When Poor Design Decisions Compound

I am a history nerd, and am a magpie when it comes to historical miniature games. Of course I had to get some Blood Red Skies miniatures. I grew up playing games like Hellcats Over the Pacific, and the Aces games, so I may or may not somehow have a bunch of Spitfires, a P-47, an F4F, and a Corsair. I want to address something strange I've noticed as I started to acquire miniatures for this game, and discuss subtle reasons why design (and design iteration) is so important.

In Blood Red Skies, it is very important whether or not your plane is in an "advantaged" or "disadvantaged" position. The way the game tracks this is by tilting planes nose-up or nose-down to indicate this. A plane with its nose up (climbing) is considered to be "Advantaged", whereas nose down (diving) is "Disadvantaged". Level flight is of course neither. This is the first design oddity; If you're a fan of air combat, especially in WW2, being higher up and able to dive gives a wealth of benefits such as increased speed, reduced effects of bullet drop, etc. Why then is the plane that's at the advantage depicted climbing?

Left: advantaged. Middle: Neutral. Right: Disadvantaged.

Now, that aside, there is of course the issue of it also looking slightly absurd if an advantaged plane fights a disadvantaged plane at close range:

Missed Me!

But there's a bigger problem. A waaay bigger problem. Some of the planes are not plastic. Some, are metal. Let's take a look at that?

Looks fine right? Should be fine if we just tilt this thing into "Advantage" position right?

Whups! Drunk Corsair time. That's not viable for gameplay at all! So already we have a huge design flaw which either forces the company to only produce plastic miniatures, or have this big flaw in your metal ones. There's a few solutions, but let's see what they went with:

If you guessed "Giant additional plastic thing" then congrats! Yep, every metal miniature comes with a larger, clear-plastic 'foot' to keep the plane off the deck. This requires a lot of extra work designing, producing, ensuring packaging fits it properly, and still leaves you with another design problem:

(Shown here with plastic minis for ease)

I don't yet know how common something like this could be in-game, but what if two planes fly close to one another? If the original flight stand counts as the "area" of a plane rules-wise, does the increased foot count? God Forbid two such hoofed beasts come near one another...

But surely there's no other solution right? how to integrate tilting planes in a flying game?
Well, for a rare moment allow me to celebrate GW's solution to this problem:

Aeronautica Imperialis uses this fascinating flight peg with a ball top. We can debate if desired whether a base with a bunch of info is logical or not, but that little ball there is fantastic.

Behold how this simple solution slots into a spot under the plane, allowing it to both climb and dive, as well as bank left or right without great cost to overall centre of mass, balance, or model adjacency.

Also, speaking on production's side, it requires far less of it. The click-base of Blood Red Skies is at least a two part production, pre-assembled at the manufacturer, sent to the user, for further assembly. Also, because the flight stand is pre-assembled it neither ships nor stores flat, but always has that A-frame bend. Lastly, should I break a flight stand for Aeronautica, I can use a spare rod and keep flying with base and plane intact, whereas Blood Red Skies risks a breakage requiring me to buy more (or repair it, since I'm not certain if they're sold separately.)

It is a cautionary tale that I am sure has cost loads more money in production and planning than a bit more design iteration time and a cleaner solution would have resulted in.

Thus ends the public broadcast, hopefully I'll be back with more cool models and conversions soon!

Pacific Fleet In Full Glory

 After a long hiatus of never making time for the actual posting part, I have finally managed to sit down and upload finalized, finished, pretty painted pictures of a pacific patrol! (How's THAT for alliteration?)

With a full range of capital ships, cruisers, destroyers, and even a full sprawl of PT boats, I figure I can cover engagements from small skirmishes right up to full on wars.

Here you can see the full effect of my basing technique. I know the blanket is solid black, but on any dark water board you still get this nice luminous layered depth effect to the water which looks fantastic and realistic!

A fun thing about this fleet; it's timed to fit anywhere from 1942 to 1944, so sadly there's not a lot of dazzle camo on any of the vessels, though I have tried doing some smaller elements and lines on the destroyers. All the ships feature the nice dark blue which was apparently standard!

This is probably one of the most accurate colour matches. You can get a good scope of the depth of the water effects. Any ship larger than a PT boat also gets its own unique name! As much as possible I've chosen ships that survived the war, to limit any "but that ship was already sunk by then" issues.

Let's start with the bigbois! Here are the capital ships lined up for my fleet. From left to right there is the USS COlorado, the USS North Carolina, USS Iowa, then USS Essex (CV-9), USS Enterprise (CV-6), and the USS-Independence. Specifically on the carriers, it was fun painting the worn blue paint where so many planes have rubbed the paint. Also fun was painting a bunch of little tiny dots in straight lines...

From this angle you can also see the bizarre, and historically accurate, curve to the lines around the tower on the USS Enterprise.

Also something I always find remarkable doing scale modelling: Holy heck the sizes of some things. Planes are already large craft. Then the Independence dwarfs a plane, which itself is a pocket carrier compared to the Enterprise, which itself looks like the little brother to the Essex! On the other half, the Colorado is dwarfed by the North Carolina, which itself looks like a stubbier version of the Iowa!

Barely visible at the top is a PT boat, which itself is some 80ft (24m) long. I measured out of curiosity, and that is vaguely the equivalent length of ONE of the Iowa's main deck turrets.

For real.. the scales are insane.

On to the cruisers!

Since I'm just playing this game with friends, I care nothing for min-maxing or taking advantage of "better" or "worse" ships. Instead, here's a selection of the various cruisers that saw action in the Pacific during WWII. 

On down to the workhorses: the Destroyers! 6 Fletchers up front, backed up by 3 Clemsons. Most people would picture a Fletcher if they thought "Destroyer", but in-game I do enjoy the sheer volume of torpedos a Clemson can unleash.

And then there's the PT boat patrols. I looked for some time to find the right "number" for a patrol of patrol boats (heh) but could only find units far larger than a single base might justify. I settled on two per base in part to get the most out of my purchase of PT boats, but also because three started to push the base and look too dense.

Seriously though: these things are adorably tiny...

I'm hoping the PT boats will help counter the volume of torpedos the Japanese fleet can put out, and maybe give my opponent some second thoughts about his usual technique of Flank speed into my formation and unleashing torpedo-hell on me.

It bears repeating because it never ceases to shock me. This is a scale-up of the various classes of ships in my fleet and I want to put it in perspective. The tiny boats in the bottom right are the length of a quarter of a football field. A destroyer (two further up) is at least a football field long. Then waaay at the far side is the Essex, which could seemingly run an entire playoff round itself!

...wait, what's that as second from the right you ask?

Hmm, zooming in it looks like just flat ocean... why, what did you think it was?

Sadly the finish of this fleet was accomplished during June of 2020, so I haven't had a chance to take to sea with the fully painted, ready-to-go fleet. When we're allowed to get tabletop games in again, I'll try to take action shots!