I have a question for my fellow piece junkies. I was rearranging part of my sculpt collection last weekend when I noticed something which had never caught my attention before. Out of the dozens of German Ju-88 bomber sculpts that I own (going all the way back to the original A&A Europe and including the brown Ju-88s that were provided for Italy in the 1st edition of A&A Europe 1940), one –and only one – of those sculpts is substantially different from the others even though it’s clearly the same plane. I’ve attached a picture, showing it in between two other Ju-88s for comparison. Its wings are shorter and have rounder tips, its tailplane is shorter and shaped differently, its engines have larger cowlings, and its cockpit is more pointy. I’ve been trying to figure out why just one of my planes would be different from all the rest, and the only explanation which seems plausible is that it comes from A&A Battle of the Bulge: BotB is the only A&A game ever published which provides just a single German bomber unit, and I own just one copy of it. Does this match anyone else’s experience with BotB or is there a different explanation that I’ve missed?
Damnit Marc now I have to go check my sculpts LOL!
Damnit Marc now I have to go check my sculpts LOL!
Spoken like a true sculpt enthusiast. :) On the bright side, it’s a good thing my question was about the Ju-88 bomber rather than the P-38 Lightning fighter. The P-38 sculpt is much smaller than the Ju-88, and it’s far more numerous because it’s appeared in almost every edition of A&A and because fighter pieces are always supplied in greater numbers than bomber pieces. Checking out the Ju-88s in a collection that also includes P-38s is fortunately like checking out a few German Shepherds standing among a pack of Boston Terriers.
The difference seems pretty radical, so I am surprised that I have not noticed it.
The only reason I would not have noticed it is probably because it is from Battle of the Bulge, which I own, but have only played once.
And I believe that you probably answered your own question by stating that you have only one example, and that BotB has only one German bomber.
The difference seems pretty radical, so I am surprised that I have not noticed it.
It took me seven years to notice it (assuming the bomber comes from BotB), and it purely by accident that I did so. I was checking the Italian sculpts from Anniversary and Europe 1940 1st edition to make sure I had correctly identified the Japanese and German sculpt designs that were used in those two games, and at one point I compared the brown “Italian” bombers with one of my black German Ju-88s. As luck would have it, the Ju-88 I picked at random from amongst several dozen others happened to be the one from BotB. I put it next to a brown “Italian” Ju-88 from Europe 1940, saw they were different and went “Huh?” My first assumption was that Italy had been given different Ju-88s, since the Italian ones all looked so different from the “normal” black Ju-88. It was only when I checked the black bomber against all the other black Ju-88s that I realized that it was this particular German bomber which was the oddball unit.
The evolution of the pieces have always bothered me somewhat.
The battleships have grown since the 1st gen 1942 from the mid 2000s for all the countries
except Japan whose battleship was actually the largest ever built.
The panthers? Oh my god!!! I love the original sculpt but as time passed to the new sculpt,
They got skinnier and skinnier. The Shemans did the same til they now look like the 76mm
gunned versions. The Me 109s grew much thicker wings compared to the versions prior to
1942 while the Spitfire went the opposite direction. They did manage to straighten out most
of the wing Bowing of many of the fighters and Bombers.
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. I may have to convert old Battleships
into cruisers since some of the early ones are about the size of the destroyers.
The panthers? Oh my god!!! I love the original sculpt but as time passed to the new sculpt,
They got skinnier and skinnier.
What Panther sculpt are you referring to? Because I disagree, though I may be interpreting you incorrectly.
The first modern Panther sculpts were in Europe (1998), correct? They had the same design in Revised and D-Day. I really did not like those. Very box like and a poor representation overall.
The rebooted Panther came out in Battle of the Bulge. I loved that one immediately. The turret was better, the gun was way better and the hull was larger. The old Panthers were not very intimidating, but the new ones were great.
Now, I don’t know if the current version has varied greatly in size in BotB, Anniversary, Global or 1941/1942… however, I do know that the old version had some major sizing changes. Pretty sure that either D-Day or Europe had the very skinny one.
Humm,
My Ju-88 from my BotB is the regular one, same as all the others I have from my collection of A&A boardgames.
J. 8-)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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”
Thanks for checking out your units and for the possible explanation. If this is indeed a manufacturing error, I’m quite happy to leave it as it is rather than trying to change it because it doesn’t look deformed or defective. I have plenty of normal Ju-88s, so having a unique one makes for a nice addition to my collection. I guess I could use it for special missions – maybe even for delivering A-bombs! :-D
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.
