Basil and Pandora

 

Just to make a change from tiny aeroplanes for a moment, here are a couple of character minis I made for a Fantasy Hero campaign I was running, years and years ago.

The little guy in front is Sir Basil de Brass, a tiny little brass automaton, whose personal shame was that he needed to be wound up at least once a day. He was absurdly confident and brave, in spite of his very diminutive stature. 

The little lady to the left with wings is Pandora, a fairy. She was a real mischief  and practical joker, and with her fairy magic could indulge in some truly appalling japes. She was never malicious, as some fairies are, but what she considered hilarious seldom aligned with the victim's sense of fun.

Both basil and Pandora are made from some WH40K Epic figures: Imperial commissars, I think. Pandora's wings are made from rice paper.

The armoured guy in the back is just there for scale. He's a Warhammer 28mm figure of some sort. He was used as a cleric in one of my campaigns, but I don't recall if it was the same one as Basil and Pandora appeared in. 

Lozengy Bottoms

 

I don't usually worry too much about the lower surfaces of my little 1:144 scale aeroplanes, because they're never really seen on the tabletop.

However, I haven't had much practice with the  5-colour lozenge pattern for the under-surfaces, and thought I'd give it a go on these two Fokker D-VI models.

I'm not too dissatisfied, though I do think that the yellow is too dominant. 

...and Lozengy Tops

 This is how the Fokker D-VI would have been supplied from the factory, entirely covered with printed lozenge fabric. Then the paint scheme would be personalised by the individual pilots, or according to a Jasta scheme.

Fokker D-VI

 

I thought that since I'd already done a Fokker Dr1 triplane, converting it into a Fokker D-VI wouldn't be all that much trouble.

And for once I was right.

The D-VI was a transitional type between the Dr1 and the D-VII, and essentially consisted of a Dr1 fuselage married to a smaller D-VII-type wing structure.

It went into limited service in April–September 1918, but its Oberursel rotary engine was no longer up to the task of competing with newer Entente aircraft, and lack of castor oil and the unreliability of the synthetic replacement, Voltol, meant that despite promising features it could not be competitive.  Only 59 were ever completed.

SPAD S-XI

 

This is a French two-seater light bomber and reconnaissance aeroplane, the SPAD S-XI (S-11). It came from the same designer as that of the SPAD VII and SPAD XIII scouts, and the design relationship between them is very clear.

This is a 1:144 scale model, printed on my Mars 5 resin printer. 

Yet another Albatros

 

This one is an Albatros D-III, FDM printed on my Ender 3.

I'd like to say that this will be the last Albatros, and it may be for a while, but I've got some Austrian OEFAG Albatroses waiting in the painting queue, and it wouldn't be fair to leave them out entirely. 

The Red Baron

 

Here's another FDM print of my 1:144 scale Fokker Dr1 triplane.

This one has been painted all red, as the Red Baron, Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen.

I believe there's some doubt these days about whether or not his triplane was ever actually painted overall red, but that doesn't really matter to me: this is the mythical Baron, not the real one. 

Decal Softener

 

I'm not a fan of waterslide decals, but they can make life a heck of a lot easier when it comes to adding markings to these little aeroplane models.

I have hand-painted them in the past, and no doubt I will do so again, but getting everything clean and geometrically perfect with my sausage-fingers is a massive pain in the arse.

The down-side to using decals is that you're pretty well stuck to whatever sizes you have on the sheet. 

These decals from miscmini.com are pretty easy to handle, though they're printed on a continuous film, so they need to be trimmed quite close to the image.

However, they do often need a bit of help to conform to an uneven surface, and that's where a decal softening solution comes in.

I had an old bottle of Mr Mark Softer, which worked well in its day, but it got so old it was basically just water.

Fortunately, decal softener is cheap and easy to make yourself.

The Recipe

• 40% white vinegar
• 40% isopropyl alcohol 
• 20% water (preferably distilled)
• A drop of dish soap to break the surface tension

 The exact proportions aren't vital, and in fact you might want to juggle the proportions of vinegar and IPA to get a more or less aggressive solution. I've found the 40/40/20 ratio to work fine.

