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.

Work - Gaming Balance

Sorry for not posting for a while - work is interfering with games but cant be helped.

Some painting is still happening - see this couple of German Pioneers for our Stalingrad campaign.



I was quite happy and showed the wife - she smiled and said "ah nice Love - Ghost Busters". Something inside cried.

Speaking of Stalingrad, our campaign is back on hold as Andy, one of our Brave Soviets, has been put on night shifts for 9 weeks so we've had to reschedule. C'est la guerre I suppose.

So any new stuff?

Well, yes. Firstly Empress miniatures have released this set of German Ost Front veterans which I've ordered. I know Sevastopol isn't Stalingrad but I couldn't resist

Next up, if you follow "Geordies Big Battles" you will know he's been posting about a 15mm Gruntz game. Gruntz is 15mm Sci Fi, and jolly good fun. Anyway he has been posting what I have to say has been a very one sided and mostly fictitious reports but on one point he was spot on - My New Vistula Legion (Polish) are certainly a bit "light" on support. Not any more - well as soon as the next batch of toys arrive - watch this space

Blood Red Skies - Over the Channel, the tale of J for Johnnie

We've been playing quite a bit of Blood Red Skies from Warlord games, and we have a Battle of Britain mini campaign running at Asgard Wargames in Middlesbrough. This week a flight of plucky Poles ran into their German counterparts high over the English Channel as part of Phase 1 - the Kanalkampf.

On this sortie the Poles are outnumbered -  this is due to previous losses and their CO deciding to rest a couple of pilots due to fatigue - something the campaign factors in. The initial set up sees the Poles in classic "Finger Four"  facing three loose pairs of Bf109s. There is some cloud, but not a lot. The Poles have some advantages however, as they have the "Radar Support" theatre card in play, which should give them a better starting position. One pilot - J for Johnnie - didn't get the message and is starting disadvantaged - possibly a language issue with his British controllers? "Repeat Please"

The concept of "Advantage" is crucial to BRS, so it is probably a good time to mention it for those not familiar with the rules. BRS doesnt track altitude. The designer Andy Chambers thinks we over complicate games and miss the point trying to represent the whole 3d thing by tracking altitude, be it with counters, extending stands or whatever. He thinks altitude on its own isn't the deciding factor, it is how you use the "advantage" it gives you. BRS therefore does not measure altitude, it tracks advantage in three stages, advantage, neutral and disadvantage, and you can use advantage to increase your move or manoeuvre options. I think he has a point, and it works. Crucially you can only shoot at at target that is at a worse status than you are, and you can only be shot down if you are disadvantaged. As status changes throughout the turn your advantage level is marked with the pivot on the bases - nose up is advantaged, level neutral and nose down disadvantaged. As each plane completes it's move you place a small "Zoom" marker next to it so you dont get confused as to who has moved in each turn. This is really important!. The Zoom markers are the card "wings" in the pics and the acrylic "Eagles" - more of that later.

The Poles make a quick decision. Not liking the odds they decide to try and pick off one pair of 109s before they others can concentrate and use their superior numbers against them. J- Johnnie trailing behind a little from his leader climbed to neutral. The 109s jockey for position and manage to outmanoeuvre J -Johnnie using a pilot action and disadvantage him - not good. Pilots have one "action" they can choose at the end of their movement - shoot, climb for advantage, or outmanoeuvre. This last one is important and harsh. Better pilots automatically outmanoeuvre lesser experienced ones, equal or better pilots can test to avoid it happening. If you fail you drop one advantage level.

J-Johnnie is distracted by the nearest 109s

Overall position at the end of turn 2

Turn 3 and the 109s do their stuff. The Rottefuhrer White 5 of the leftmost pair uses the 109s "great dive" ability to burn his advantage and slots in behind J - Johnnie. This would automatically disadvantage him anyway, but he is already struggling. Just to make things worse White 5 plays his "Superior Armament" card, adding an extra dice to his shooting attack. J-Johnnie counters with his "Robust" Trait card, reducing the attack by one dice. The Pole sees him at the last minute, takes some hits but just manages to avoid being shot down, however his Squadron suffer a "Boom" chit - the morale system in BRS -  basically if the number of "Booms" exceed your planes you disengage and run for home.

