It was the replacement for the Sopwith Pup, and initially, when it was introduced in 1917, it was nicknamed the Big Pup, but the name Camel eventually took off because of the hump in front of the pilot that partially shrouded the guns.
I realise now, looking at the render, that I've forgotten to give it any elevators or ailerons, so i suppose I'd better take care of that.
It's designed for FDM printing, and for use as a gaming piece rather than a display model, so all the struts and things are way out of scale.
This next one is the Siemens-Schuckert D-III, from very late in the war. It was very fast and manoeuvrable, and could climb like a rocket, but its huge 4-bladed propeller meant that it had to have very tall undercarriage, making it tricky to control on the ground, and the powerful engine was prone to overheating. The overheating issues were solved in the D-IV, but by then the war was pretty much over.
I've done a couple of 1/144 Albatros D-II, one with the side-mounted "ear" radiators, and one with the centrally wing-mounted radiator perfectly positioned to spray boiling water straight into the pilot's face if a bullet goes through it.
I haven't tried printing them yet; probably tomorrow.
I've successfully test-printed one of these models, and splashed some paint on to it, and overall I'm pretty satisfied with it.
I've been working on a 1/144 scale Junkers D1, a German metal monoplane fighter from very late in WW1.
I've been tossing up whether or not to try to represent the corrugations of the metal skin — on the one hand, they were very characteristic of the Junkers aeroplanes, but on the other hand, in this scale (and when printed in FDM) they'd be barely perceptible unless they were wildly out of scale.
It's a usable wargaming model just as is. I might try a corrugated one just to see, but I suspect it won't really be worth the trouble.
I've printed and painted it now, and I'm glad I didn't corrugate the crap out of it.
The original design was (I think) from CapnAhab on Thingiverse. He has done a lot of models, designed in 1:100 scale, but intended for printing at 1/300. The geometry is always very simple; no wing ribs or anything like that, and sized to be able to be shrunk down without issues.
I've just smoothed out the faceting of some (most) of the elements, and provided it with a socket for a flight stand attachment.
Having smooth wing surfaces should ease the application of decals, and I can paint on wing ribs, as I've done on 1/300 and 1/200 models.
For gaming purposes, the silhouette is much more important than fine detail, which seldom gets seen at tabletop distances in any case. I have one on the printer at this moment, so we shall see how it turns out.
The Tripe printed without any real issues, and I also did a Fokker D-VIII from a similar style of model, which also printed very easily.
I clean up the prints as best as I can straight off the printer, but inevitably I find that I miss a bunch of zits and nubbins in the raw bright white PLA which is very hard to distinguish detail in. A quick primer coat reveals them though.
Each of them printed with a semi-broken back, probably because the models were printed tail-down at about 60° to the build plate, and lacked any supports along the underside of the fuselage, so they sagged just a little bit before the upper layers started printing.
I've rebuilt the gcode with more supports in the problem area and I'm trying another one; we shall see how that turns out.
They also all printed the tail fin poorly. I added more supports there too, but that problem isn't nearly as troublesome to me.
They're all usable as gaming models, even as they are, but I would prefer it by far if they were less flawed.
Here's one painted in a livery for late 1916-ish. At some point in 1917, I'm not sure exactly when, the official colours changed from green and brown to green and mauve.
This particular model was printed split into two pieces, with the fuselage cut just behind the lower wing. It improved printing of the tail section quite substantially, but the struts are all pretty grungy.
As it turned out, it was easier than I'd expected, mainly because in this scale the lozenges themselves aren't really discernable as geometric shapes, but just resolve to blobs of colour, so as long as they're about the right size and in the right pattern, the finished effect is not too bad.
Reviresco used to produce sheets of 1/144 lozenge camo decals, but they've been out of print for some time, and I don't think they'd be all that easy to apply on a one-piece model, especially on the lower wings.
The STL is available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/fokker-d-vii-1144
Here's number two.
They're both still gloss varnished, and they may very well stay that way since it makes them easier to keep clean.