I made it up in my old Mr Mark Softer bottle, because it has a brush in the lid that I find convenient.

The Method 

I put some self-levelling gloss varnish where the  decal is to go, as the smoother surface is helpful in avoiding silvering, hiding the carrier film, and aiding adhesion. People have used Johnson's Klear (or whatever the equivalent is these days) for this purpose, and apparently it works well.

I brush some decal softener on to the area where the decal is to go, then place the decal and work it down a bit with a cotton bud, then brush more of the solution over the top of the decal and let it sit for a minute or two before pressing the decal firmly into place. I use a folded piece of toilet paper for this, as it's soft and absorbent, or else a cotton bud. 

When the decal is well set, I brush more varnish over the top to seal all the edges, and when that is properly dry I'll spray matte varnish over the whole lot. 

Bristol Fighter

 

This 1:144 scale Bristol Fighter was printed in FDM on my old Ender 3, and it's a bit nubbly as I didn't take enough care in removing all the zits before I started painting.

The Bristol F2b had an inauspicious start, as on its first mission over the lines it suffered very badly from a massed attack by German scouts. The pilots tried to use standard two-seater tactics in such a case, and formed a defensive circle, and they lost a great many planes and crew as a result. Only when they learned that the big aeroplane could be thrown around and flown like a fighter did it come into its own, and from that point on it became a very dangerous opponent indeed. 

Roland C-II

 

It's taken a while, but I've finally got around to painting my 1:144 print of the Roland C-II Walfsch (whale).

This has been one of my favourite German WW1 two-seaters ever since I built the Airfix 1:72 scale kit of it way back in the before-times, the 1970s I think.

There's an interesting optical illusion here: the Maltese crosses on wings and fuselage are exactly the same size, but the fuselage crosses look much larger. 

Camel Flight

 

I've done a flight of three Sopwith Camels in 1:144 scale.

The prints are not the best; there's some distortion in the trailing edges of the lower wings, but it's not severe enough to make them unusable as gaming pieces. These were among the last things I printed on my old Mars Pro before it went bung.

Another issue is that the wing decals on two of them are ever so slightly too large, so they wrap around the wing edges a little bit. If I was truly dedicated I'd scrape them off and redo them with the smaller 8mm roundels, but I am not that dedicated. They'll just have to do. 

Fokker E-IV (1:144)

 

I've taken my Fokker E-III model and converted it into a two-gun E-IV, with a new cockpit shroud and coaming. The fuselage and wingspan were both lengthened too, though visually the difference isn't very significant.

As an experiment in up-gunning the fairly mediocre E-III, the E-IV was a failure. The extra weight of the second gun and its ammo, along with the lengthening of the fuselage to cater to the altered centre of balance, made an already fairly sluggish aeroplane even worse. It was slower, and its rate of climb considerably worse than the E-III.

The value of the second gun when it could actually be brought to bear was unquestionable though, and it was reintroduced just as soon as an engine powerful enough to carry it eventuated. The monoplane format went into abeyance though until the appearance of the E-V, the Fokker D-VIII and the all-metal Junkers aircraft in late 1917-18. 

 

I'm really not much good at texturing objects in Blender for rendering; I've concentrated almost entirely on modelling. 

However, I'll give it a go from time to time. 

DeHavilland DH2 (1:144)

 

The AirCo DeHavilland DH2 was a "pusher" scout, introduced into RFC service in February of 1916 in response to the depredations of the Fokker Eindekkers with their interrupted forward-firing machine guns. Though in fact it had been in development for some time, before the so-called Fokker Scourge eventuated.

Not having access to a reliable interruptor or synchronizer for their guns, the British simply put the engine and propeller behind the gun instead of in front of it. 

It thoroughly outclassed the Fokker monoplanes, but was in turn outclassed by newer German tractor biplane types, and was eventually withdrawn from service in 1917.

