I’ve been working on this for awhile, and we managed to have our first game last night. We both thought it worked great. We played two games, each completed in under an hour. Here is the first vic of Spitfires:
The Spitfires are completely finished. I have 4 109s that are almost completely finished. You can see them coming in this crap photo here:
I’ll put up some nicer pics when they are done.
Blood Red Skies is a game from Warlord that has been out awhile. This year they released an updated version called Air Strike. The game is played with 1/200 scale aircraft on some plastic stands that come with the game. I wanted to do it in 1/72 so created some stands that I can put the models on. In a Wargames Illustrated interview Andy Chambers said they are working on a 1/72 version which should be released soon. I was very far into making my own stands when I heard this and I’d like to show them off, but if you are interested in gaming this in 1/72, you will probably be able to, with kit from Warlord soon.
I had these bases created:
The base is 3″ in diameter. It has pointers on it every 45degrees around the base. These are used in determining front and rear arcs, for firing and being tailed and side arcs for being fired at with deflection shots. The front pointer tells you the front of the stand and is used when determining whether you are tailing someone. The round token marks pilot quality (2 through 5 in Blood Red Skies). The square cut out on the right is for a microdice. You don’t need that in the game, but I had it added just in case we need to mark something in the future that isn’t accounted for.
The plane sits on top of the stand on a magnet. It took me some time to figure out how to get the planes to stay on the top of the stand and be manipulated. In BRS, a plane is in one of three states. A plane with advantage is depicted as climbing, a plane that is at a disadvantage is depicted as diving, and a neutral plane is flying level. Pilot actions during the game cause this state to change, so you need to be able to manipulate that easily.
I tried a few things that didn’t work then came across this article from K&J Magnetics: Magnetized X-wing mod . That looked like it would work so I ordered some components and tried it out. It’s perfect! A friend of mine made up the flight stands, 3″ high, and the bases. I ordered 3/8″ magnets, north and south magnetized, and 3/8″ unmagnetized steel balls. You can see the whole assembly here:
I glued the north magnets on the sticks with CA glue and the south magnets on the bottom of the plane with CA glue. The ball just sits in between. I didn’t take pictures showing how powerful these are, but it takes a bit of pulling to get the plane off. I have held the whole thing upside down and nothing has moved. Now it’s easy to swivel them on the ball to make them climb or dive of bank or whatever, but it will take quite a bit of effort to knock them off.
When I paint the planes, I put a mask with tamiya tape on the bottom of the plane to keep a segment of clean plastic for the glue to stick to.
Painting Distractions 
Lovely and I like your mounting solution, be stealing that idea
Cheers
Matt
Hey, this inspired me too. I’ve bought the Airfix Blood Red Skies Battle of Britain game from Warlord Games. But I would like to ask you, how you create unit cohesion with the decals. It’s giving me a headache looking for them.
Right. It’s a bit of a challenge.
For the Germans, Printscale decals makes a decals sheet for JG 52 and JG 54. I use the kit decals for the squadron markings and then add the numbers from the numbers on that decal sheet. You can kind of go bonkers figuring out what they looked like. There are some specialist books with a lot of details. But I just chose the unit insignia that came with the Tamiya kit for the 109 and then added numbers from the printscale sheet.
For the Brits, I did two different things. For my hurricanes I got individual decals for the Polish squadron. There are two packs from Techmod decals that will get you 4 planes. These decals are extremely thin which makes the clear parts invisible but they are very delicate to work with. For the Spits, I just picked up RAF letter decals and made my own squadron markings. You can find out which squadrons used which letters. This website will get you a few and the pulldown on top will get you links to the rest: https://battleofbritain1940.com/nos-54-72-squadrons/. I don’t have the size I used near to hand but can find that tomorrow if you’d like.
(If you are in the US I buy most of these from an ebay seller RebelAlpha. I’m not affiliated at all but had great service from him.)
I was hoping that with the airfix release of the rules they would offer some squadron decals sheets with enough generic markings to do half a dozen planes from some sets of squadrons.