[Commissar_Will]

Aside from 40k, my other main modelling love is WWI aeroplanes. I'm by no means a master of the art, and I fail horribly at rigging them so tend to leave all the wires off, but it still makes an interesting change from Warhammer. Anyway, I just finished my latest one, a Revell Airco DH2. The mould is pretty ancient (1981), and as such some of the details aren't perfect - for example, the .303 Lewis gun on the front is far too chunky, the ammo box on the pilot's right is somewhat lacking in detail and the the underside of the wing under the engine should be an angled piece of metal leading up to the rotary engine, but ah well. I'm not too fussy, as long as it still looks like what it's supposed to. For an idea of the size of this thing (A 1/72 kit, the standard size for aeroplane kits and about the smallest available commercially), an XV25 Stealthsuit comes up to the top wing in height.







Quick history lesson for anyone who cares - the DH2 was, in a sense, the spiritual successor to the Vickers FB5 "Gunbus", the world's first fighter plane, and is very much alike in terms of design. The ununual design of this plane, with it's pusher propellor and strut-mounted tail jutting out behind the tiny fuselage, was a result of the dilemma of creating a fighter with fixed forward-firing armament that didn't shoot it's own propellor off - the solution here was to have a pusher propellor mounted at the back, instead of the usual tractor propellor mounted on the nose. The only real alternative to this was a metal deflector mounted on the propellor blades to deflect any bullets that hit the propeller - however, the problem with this was that you were never quite sure where the bullet was going to be deflected to! The DH2 proved a good fighter for it's time, and was the first Allied plane that was capable of facing the German Fokker Eindecker - a monoplane designed by Antony Fokker, creator of Richtofen's famed Fokker Triplane that was the first aeroplane of the war to be fitted with Fokker's synchroniser gear. Able to fire through it's propellor by having a mechanism connected to the propellor that was synchronised to physically stop the gun from firing when a propellor blade passed, the Eindecker had caused horrific losses to the Allies in what became known as the "Fokker Scourge" - and it was the DH2, combined with the Allies perfection of the synchroniser gear, that ended it.

[Warwolt the engineer]

So is this just assembled or painted as well? Either way its well, a bit neat.

[Commissar_Will]

Yes, it's all painted. You don't really tend to get pre-painted aeroplane kits, unless you buy them second-hand already made of course. I've had bad experiences with the paints usually used on aeroplane kits, ie Humbrol, Revell and the like, and so I've painted this one using GW paints, which tend to be much more reliable and give way better coverage - the downside is as there's many, many hundreds of different colours in those ranges, most of which are varying shades of military green, grey, brown or tan, you tend to have to do a lot of mixing to get a good match on the colours, and a lot of it is just guesswork. The colour on the underside of the wings, for example, is an odd mix of Snakebite Leather, Kommando Khaki, Skull White and a bit of Dwarf Flesh - it'd take me absolutely ages to accurately mix up another lot, I had to spend a good hour just experimenting with that until it matched the box art!