Knights of the Sky

At my local club we play the occasional game of Knights of the Sky, a WW1 aerial warfare set of rules that Richard, one of the long standing club members, devised for use with 1/72nd scale model aircraft. The rules use a system of hex movement and manoever based on the actual flight characteristics of the aircraft types involved. It also uses an ingenious but simple representation of vertical flight using homemade telescopic magnetic stands. Very neat!

A few years ago there was a year long aerial campaign at the club which consisted of a series of linked scenarios set in 1917. Each month we would get together to see how many of our pilot characters would shoot down the enemy, go down in flames or survive to fight another day. It was a really top notch campaign with plenty of excitement, some hilarious moments and lots of daring do.

Needless to say my pilot, Lieutenant Twistleton Twinkle RFC, did not do too well, although he did survive a number of dogfights, which was an impressive achievement considering the fact that for most of the campaign he flew a rickety and very sedate RE8. His rear gunner, Corporal Scrote, even shot down two of the dastardly Hun opposition in the process.

Perhaps the best bit of the campaign was the opportunity it provided to indulge my childhood interest in model aircraft kit building. As a result I glued together at least two dozen WW1 biplanes, triplanes and monoplanes over the space of a year or so, including French, British, German, Russian and American aircraft from 1916 through to 1919.

In doing so I tried to produce a number of flights of two, three or even four aircraft, so that I could provide planes for further multi-player games that had a common squadron identity. However, the last couple of planes I built were one offs, a Roland DII and a Nieuport 17, as I wanted to fly them myself!

Anyway, I realised today that we hadn't played a game in a long while so posted a message on the club yahoo group to the effect that we should set one up for next month. It looks like we're going to get enough players together for a good game, so I'll be dusting off my latest efforts, the Roland DII to be precise, for a dawn patrol over the Ypres sector pretty soon.

I'll post some photos of the game but in the mean time, I'll take some pictures of my existing collection of planes and post them here.