I recently found the home-made version of Avalon Hill's Knights of the Air that I made back in the '80s.
This was way back before computers and scanners were readily available to anyone who wasn't a hard-core computer nerd, and digital cameras hardly existed at all. Colour photocopying was pretty much non-existent, and if you could find it, it was mind-bogglingly expensive.
I drew plan views of all the aircraft with my trusty Rotring pens, and photocopied them to size for the aeroplane counters, and then coloured the counters individually with watercolours. I drew out the aircraft statistics sheets by hand, and filled them in by hand for every type of aeroplane, and coloured them with markers.
Looking back, it was an incredible amount of work for a game that I played probably half a dozen times. I must have had amazing stamina back in those days.
And now I have absolutely no memory of how to use all this stuff.
Initially they were scratch-built in 1:300 scale from cardboard, wire and wood, but later on I found I could get cast metal models from Heroics and Ros, which, though lacking in interplane struts and the like, were generally okay in terms of silhouette, and much less work. Later still I got into 3d printing, though I've printed very few aeroplanes in 1:300.
I've since focused my attention on 1:144 3d printed planes, as they're easier to paint and to see with my increasingly decrepit eyes. However, the larger models require a hex grid of 50 to 70 mm. That's fine for small scale dogfights, but the smaller models can be used on a 25mm grid, which gives you a much larger battlefield, and can therefore accommodate more players at need.
These models are as follows:
It is socketed to accept a 3mm acrylic rod, which has a magnet glued to its top for the aeroplane models to stick to. The models sometimes turn on the magnets, making the actual direction of flight ambiguous, hence the arrow to remove all doubt.
I have printed the prototype, and it works fine, so with a couple of minor tweaks it's ready for mass production.
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| Components |
The only problem I have with them is that they're all the same height, so although the index wheels give the altitude information required, the battlefield still looks a bit two-dimensional.
I might make some with some longer and shorter acrylic rods, to represent the gross height bands, say altitude levels 1-3, 4-6 and 7-10. They're not mechanically necessary, but I think they'd look better.
The struts and booms are all a bit chunky, but that's for the sake of printing. If they're too dainty, they'll either just not print at all, or else they'll break when the supports are being removed. I can live with a bit of chunk in a wargaming model.
Even so, I'm not expecting printing to be smooth sailing.
The rearmost one I scratch-built from cardboard and copper wire, with a carved matchstick for the nacelle. The other was a metal model from Heroics & Ros, with interplane struts added by me in copper wire.
The decals came from Miscellaneous Miniatures, and their service was very good. I got WW1 British, French and German decal sheets in various styles, and they worked just fine.
I can't say that I've been exceptionally productive: these three (plus a Fokker Triplane that I gave away as a gift) are the sum total of my completed work so far.
However, I've just ordered some 1:144 decals, which will make painting the little things much less of a chore. Painting the markings is the hardest part of the whole process.
This is the game in action, in our introductory learning-to-fly session. I chose a SE5a and a Fokker D-VII for the purpose, because they're very similar in capabilities. I won two dogfights to one, flying the SE5a, partly through skill and cunning but mainly due to luck, and we learned that flying straight at each other and shooting each other in the face with machine-guns is very dangerous and often makes your aeroplane fall to bits.
I've printed the occasional one on my Mars Pro resin printer, and when it works it does give me cleaner surfaces, but for the most part I print them in FDM on my Ender 3. It's no slower when printing a single plane, and the resulting models are considerably stronger and less prone to distortion of wing tips and things.
I need to figure out a process for painting the lozenge camo scheme on the Fokker D-VII. That could be a bit tricky.
The aeroplanes in the little white dish are 1:200 scale, which I thought would be a good compromise size between 1:300, of which I have quite a few but which are tiny to see from any distance, and 1:72, which are readily available in kit form but take up far too much space. And so they are, but the resin I was using to print them (eSun water-washable) had a tendency to warp horribly. The spirit-based resin I'm using now is better in that respect, but is more trouble to clean up. I'll probably stick with the larger 1:144 FDM prints.
