Epic: Let's Paint Aeronautica Imperialis

Let's face facts: I love painting little planes. What got me back into this whole hobby in the first place was Star Wars: Rebellion, and I liked painting all the little TIE Fighters and Y-wings and so on so much that I bought Star Wars: Armada and all of its squadron expansions just to paint more of them. And Warlord's Blood Red Skies. So yeah I think I like planes.

Also, 6mm Epic was my first love, and I thoroughly enjoyed painting and playing Adeptus Titanicus. However, I've finished painting all my Titanicus stuff for the moment. Is it, therefore, high time to get my hands on Aeronautica Imperialis, if only for the sheer pleasure of painting all the little planes? Especially since they just announced a beautiful golden flyer, and I love gold? Yes. Yes it is.

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My friendly local game store still had all three starter sets in stock, and I dithered for a while over which one to buy. Eventually my Gladius experience tipped me over into Wings of Vengeance: the Imperial Navy flyers are represented in Gladius, and my brother likes playing orks in our multiplayer games, where he makes devastatingly effective use of Dakkajets.

I'm going to start with the Thunderbolts. Somehow, I did not learn my lesson about fiddling with tiny-as-hell magnets when I built my Epic Knights, so I'll be magnetizing their underwing hardpoints. I've still got a whole pile of those Primal Horizon 1/16"×1/32" magnets, and at least I can console myself with the thought that if I use them on these models, I won't have to use them on anything else. The Thunderbolt's wing is just barely thick enough to take the magnets:

I decided to start with the Skystrike AAMs, and what I ended up doing was simply chopping off part of the pylon to accomodate the magnet. It's not pretty, but it works, and they're under the wing anyway, it'll be fine.

This wasn't as fiddly as I'd feared, but I'm still not doing any of the other munitions unless I need them! So far, this is the most glaring difference between Aeronautica Imperialis and Adeptus Titanicus: with the latter, they've thought about magnetizing in the design of the miniatures, but with Aeronautica, it doesn't even seem to have crossed anyone's mind.

Other than that, the models were a delight to assemble. The quality is similar to Titanicus, which is to say very good, and since there weren't many choices to make here, it was just an easy and satisfying build.

One thing did bother me, though: the bases. Even in that preview of the Custodes flyer I linked earlier, GW always shows the bases completely unpainted. I think that's a tremendous shame, they're big and chonky and practically crying out for paint. There is simply no way I'm not painting that Custodes base gold. Luckily, there's a lovely guide on Goonhammer that shows how to pop the bases open so they can be painted and still stay functional. I tried it and it works.

The planes themselves are going to be painted dark green to match my Imperial Guard vehicles, and if I'm going to do that, I think it would be fun to give them a similar camouflage scheme as I did for my Soviet Blood Red Skies planes. So it's Deep Sky Blue for the undersides.

The blue isn't actually that brilliant, but the light was hitting my desk funny and I like it. I was teaching Swedish history at the time and decided to use the Kalmar union colors for the insignia. Here are the bases:

They were quite easy to reassemble, so I'm definitely going to be painting the rest of the bases as well. For the top side of the Thunderbolts, I painted them Luftwaffe Camo Green with some German Camo Dark Green and Black Green splotches to make a sort of camouflage pattern.

I also went full Soviet on the markings, with the exception that the numbers are significant: these are Blackbird 1 and 2 from whatever I'm going to call my Imperial Navy unit.

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Then it's on to the Dakkajets! Like I said, I've become quite fond of them during our games of Gladius, and I wanted to try my hand at an epic-scale conversion. I was originally going to do this with a 28mm Dakkajet, but I never managed to pick up one of those three-jet boxes until they went out of production. Anyway I chopped a bit off the top and bottom of the fuselage.

And swapped them. With a little putty and some internal support, it worked out just fine.

I assembled the other two in a more traditional way.

And magnetized the hardpoints, if not any of the ordnance (yet). Then it's on to painting, and since my brother's preferred color in Gladius is orange, that's what we're going with.

The Dakkajets have the name of their mothership blazoned across the bottom of the fuselage, and carry a kunning recognition stripe on the wings in white and Royal Purple. I used the same colors, along with some Copper, on the bases.

