Pardon the shoddy attempt at a "clever" title. I figured I had to follow suit after Kashirigi's excellent review of the Fiddler's Green Gotha. With that out of the way, here is my sub-par review of another card model biplane bomber!
After receiving the Flight of the Giants box, I really wanted to get some miniatures on the table. Being a fan of card modeling instead of buying minitaures (Between bicycles, motorcycles and photography, I have enough expensive hobbies already, so when it comes to gaming, I'll cut whatever costs I can! ), I've built a few gaming models before, but nothing this small. As such, I figured I'd build the free one before paying for kits.
The model is available at Bob's Card Models free to download PDF files, but he seems more than happy to accept donations for his hard work. The website is here: http://www.bobscardmodels.com/
Instructions are present, but being an engineer, I disregarded them completely. I only had to hide my shame and go read them a few times.
The kit goes together pretty easily after being printed at 50% on 110lb cardstock. It is quite obviously designed to be constructed at twice the size, so I made a few modifications. For the struts, I wrapped 22 gauge craft wire in the paper and then stuck the ends of that under the surface of the wing (wire bent at a 90 degree angle towards the inside of the wing). This construction method has made the entire wing structure extremely sturdy, and I will most likely be using this method again. furthermore, a couple of details are just too fiddly for me to deal with (the rear gunner's hole I just replaced with a flat black sheet, I omitted one of the struts holding the engine up, and there's some rigging detail I just flat out didn't want to bother with). Additionally, I made the guns out of black cardstock from scratch.
That said, I'm relatively happy with how the model came out. Most definitely not "showroom" quality at this scale, but it should be more than adequate for the tabletop. Perhaps a more experience small scale card modeler would have better results, but it's good enough for me!
The scale seems to be close enough when shrunk by 50% (or more appropriately, just doubling the DPI in The GIMP and printing with Irfanview - seems to have better results than scaling in an image by 50% and printing at the same DPI as the original image). The length of the fuselage comes out to about 5.25" or so, which seems to be on par for 1/144 scale.
Sadly, I'm still experimenting with mounting solutions, so she's not quite ready for the tabletop. However, the hard part's done!
Additionally, now I'm curious how hard it would be to get custom laser engraved acrylic. I'd love to have transparent bases the size of the cards with all the fire arcs on them. I'm hopeful I will be able to get most of the FotG planes on the table soon enough. Sadly, unlike the standard WoW bases, they're not standard across all aircraft in either shape or fire arc, so I'm assuming manufacturers will be less likely to bring a product out (especially in light of the fact that 1/144 scale models of a few of these aircraft aren't exactly accessible).
Anyhow, here's a few more thousand words with a Dr.1 and DH.4 for scale reference.
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