Blood Red Skies - The WW2 plane I love the best

Isn't the Spitfire. It's the Lavochkin La5FN

I had better explain. Back in 1997 I got my hands on Airwarrior III. This was one of the first massively multiplayer on line games and was about WW2 dogfights and stuff. It was at the time the cutting edge of online gaming, in fact it was one of the first wave of games you could play online against other players over the internet. I stress you could play it, but given the nature of the dial up connections and the fact the server was on the other side of the world it did take some effort and cause quite a bit of frustration - particularly when the wife decided she needed to call a friend and picked the phone up mid dogfight, resulting in an instant disconnection. Needless to say the graphics were rather basic, but at the end of the day, if you shot an enemy down that was a REAL person you just beat, not a selection of computer code that always reacted the same way. This was really exciting stuff, and the skies were literally full of real people to fly with and against. It was a revelation.

The main player base was in the US, as far as I could judge. This meant the skies were full of P38 and P51 players, and the occasional "Death Star" B17 that would have spent half an hour dragging itself up so high that when fighters got up to it they were hanging by their prop and nearly stalling, and therefore an easy kill for any gunners. I didn't bother with that, because I had fallen in love with a little lady from the East, my beautiful La5FN, and she lived down low in the dirt and gutters. To be honest I knew very little at the time about it, but after trying it, I knew I liked it. Lightweight and agile, the La5FN was a joy to fly in Airwarrior because the sky was full of impatient Americans who firmly believed that the P51 was the best fighter in the world. The impatience was the key. Rather than fly their Mustangs up high and use the altitude to their advantage by Boom and Zoom, they were happy to come down low and turn fight with the cheap and nasty Commies in their La5s , with predictable results. I don't know how accurate the flight characteristics in Airwarrior III were, but in a turning fight against Mustangs the La's won every time.

After a while I moved on to playing the amazing IL2 Sturmovik series, and stuck to my La5FN. Il2 was a beautiful game, with for the time superb graphics, and a joy to play. The first time I took it up into the beautifully rendered skies I was almost breathless with the sheer prettiness of the game and my beautiful La5FN. Ok I liked my Spitfire, but I loved my La5.

Historically the La5s first saw action over Stalingrad, and the definitive FN version with it's cut down rear fuselage came slightly later. With the new generation of Yaks the Lavochkins wrested control of the skies over the Eastern Front from the Luftwaffe, and although it was never the same level of air superiority as the Western Allies achieved, it was enough to allow the Sturmoviks in to do their work, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So when I got into BRS I was rather keen to give them a go. At first I was disappointed with the raw stats, but once I understood both what they represent and how the plane works, I'm much more relaxed.  I bought six from Armaments in Miniature but got sidetracked and it took me a while to paint them, but after a recent "spurt" they finally made it to the table. Here they are, painted up as 32nd Guards from 1943-44. Decals from Miscminis

And here is a pair climbing into action somewhere over the Eastern Front - in this case Hartlepool Wargames Club, so possibly more the North Eastern Front :-)

Warlord are planning on releasing their own model later in the next month or so in metal. Initially this will be part of a mixed Squadron Pack based on the "Johnny Red" comic strip, but with a full Squadron release plus an associated Ace pack to follow later in the year.

In BRS the La5FN gives Soviet players a few interesting options. They're faster than most Me109s and although marginally less Agile in game terms to the superlative 109F they do turn better due to having the "Rapid Roll" Trait. In comparison to the Yaks they have slightly more firepower, at a cost in agility. Where they shine is the way their "Rapid Roll" and the synergy that gives with the Soviet's Low Altitude Performance doctrine, meaning they don't stay disadvantaged for long and can get back up into the fight. They do have the "Poor Quality" trait, which Andy Chambers thinks is reasonable due to some alleged production issues (as far as I am concerned nothing can be poor about my beautiful La5s but he wouldn't listen), and as a minor plus this does make them quite cheap too.

Like everything in BRS they have to be a little wary of the Fw190, but they're measurably cheaper in points which means you should always have either a pilot quality or numbers advantage over the FWs, but they give Soviet players a much needed high performance mid to late war fighter.

I did mention I liked them didn't I?