Then it was just a matter of finishing up the top fuselage and tail section on each Dakkajet, and they're done.

I'm happy to report my conversion was also quite successful.

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My actual first purchase, when I'd decided to do this, was some Arvus Lighters from Forge World, but they took their time showing up. Most of the players in my Rogue Trader campaign have spent so much time flying around in their Arvuses that their characters must know them inside and out. I already painted a Land Speeder in House Frunze colors earlier, so I think these lighters will get the same Royal Purple treatment. I got started with the bases.

The actual models were a breeze to assemble. Forge World resin has come a long way since the old days.

The only complaint I have is that one of them is very wobbly on its flying stand. Here they are:

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I'm not really all that interested in the Fighta-Bommas, so I think I'll leave them in the box for now. Marauder bombers, on the other hand, show up in Gladius and based on my Thunderbolt experience, I think I'd enjoy building them. Even though they have eight hardpoints each.

Eight! Was this really necessary? They're big planes, by the way.

I could paint both Marauders in my Imperial dark green. However, I mentioned that I really liked painting Star Wars fighters. Even though I'm an Empire guy myself, the dirty white rebel scheme was my favorite. I've been meaning to recreate it in Warhammer forever, and now is the time. Therefore, using the Gue'vesa rules in the Aeronautica Companion, here is the first representative of the Shi'ar sept: the Tau bomber What is foolish speech?

I decided to use Light Green as the marking color, and I think it works.

The faction markings proclaim the Shi'ar sept's loyalty to the Group of Seventeen, and the aircraft number is is the green circle. Sadly, the Tau numerals GW has come up with are pretty much identical to ours. Here's the Imperial Navy Marauder:

I did the camouflage colors a little differently, because I figured most opponents will be seeing the bomber from below.

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So here we are: I really liked painting these lovely little planes, and I may or may not have already bought more...

Let's Read Tolkien 91: The King and the Steward 23-24

Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

May 12, 3019

“There’s your Ithilien.”

We're back with Haladdin and the gang, who are making their way across the mountains into Ithilien, with the help of some trollish resistance fighters. We visit the trolls of the Shara-teg valley in a sort of flashback, and then our heroes find some of the Baron's old soldiers.

To use Tolkien's terms, we're now in Yeskov's own particular sub-creation, and a couple of things do stand out.

First, the language. We experience Hotont Pass, Shara-Teg valley and meet Ivar the Drummer. Oh, and they drink vodka. There is no logic to these names, or to the kind of culture and language Yeskov is trying to portray. Everything is eclectic and poorly thought out, and keeps getting worse as the story goes on.

This is underlined by my least favorite feature of the story, which is the relentless anachronism. We again have guerrilla fighters in a preindustrial society behaving like modern professional soldiers. People point bows at others like they're guns and hold modern military ranks. While they're staying with the trolls, Haladdin meets, of all things, a graphologist. The graphologist produces a psychological profile of the elven officer they killed in Mordor, and Haladdin uses this to come up with a key idea for his plan, to which we are not privy.

A lot of stupid things get said about fantasy and "historical accuracy", especially by people who are fine with dragons and zombies, but insist that if there isn't violent misogyny it isn't "historically accurate". As a historian, I consider this very silly. Fantasy isn't history: there's no reason to demand historical accuracy of it in the first place, and when the demand is made, it's almost invariably made in a way that's so selective that it's obvious it's being used as an excuse.

What I think fantasy or indeed any speculative fiction should be is coherent. If you want to portray a pre-industrial society with Middle Eastern influences, then do that. This seems to be what Yeskov set out to do, but it's constantly undermined by his references being all over the place, his unbearably smug narrative voice, and above all by the fact that all of his characters are clearly 20th-century people who for some reason happen to live in a fantasy world.

Tolkien used anachronisms deliberately, to maintain a distance between the narrator and the story, and sometimes for reasons that are entirely beyond me. I still have no ides why hobbits have potatoes. Yeskov uses them constantly to batter the reader into submission.

I'm still of two minds as to whether or not I actually want to see this whole thing through. Every now and then, I read a chapter and I feel like okay, I want to see where he's going with this. Far too often, though, the "look how clever I am" schtick makes me despair. We'll see what happens.

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Next time: merry men.