Printing biplanes can be a tricky affair, due to all the struts between the wings. This Albatros D-III has proven to be especially problematic for some reason.
It's not the printing of the struts per se that is the problem, but rather that the printing supports tend to wind around them, so that they can be difficult to remove without breaking the struts.
Another issue, especially for FDM printing, is that skinny structures like wing struts, when the layers are printed vertically with very little connecting surface between them, are very weak. You want to get the layers as long as possible, with as much contact area between the layers as possible, to maximise strength.
For that reason, I've separated the top wing from the rest of the model for printing as a separate component.
I may find I have to do the same with the undercarriage, but we shall see when the test print is complete.
Success at last, on the seventh attempt. I now have a printable Albatros D-III fuselage. I've had to print it tail-down rather than nose down; why that makes a difference I have no idea.
I'll have to print upper wings and and undercarriages for them separately, but I haven't had anywhere near the problems with those components that I have with the fuselage, for some reason.
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| 1:300 Heroics & Ros Hannover |
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| 1:72 Airfix Hannover CL-II |
Here it is, fully assembled, and primed with Vallejo Surface Primer.
The raw white filament is very difficult to distinguish detail on, and even after cleaning up as much as I can see of it, I almost always find more work to be done after I've primed the model.
This still has a bunch of zits that need smoothing.
This is a flight of three SPAD 7 straight off the printer, with all their support clutter still in place.
Removing the supports is the most troublesome part of printing these wee planes, as without careful orientation in the slicer, they can twine around things like interplane struts, and then they inevitably bust them while being removed.
There are multi-filament printers out there that can print the supports in a water-soluble substance, so in theory you could just wash the supports away. I don't know how well they work, but it's an attractive prospect.
Here's the first of the SPADs all painted up and ready to fly.
This is the next one I've got on the go in Blender — a Fokker E-III Eindekker.
The rib details are over-prominent for its scale, but things like that need to be exaggerated a bit for the purposes of FDM printing.
I've got it on the printer at this very moment, but I'll be surprised if I don't have to make some adjustments to get it to print successfully — I almost always do.
The tall one in the middle is the original design, but I enshortened it, mainly for the sake of cutting its print time in half.
The figures are the flat card standees from OkumArts that I've taken to using these days. The doors themselves could also just be print-and-snip 2d standees, since they're essentially flat anyway, and if I find that I need a bajillion of them, that's probably the way I'll go, since the 3d ones take about an hour and a half each to print.
Some time in the 1990s I bought a pack of GW metal Warhammer Skaven. I didn't have any interest in Warhammer, but I did want something I could use as wererats for my AD&D game.
The skaven are a bit more heavily equipped than your standard AD&D wererat, but they looked ratty enough for my purposes.
I must confess, I bought Halith Vorn and Zorth mainly because the illustration appealed to me, but they also had pretty good reviews on DTRPG.
They took a bit longer to arrive than PoD stuff usually does, though only a bit. I made the order on June 8th, and today is the 24th; I normally expect a turnaround of about a week to ten days.
This is made from bits of a kitchen sponge, whizzed up in a blender, coloured with ordinary house paint kneaded through, dried in the oven and then ground again in a little electric coffee grinder.
It's not utterly worthless, but I was hoping for a smaller grain size than this. Also, the sponge is yellow, so that affects the final colour.
As it is, this is really no better than the sawdust flock I made some years ago. In fact, it's probably a bit coarser.
I'll give it another go with some white open-cell upholstery foam, which should colour more accurately, and will hopefully grind down to fluffier bits.
My friend Ivan (a wonderful man, now sadly deceased) was running what I think was his one and only AD&D campaign for our group, and wanted to try out the use of figure markers. Up until then, we'd always done pure theatre-of-the-mind stuff.
For the most part, our markers were just chits with the character names written on them, maybe 15mm tall. But as usual, I couldn't resist being more decorative, so I drew a little character portrait on mine.
She was not a long-lasting character. She was a pixie, very curious, and her curiosity was her downfall as it led to her being electrocuted to death by a will-'o-wisp.