'Planes' for Wargaming

One of the joys of the whole AVBCW period is the ability to field lots of great, and often weird, WWI, Inter-War and early WWII kit in the form armoured cars, tankettes etc. Fortunately many of these are readily available in 10mm, my prefered scale for this and other periods. However, it seems that there is a distinct lack of availability of 1/144 scale planes to be had in the UK at a reasonable price.

With this in mind, I started to think of how I could quickly make some nice looking planes for use generally in games of BKCII, but specifically for use in the Storm Clouds Gather campaign. So I started trolling through my numerous bookmarked pages on the computer for ideas. I soon came across a great reference site (see below) which contained loads of wonderfully rendered elevations and plans of a whole host of planes, including many Inter-War ones.

http://ww2drawings.jexiste.fr/Files/2-Airplanes/Airplanes.htm 

I then had the idea of copying the images and reducing them in size until they were approximately 1/144th scale. With this in mind, I copied a couple of planes that I needed for a forthcoming AVBCW game and printed them out onto thick card, once I had reduced them to 1/144th scale. Once stuck onto a suitable base with Blu-tack,  I thought that they looked remarkably effective given that they were just 2d planes. You can see the results in the following couple of images:

Henschel HS123 A

Caproni CA135

Now I know they will never be able to compete with proper 3d plane models nicely painted up, but for the amount of time that they spend on the table in a BKCII game, I think they are fine, especially for the more obscure planes used from WWI through to the end of WWII. The other advantage is that you can either paint on your own markings etc or do it in any simple drawing package. I will also paint the card to get rid of the white edges to improve the overalllook.

In the future, I'm going to go down this route for the vast majority of my planes, especially for the AVBCW period. This allows me to spend more time painting my troops, tanks etc which are really what matters to me in terms of the look for the gaming table.  

If you are at all interested in the above, please give it a go as I think that you may be pleasantly suprised by the results!