Red Falcons v. White Camels BatRep

Greetings all and Happy Fall! Working diligently away at some new homebrew rulesets, some solo campaigns for said rulesets, and miniatures for the long winter ahead. Played a quick game last weekend pitting the Soviet Red Falcon squadron against the RAF intervention force and their White Russian allies. Tested my homebrew rules which I have altered a bit since last sharing this project. 

....Somewhere over Russia, 1919. The rumble of biplanes through the crisp autumn air. Conditions optimal for dogfight. Our White Camel RAF intervention force is led by a White Russian Snipe piloted by the Ace Alexander Kazakoff, a single Camel triplane, and a DH.9 two seater. Their opponents are the flying Great War air museum, the Workers’ and Peoples’ Air Fleet. We'll just call them the Red Falcons for brevity sake. Consisting of a white French Nieuport, German Pfalz, and the squadron leader-the enigmatic Black Baron. Flying a sinister all black Fokker triplane, rumor tells that perhaps he's a German mercenary in paid service to the Bolsheviks Rubles are just as good as marks Comrade!

Turn Length: 5

Victory Conditions: DH.9 is shot down or the Red Falcons lose two 

planes and/or the Squadron Leader.

After Turn One

The Black Baron struck first doing damage to Kazakoff's Snipe and then zooming off towards the bomber. Next up, the Camel did damage to the Niueport with a roll of 17 and 20. On the following turn Kazakoff rolled a 1 for initiative order and finished off the Bolshevik Niueport in quick order. The DH.9 began shooting, successfully hitting the Black Baron only to suffer a jam to it's front guns on the third turn. The Black Baron executed a flawless Immelman turn pulling in behind the Camel, spraying the Englishmen's aircraft with one successful hit while the Pfalz attempted to hit the DH.9 with no luck. Starting the last activation, the Pfalz successfully hit the the Ace Kazakoff on it's second barrage. Shooting from the gunner's seat, the DH.9 successfully hit the green Pfalz once on it's last activation of the game.

Each aircraft carries two small dice during the dogfight. The green dice indicates each pilot's activation order while the blue dice represents altitude. Change altitude to avoid enemies or anti-aircraft fire from below. After five turns of some hotly contested high altitude action all our daring pilots returned to their respective aerodromes low on fuel, save for the Niueport which lay smoldering in the Russian turf, Kaput!

Keep Rolling Those Crits

 -BB

Red Falcons/White Camels: Custom Russian Civil War Wings of Glory 1/144

Using some old Wings of Glory airplane models produced by the Italian company Ares Games which I had stored away, they were stripped entirely of their paint and then repainted and decaled, a little more on this below. The working title to this campaign module and ruleset is Red Falcons/White Camels. I homebrewed a set of rules which attempts to wargame the air war over Russia during the civil war, specifically the British aerial intervention of 1919-1920. Lets take a look.

Bolshevik Fokker

Since I found the Wings of Glory rules to be lacking both in playability and the overall tone of the game to be rather dull and not gritty enough. The impetus for this project lay in the fact that I have always been interested in the history of the Russian Civil War and have always wanted to wargame some aspect of it. From a prospective wargamer’s perspective there's quite a lot of campaigns and battles to game, add to this the fact that you could conceivably use infantry, cavalry, armored trains, aircraft, tanks & armored vehicles in most any Russian Civil War tabletop campaign, and there are endless options to create a variety of forces.

Niueport 17

After reading a rather informative article on a old gaming website, Red Star, White Eagle The War in the Air, 1919 to 1922 by David Meyler (October 2015), one line stuck with me in reference to Red Russian aircraft of the civil war, “equipment was a virtual WWI museum, including Spads, Nieuports…after March 1918, a number of discarded German Fokkers, Pfalzs, Halberstadts and LVGs.” I took this idea and flew with it, so to speak (Pun intended!) The Red Falcon squad includes an all-black German Fokker Dr.I triplane, referenced in Meyler's article, French Niueport 17, German Pfalz, and the French (but Americans used it as well) SPAD.

Big thanks to my friend Mike at the Painting Goblin for stripping and repainting these models for me. I didn't have the courage, patience, or time to do them so his commission work was crucial in realizing this project as I juggle work, family, side hustles, and more than a few other miniature projects. Check him out on Etsy. Though ultimately striping and repainting these was an unnecessary chore for the talented Painting Goblin since there are multiple options for WW1 1/144 scale aircraft out there. I left the opposing British aircraft in their factory paint schemes as the original paint applications are very nice looking on nearly all of the Wings of Glory models. It seems that across the series, Ares did a very good job producing the Wings of Glory warplanes from the decals, to the paint applications, and even the more minute details on the aircraft. The second hand prices are absolutely insane on the rare or short pack models however- this might be partially due to the company's location in Italy.

All 1/144 scale aircraft are pictured with LITKO flight stands. Damage tokens are LITKO as are the custom Weapons Jam tokens. This is a great little service that they offer with hundreds of different styles to choose from. 6mm dice are for activation sequence and altitude.

Tokens by LITKO

The Black Baron, Red Falcon squadron leader

The rules that I'm using for this wargame take a few bits from the rule book Target Locked On!-Modern Air Combat Wargame by Rory Crabb, which games Cold War and beyond jet combat. This might seem like an odd choice for a post WW1 aerial dogfighting game but I really dig how TLO treats activation, moving, and combat so I gleaned some of that for this module. You can find that ruleset here.

Each aircraft has specific characteristics for their speed/maneuverability, allotted damage, and firepower while the pilots of each plane have two skills-Reaction and Pilot Skill. Pilots are better skilled depending on their rank (class). I'm working on making specific pilot cards for each aircraft including character profiles with a bit of added Pulp flair. But that is a project for another time.

Keep rolling those Crits...

-BB