimpressed". There is a similar issue with Team Yankee - the Cold War variant of FoW, where army lists were artificially restricted to only vehicles that BF produced. That also has restricted take up, which is a shame.

I was always in two minds about FoW - I'm a history snob and some of the tactics FoW encouraged were suspect to my mind. However right from the outset I was 100% convinced they were a very well written set of rules, and the things that made me uncomfortable with them, on table artillery, telescoped weapon ranges etc, are all things deliberately built in to the game at designer level rather than an unintended consequence of poor game design. I may not like it, but it works, and it undeniably boosted the profile and take up of WW2 miniature gaming dramatically. It also plays well.

So what has that got to do with Blood Red Skies and all that? The thing that struck a chord was the mention of plastic models and the long lead times they involve. In the case of Battlefront that seems to be about a year. Let that sink in for a while. Battlefront were not the first plastic producer, but now they have "seen the light" and they have amassed a lot of experience. Given all that experience they still take a year to produce a plastic model. When we look at Warlord, who make Blood Red Skies, they also have experience in plastic production, although they did make a very astute move in teaming up with Italeri to make the Bolt Action plastic models, and they have also done something similar to rebox the Zvezda Art of Tactic 1:200 models to make then usable for Blood Red Skies see Warlord Games  here. But even so, can they realistically shave that year down much? You could argue they are producing one piece models rather than kits, but even so I think a year is not a bad guesstimate.

It is also clear that BRS isnt the favoured child in the Warlord games stable. Clearly that position goes to Bolt Action, Black Powder, Hail Caesar etc that rightly claim high priority due to popularity and sales, and again I 100% understand that - in this scenario BRS is the little ginger kid who is always picked last when choosing football teams in the school playground. Basically BRS isn't top of Warlords priority list, and I can't blame them. They couldn't have predicted at launch, and we still don't really know how well sales have gone. I suspect the answer is well enough because they immediately commissioned Wave 2 once the main game hit the shelves, and they have been reasonably quick in producing supporting material - custom dice, dice trays etc. They also have a good track record supporting games once they have launched them - so going back to the playground analogy, our little ginger kid may not be first in the list, but he is certain that he will get to play.

The problem is the gap. Remember FoW and their year lead time? If that yardstick is correct we will be lucky to see Wave 2 this year. I get an inkling that Wave 3 has already been green lit and will probably be US fighters, but that will be 12 months down the line. I'm not sure where that leaves BRS. Without a regular release the game may stutter in popularity as people get fed up with just 5 planes to play with, in a similar way to FoW V4 on release. I suspect the answer will be user generated content, and I would hope warlord will support that to allow the game to grow while they flesh out the range. Lets hope so, because it is a damned good game.