Blood Red Skies - Japanese Bombers roll in

I do have a plan for Blood Red Skies. I have to admit it's not a particularly brilliant plan, but it is a plan.......

Blood Red Skies is all about fighters, but sometimes you need to have a few bombers to act as targets. The scenarios in BRS and the coming supplement "Air Strike" are configured so that when bombers are called for they are "free" to the appropriate player (ie don't cost points). The actual numbers involved are based on the number of "engines", so usually three twin engine bombers, or six single engine etc etc.

With that in mind my cunning plan is to assemble suitable forces to allow me to field a fighter & bomber force for the nations I'm expecting to play and covering the early and late war period. My Soviets are pretty much complete, in that I will be using Yak 1 fighters and SB2  bombers for the early war, swapping to La5s and Pe2s for mid- late war.

My Germans are not quite as developed - I have Me109Es and Do17Zs for early war, and I plan to use FW190s and Ju88s for mid- late war.

Brits are a bit lost - I have Spitfire IIs for early war but as of yet no bombers - I'm sure Blenheims are in my future. Mid - late war I have Spitfire IXs but no bombers yet.

So that brings me to the Japanese. As I mentioned in my "Not a Zero" posts last week, I've just finished my Ki44 Shoki fighters. I also have some Zeros to paint. When choosing a bomber to go with them I needed something that would balance with the Blenheims and Do17 light bombers, so I chose the Ki 48 "Lilly".

The Lilly is pretty much cut from the same mould as the other pre war "fast bombers". They all were inspired by the Soviet SB2 and relied on speed to get them through the defending fighters - which to be fair at the time was not a bad bet as most of the fighters were still biplanes like the Bristol Bulldog and Fiat Cr32. Most of them stressed speed over protection, because who needed defensive guns and armour plate when the fighters were too slow to catch you? And anyway armour and guns weighed quite a bit which slowed you down and robbed you of your primary protection, speed.  Up against the current opposition the streamlined monoplane twin engine bomber was fast enough to leave the biplane fighters in the dust. The problem was that simply proved to be the impetus for the world's air forces to finally give up the defence of the biplane and move to the monoplane fighter. It was a new world, and the fast bombers suddenly found themselves no longer able to outrun the opposition and unable to fight back when caught. On the whole it was a bloodbath.

The Ki48 was actually quite a good light bomber for it's day, possibly the best of the class, with unusually for the Japanese, a reasonable reputation for not exploding at the first sign of enemy fire. They served on through the whole war in just about every theatre the Japanese Army Air service was present, but losses were heavy.

Armaments in Miniature make a Ki48, and it's a nice model (and cheap!) so I ordered three. In a moment of madness I decided to go for one of the mottled camouflage schemes which seem to proliferate in Japanese units once the shooting began. With hindsight I probably should have went for an overall green but, well, too late.

Here they are having had their base colours applied.

Here they are after decals and tidying up. Decals are by the ever reliable MiscMinis btw

And the final version

I'm not 100% happy with them. I decided to try using an overall wash rather than a pin wash for the panel lines, and I think I may have overdone it. I also applied the decals first, which meant I had to give them a touch up with a brush. All this was of course my fault, mainly an attempt to cut corners but hopefully I have learned a lesson, and they still look mostly ok.

We're lucky in that the Lilly was one of the planes we got Beta test stats for, and the talented Martin Evans has done a data card.

So all in all that's my Japanese bomber "squadron" ready. Not sure where to go next - watch this space :-)

Links -
Armaments in Miniature
Miscminis

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Cheers