2014 Retrospective: CY6! Jet age. Falklands

I've been trolling through my photo archives, which I tend to separate by month and year and was trying to figure out how much I've actually painted this year. Funnily enough, I didn't take pictures of a lot of what I worked on (which is unusual), but I do find hints of what I was working and interested in at various times in the year.






Beginning of last year I had just finished up a batch of jets for check your six! (CY6!). I chose to do the falklands war purely based on the limited number of planes needed, and the couple of scenarios available. After hunting for various pics of 'correct' paint jobs, and getting confused (as there was changes through the quite short war), I painted up these fellows.

mirage 3 (i think)

Daggers are slightly smaller than the mirage 3 to the topleft and the right

These are all 1:600 tumbling dice figures. They include harriers, mirage 3's, 14 skyhawk, and IAI daggers (which are almost indistinguishable from the mirages...and I think they are perhaps an earlier model).





















 Harriers in the two group colorations. They are noticeably smaller than most of the opposition.













 A4 skyhawks which are wee little planes compared to the mirage's and daggers.












Despite finishing these in Jan/Feb I haven't gotten around to playing yet. I have sourced a hex mat, but I'm still facing sound challenges with how I want to do the bases.

Ideally they will change height, and show the speed on them. The planes have a small ball bearing located on the bottom in order to pitch/roll/yaw on the magnet on the stand.


I originally toyed with the idea of having the ball bearing on the stem, and only placing a magnet inside the plan. The end result was wildly unstable and the nose or tail (depending on where I placed the magnet) would instantly track downwards. I then managed to embed some magnets within the base stem, and attached the ballbearing to the plane. This is improved....but they still yaw a bit too easy. I may just stick some 'blue stuff' inside the stem to increase the friction.  I'm hoping the whole basing scheme isn't kaput.

Meanwhile, I still need to decide how to represent plane speed. A dice and frame arrangement vs a arrow/dial/pointer thing. Decisions, decisions.....

I'm going to wait till I'm more inspired to fight with these problems.