1/600 Scale Japanese Planes

Now that the Olympics are done, I'm able to return to my hobby table and get some painting done. The prior two weeks were utterly consumed with my watching sports that I never think about except every four years. It was fun, but time to get serious again!

Here are the Imperial Japanese Navy planes for the planned Guadalcanal campaign.

This completes what I need for just about all scenarios, except one. I still need to get a few more planes for that one scenario. The green planes are ten GM4 Betty bombers. They're good sized planes even in this scale.

The white planes are twelve classic A6M Zeroes. Their color is not actually white, but a very light tan that unfortunately looks white in these pictures...even in real life too. Not sure what happened, but I think the contrast with the black cowl makes them look lighter.

 

My decals arrived from Dom's Decals in the UK. I was quite nervous about putting them on, but in the end it wasn't so bad. They are not individual decals on the sheet, so you might see some shine from the clear transfer paper in these pictures. Overall they look nice, and I'll re-do my US planes with the decals.

So now all I have to do is learn how to play Check Your Six, and these planes will take to the air over Guadalcanal!

1/600 Scale Cactus Air Force

I finally got my flight stands from Litko, which took over a month to arrive. I guess they're the only game in town, but that shouldn't mean something as commonplace as 1" hex stands should take so long to ship.  Well, now that I've got the bases I can start painting my Guadalcanal 1/600 scale planes.

Here's my US squadron that will last the campaign. These are all the US planes needed to play through the Check Your Six Guadalcanal Campaign. I'll be playing this with a friend, but will supply all the planes for it.

Click for a larger picture.

There are 18 planes total, a bit more than necessary for the campaign. The blue planes are F4F Wildcats and the green planes are P-39 Airacobras. They're on a 6' x 4' felt hex mat made by Monday Knight Productions.  I highly recommend MKP for their fast service and inexpensive prices. They have a lot of different mats from oceans to deep space. It's amazing to me that they made and shipped this mat four times faster than the stupid hex bases took. Ok, no more whining.

You will notice that I hand painted the US stars on the planes. I did order 1/600 scale decals but since these are coming from the UK I figured it'll take forever. Also, these things are so small that I'll probably give up in frustration anyway!  The painted "stars" look like crap up close, but of course on the gaming table both the stars and the overall paint job looks much better. These photos really highlight any mistakes I made.

So, up next are the Japanese squadrons, which will be Betty bombers and Zeroes. Then it's off to battle for these planes!