Junkers 88 Sculpt Question

@sgtwiltan:

I’ll check my BotB Germans and compare as well.

Lucas the Panthers in my thread are from the 1999 Europe versions which are the ones I like.
Look at the panthers at HBG for the D-Day and Revised and you can see a huge width difference
from my modded ones. However, not all the panthers were made that way. They got skinnier while
retaining the same profile till the new panthers in BotB. The guns needed Viagra for sure but the
overall shape and size are the closest to the GHQ 1/285 model. The newer Panthers with sideskirts
are smaller in 1/300 scale and for some reason doesn’t excite me as much. I might change my mind
once I start modding them in more than prototype form. They can be backdated to earlier versions but
with sideskirts.

Ah, I understand. I will have to go back and take a closer look at the ones in your thread.

Took a look again and I can see they are from the old Europe. However, they look so great after the mods that I couldn’t even tell before.

The yellow basecoated ones look especially excellent. How much is a tank from GHQ? Do they come 1 to an order or do they have 3 or 4? I assume they cost a bit more and would be difficult to make an entire game set with.

GHQ are $10 per 5.
I have a bunch but I never used them due to weight and ability to shed paint and noodle guns.
8 1/2 1941 tigers= 1 ghq tiger.
Think about what they will do to your game box with hundreds of them in your game.

@sgtwiltan:

GHQ are $10 per 5.
I have a bunch but I never used them due to weight and ability to shed paint and noodle guns.
8 1/2 1941 tigers= 1 ghq tiger.
Think about what they will do to your game box with hundreds of them in your game.

Yeah… not impractical, but not recommended either. I wondered at their weight and how they could rip up the gameboard too. I love the detail though.

@CWO:

@sgtwiltan:

The evolution of the pieces have always bothered me somewhat. […] Being a modder, these changes make it hard to get consistency of pieces from generation to generation. I understand the bulking up of parts for gaming and handling reasons but I have to have multiples of each game just to build up my obsession of battalion/wing strength collections.

Yes, I can see how lack of sculpt design consistency is a problem in terms of doing mods.  My own feelings have been ambivalent about the sculpt changes we’ve seen as the games have evolved over time.  I’m rather obsessive about fine details, so at first I was annoyed when I realized that the sculpts weren’t always consistent from one game to the next.  The impossible-to-miss major changes (like the replacement of the original short-gun Panther with the long-gun side-skirt version, or of the closed-strut Japanese artillery piece with the open-strut version) were always fine with me, since I saw them as adding variety and as offering potential use as easy-to-identify alternate units.

The subtle changes were more problematic, however.  From a collecting and organizing point of view, a shape variation poses the question: should I consider this to be a unit that should go in its own storage compartment or that should be mixed with other units of the same type?  I’ve waffled over this question a lot, and currently I decide my answers on a case-by-case basis.  If the difference between two versions is easy to see when I specifically look for it, I’ll tend to consider them separate models.  Some examples of those are the bent-wing versus straight-wing versions of the Russian bomber and the Spitfire, or the standard T-34 versus the one with the very narrow diamond-shaped turret that only appeared in one game (I can’t recall which one).  But there are also some fairly easy-to-see differences that I choose ignore, like the versions of the US destroyer that either do or don’t have a gap behind the bridge.

As for the differences which are hard to see even when I specifically look for them, I ignore those – especially in numerous units like the P-38 Lightning, which has seen all kinds of tiny tweaks over the years.  Ditto for the Sherman tank, in which the turret itself and the hatch on top of the turret come in a variety of slightly different shapes.  It basically comes down to deciding if I care whether such minor differences exist between copies of such-and-such a unit, so it’s really just a matter of preference.

I was never annoyed so much by the slight changes in pieces, but more if I felt they were going about the changes to make things cheaper. Like making the Spitfires extremely thin, or slimming down the ships and tanks.

Now that HBG is making many more detailed and more diverse units, I really don’t care about the OOB pieces anymore, one way or the other. I am probably only going to buy HBG pieces from now on,  because they will have everything OOB does (and more) and do it better.

Just checked my games.
CWO Marc, I think you happen to have a mismolded one.
I’ve got a couple Me-109s with the same short wing disability.
It seems the sculpt was subjected to some extra heat and the tips shrunk.
I’ve had that happen on some pieces I’ve tried to straighten out using the
lighter method.

@sgtwiltan:

Just checked my games.
CWO Marc, I think you happen to have a mismolded one.
I’ve got a couple Me-109s with the same short wing disability.
It seems the sculpt was subjected to some extra heat and the tips shrunk.
I’ve had that happen on some pieces I’ve tried to straighten out using the
lighter method.

––Or possibly the mold simply wasn’t filled completely up. Production defects happen all the time. QC should have got it.

“Tall Paul”

Well I went through and did a sampling of all my JU-88s. AAR and AA50 had thin almost fragile vessels and aircraft across the board every other edition they looked good especially the original AAE and BotB. AA50 had two that had a stubby sort starboard wing.

All in all AA50 and AAR had some lousy sculpts. AAR was really bad but mostly symetrical LOL.

Side note: in some editions my UK units looked damn near mocha colored but just not enough to make a seperate army at a dimley lit table.

Lol

Yeah I’m trying to work Marines into the equation. I have some good ideas about it. It may not be for everyone. I’m really working at trying to come up with D6 rules for all these units from HBG and all the older editions of A&A. Russia especially, You’ve got the brown and the two shades of maroon. Then there’s Japan whoo boy LOL! Lot’s of good pieces.

@CWO:

I sometimes have trouble telling them apart too, depending on the lighting.  When I was reorganizing my sculpts recently, I took the darker tan British pieces from the older games and reassigned them to India.  Great Britain got to keep the lighter beige pieces from the more recent games.  This way, India ended up with less equipment-type diversity than Britain (no dive bombers or APCs, for instance) and it also ended up with older models (like the small-sized Royal Oak battleships) – kind of in the same way that the USMC sometimes gets hand-me-down older equipment from the US Army.

Or we stole em like the M1 Garands in GuadalCanal or Army vehicles in Marine “Amnesty” lots after Desert Storm.
The deal was, you dropped off vehicles not in your TOE, no questions asked and you didn’t get in trouble or have
to abandon usable equipment. The military is quite good about accountability during garrison but not as much during
a SHTF situation.

Hows this for “uniform”

We were, but we got Army M1s as loaners as well.
Here’s a pic of our M60s in Kuwait. Taken by my now deceased Staff Sgt.

Very cool Wil!

Always love seeing your service pics.

Wil,

––Oorah!

“Tall Paul”