Dakka dakka dakka...

Meanwhile on the other side of the cloud the other pair of Hurricanes are above their opponents and have the advantage due to Radar. They decide to try a head on pass at the 109s who are still trying to climb up to them. Head on passes are the exception to the rule about only shooting lower advantage level targets - you can always return fire if you are attacked head on. This exchange goes disastrously wrong for the Poles, and they suffer another "Boom" result with no return - in fact the 109 scored 2 hits making the Hurricane lose one defence dice for his dodge attempt and he dropped to neutral. The score is now 2-0 in Boom chits to the Luftwaffe

Head on pass misfires 

 Back to the beleaguered J- Johnnie. Activation is in sequence of advantage, then pilot skill, then speed as a tie breaker. Johnnie is in the unenviable position of being at a lower advantage status AND the slower plane. The Luftwaffe take advantage of this, mercilessly trying to hit him while he is vulnerable. Two more 109s make an attack, this time from the beam. J-Johnnie twists and turns, getting hit twice but on both occasions his Hurricane holds together - just, but two more Boom chits are added to the score - 4-0. One more will cause the Hurricanes to head for home.

J- Johnnie in deep trouble

The 109s on the other side of the cloud try and press their advantage, and another lucky deflection shot causes a "boom" chit - the Poles now have 5 Booms and only 4 planes, so they must disengage at the end of the turn, even though they have yet to suffer anyone shot down.

Hurricanes climbing away from the fight

Which is no help to poor old J-Johnnie, disadvantaged and with four 109s after his blood. Thankfully he survived the 109s fire and managed to make it to the safety of the cloud. Clouds are good places to be in BRS if you are in trouble. When you enter or move through a cloud your advantage resets to neutral and you can no longer be tailed or shot at - in fact you cannot be affected or affect another plane in any way while you are in a cloud. J-Johnnie likes this cloud :-)

Safe!

Final positions

And in a moment the skies were empty again.

The Germans scored a campaign victory and returned to Abbeville for champagne and bratwurst, claiming one Hurricane shot down as they saw J-Johnnie diving into a cloud clearly damaged, and one probable. The Poles made it home but managed to write off one damaged plane in a landing accident - and it wasn't J-Johnnie! What is more, having survived the repeated attacks the pilot actually learned from his experience and increased his skill in the campaign. The next sortie he will know better and listen to his controller more carefully.

The campaign is now moving  on to Phase 2 - the Attacks on the Radar Stations.

A word on the toys. The Bf109Es, dice and card tokens are from the BRS starter set from Warlord Games. Warlord has not released Hurricanes yet for BRS - they're scheduled for a summer release along with Bf110s, but we are lucky in that we have a set of the beta stats for them. The Hurricane models are from the excellent Armaments in Miniatures range. You can also see some very nice third party acrylic measuring sticks and "Zoom" counters in the pics. These are from Buy-the-same-token on ebay. The movement stick is particularly welcome as the one in the starter set is badly designed, a pain to use and also a bit wrong.

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Blood Red Skies - A Tale of Two Adolfs (or Adolphs)

One of the features of Blood Red Skies, the new WW2 air war game, is the inclusion of Aces. In addition to the Squadron Boxes (which I did mention a few weeks ago), each nation in the game gets a named Ace in an Ace Expansion box. The main rules allow you to create Aces, but the named ones are more potent, and more expensive in points too.

Each Ace expansion includes one aircraft model, base and aircraft stat card (identical to the ones in the Squadron), a sheet of stickers (ditto), an Ace card explaining his or her skills, plus the relevant Skill and Trait cards. and Skill Discs and counters.  They retail at £12.00 each from Warlord Games , which is ok but looks a bit pricey for a single model when compared to the 6 plane Squadron box at £20.00, but then again no one is forcing you to buy  them and they do add an extra dimension to the game.