This 1:144 scale model was built in Blender and printed on my Mars Pro resin printer, just before it went irretrievably bung. It's taken me a while to get around to painting it, but here it is at last.

Sopwith Triplane

 

Here we have a Sopwith Triplane, an aeroplane that sparked a craze for triplane and quadruplane designs amongst all the powers involved in WW1. As it turned out, the multi-plane format provided no real advantage over biplane designs, and the fad eventually faded away, but the Sopwith's performance originally excited many designers, most notably Antony Fokker.

This model is a design by Capn_Ahab, on Thingiverse, and I've done very little to it except smooth out the faceting. It's a simple model with almost nothing in the way of surface detail, so things like wing ribs, ailerons, elevators etc. have just been painted in.

It was FDM printed on my old and increasingly cranky Ender 3. 

Sopwith Dolphin

 

This is the first of two Sopwith Dolphins, a British fighter from late in WW1 that had excellent performance but had to battle against prejudice in the RFC against its backward-staggered wings.

 This one is not all my own work, but a remix of Decapod's excellent model. 

Another Albatros

 Here's another 1:144 scale Albatros DV.

I rather like this colour scheme, with the bare varnished plywood showing on the fuselage.

More Triplanes

 

Here are two more Fokker Dr1 triplanes in 1:144 scale, this time printed in resin on my Mars 5.

Fokker Triplane

 

This is an FDM print of my 1:144 scale Fokker Triplane model, and it's a bit ropey. It's triplane-shaped enough to be usable as a gaming piece, but it's not great, and I'll re-print it in resin.

The paint job doesn't please me either. The streaky green isn't streaky enough — I might have to go back and try adding some lighter streaks back in, and hope that doesn't just make things worse. 

Albatros DV

I decided, in a fit of madness, that I wanted to use the 1918 German crosses on this one. And since I don't have any decals for that particular style, I had to paint them by hand, which proved to be a lot more difficult than I'd anticipated. Keeping them all sharp and geometrically regular was something of a trial.

Still, it's done now. I don't know that I'll be likely to try it again, unless I can maybe organise some laser-cut masks.

Dogfight (Milton Bradley)

 

When I was a kid of about 10 or 12, a friend of mine had a copy of this game. I lusted after it so badly, mainly because of the little toy aeroplanes.

Skip forward many, many years, and I found a copy second-hand, and bought it immediately. 

It is by no means a simulation of aerial combat in WW1. It is extremely simplistic. But it holds up better as a game than I really expected. 

I wouldn't play it in preference to an actual aerial wargame, but I wouldn't turn down a game as a moderately entertaining way of passing the time. 

OEFAG Albatros

 

The Albatros D-III was built under license by the Austro-Hungarian OEFAG factory, but they improved it considerably with a much more powerful engine and strengthened structure.

They usually (but not always) removed the propellor spinner, as they found it made the machine faster.

It was often armed with a pair of German Spandau machine-guns, like the original D-III, but it was also often armed with a pair of fully-shrouded Schwarzlose guns shooting out through the engine bay, as I've represented here. 

I've taken my 1:144 scale Albatros D-III model and given it a new nose profile and engine to represent the OEFAG Albatros.

 D'oh!

 The test print went absolutely fine, but I gradually became aware that something was missing.

When I exported the STL from Blender, I had the centre-section struts hidden, so they weren't rendered.

I still didn't notice right through the slicing process, and printed it like this.

The simplest thing to do would be to just re-slice and reprint the whole thing, but instead I'm printing some struts and I'll glue them in position. It will be a fiddly task, but doable I think.

If that doesn't work, I'll reprint the whole thing. 

 Later...

It didn't work. 

Instead, I made some replacement struts out of copper wire.

It was a fiddly job with my sausage-fingers; they kept twisting in the tweezers and getting out of place, but I managed it eventually.

They're slightly wonky, but they'll do the trick, and it means that a couple of otherwise fine 3d prints won't go to waste.