The British Ace is Adolph "Sailor" Malan, a South African who served in the RAF and was for a time the highest scoring RAF fighter pilot, with 27 kills. Malan is a good shot with an interesting ability "Set them Up" that helps friendly pilots flying with him, but he is no slouch when it comes to shooting with the "Killler Instincts" skill that converts close range hits to criticals. All this comes at a hefty price of 166 points (135 for the pilot and 31 for his Spitfire) just over twice as much as a regular pilot & plane.

His German opponent is Adolf Galland, the oft quoted senior pilot who ended up as General der Jagdflieger, the highest rank of fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe, amassing 104 Kills along the way. Galland is particularly interesting in that he is the only Ace in the game so far who has a specific mention of flying jets (as he did at the end of the War). That obviously shows Warlord are planning ahead, but also that it may be possible to transfer Aces to aircraft other than the ones in the Ace expansion. This makes sense, Galland flew several types of Bf109, not just the E included in this set, and also Me262s.  Galland is a more traditional pilot who excels at deflection shooting using his "Snap Shot" skill and is hard to tail because he has "Sixth Sense". like Malan he is expensive - 166 points in total in his 109E

I've already painted up my Spitfires and Bf109s from the starter set. The Spitfires are in the markings of 602 Squadron (City of Glasgow) and my 109s are a generic Luftwaffe scheme - I regretted this almost immediately as it would have been easy to go with a specific unit but I got carried away and painted some rather non historic yellow wingtips . Decals from the Spitfires were from MiscMinis in the US who provided an excellent, speedy and very cheap trans Atlantic service, and the German  markings were from Mehusla's store on ebay 1:144 Direct , who again provided an excellent service. (Side note here - I have used Mehuslas decals numerous times before, and he does a couple of RAF Squadron sets. but I think he was caught napping by the massive spike in demand that happened when BRS was released and struggled initially to keep everything in stock - one of the reasons I tried MiscMinis for the Spitfire decals. Thankfully he seems to have restocked several times so the Great Decal Shortage of Spring 2018 is now at an end here in the UK)

Anyway, back to Adolph and Adolf.  It seemed a good idea to paint the planes up to represent the "real" thing as much as possible. With Malan this means 74 Squadron, and Galland JG26 and I ordered decals from Miscminis who happily do both. I also decided to try and make the Aces a bit different to the normal Squadron aircraft, so I decided to try painting them in different but reasonably historic colour schemes.

For Malan I decided to try the early black & white underside. This scheme predated the Battle of Britain and was mainly used in France, but 74 Squadron certainly had it, and it was different to the duck egg undersides on my 602 Squadron Spitfires.

For Galland I wanted full on light blue with a hard edge upper surface. Galland flew several different Bf109Es during the period and this had the advantage of standing out a bit from the others and also ticking the "Airfix" nostalgia box. I've cheated a little and included his personal Mickey Mouse style emblem which may not be quite 100% accurate but I'm not feeling that concerned.

OK at this point I need to come clean. I didn't paint the models from the Ace boxes as Aces, I painted them as normal planes, which helps explain in part the odd numbers in some of the pics. This is because last year Warlord kindly sent me a couple of resin prototypes to have a look at, and they have languished in a box ever since. I decided to paint these up as the Aces. Apart from the material being different the plastic and resin models are to all intents identical, so I thought "why not?" Actually that's not 100% true. the prototypes have a different (hexagonal) hole for the flying bases. Fortunately this was an easy fix as it had been pointed out to me that the Hawk Wargames "widget" fitted over the BRS base very well, so it was a simple job to drill out a 3mm hole and glue a widget in, so the Aces actually stand a couple of mm taller on their advantage stands.

Here are the finished planes

Galland looking a bit bright blue, and a subdued Wing Man

Malan and his 74 Squadron Wing Man

I'm quite happy with how they turned out

So are the Ace expansions good in the game I hear you ask? BRS isnt going down the XWing route, with ever more expansions that you need to have to be "competitive" - theyre trying to stick within reason to the history. The Aces are good, but the points premium would make me think seriously about including them every time. Nice to have as an option, but not game breaking, which is how it should be.

I'm sure we will see more Aces in future, both for the current models and also for new releases.
       
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