Hurry up and Wait

So I had to pause for a bit to job hunt in another state, but now its just waiting on the background check to clear.

Having procured and resized the plans for the C-130 (which I found out after they arrived were for an A model, Doh!), I have handed them off to my dad who has a laser cutter. In spite of our best efforts, the scan I did of the plans was unusable on the cutter. Like, instead of one solid cut per piece, its like a thousand little dots. Sooo… he’s been copying the plans for the frames by hand in a vector graphics program. We’ve been going back and forth with input and slight changes; like not needing the cutouts for controls or fuel lines. While he’s been doing that, I got a jumbo sheet of 1/8 thick plywood from Home Depot, got it cut down to usable pieces. As soon as he gets a work file and starts cutting, ya’ll get to see some WIP shots of stuff going together.

On another tack, I got the 2nd edition book for SAGA and of course, the Viking book. I’ve always loved digging into Vikings and their mythology. They make for fun reading if you get the right book. Wrong book and like all history, its gets mighty boring. I’m not sure what factions to get just yet, but I’m going to have to do a little digging; I plan on getting a figures that can be used in hopefully two factions, so I can start playing with some of the easier factions, then shift to more complicated ones later.

Also on my horizon is a giant box of 28mm miniatures from the Sash and Saber Kickstarter. I already have a stash of Rogers Rangers and French Marines from Cavalcade Wargames, so I’m just adding on to those. I backed at the $200 level, and then added a few packs afterwards. I could have gone nuts and gotten a bit of everything, but I kept it to just building off the miniatures I have. I did add some regulars and light infantry/militia, a unit of Highland Grenadiers, officers for all of them, and also some artillery pieces. I’ll more then enough figures to do skirmishes, but also enough to do larger battles too.

While looking for a work, I also found a game store right in town. So on the rare days I’ll have off, I’ll be trying to duck down to it for a game. I might even take my twins to learn some too.

Getting Down to Business.

A little follow up to Up, up, and away!. I began with looking up the rough dimensions of a C-130H (what the YMC-130s were based off of) to get an idea of what the model’s scale would need to be. What I found is a 40.25m wing span, a 11.6 m to top of tail, and a 29.6 m from nose to tail. Not wanting these to be ginormous pieces, I punched the numbers into Excel and extrapolated their dimensions into 20mm (1/80.5), 25mm (1/64), and 28mm (1/58) scales.

So 1/64 is about the middle of the road for sizes, regardless of what size miniatures I’d use. So off to find 1/64 scale aircraft models. Nadda for 1/64. And 1/72 scale models are in the neighborhood of $50 a piece online. Not very economical. So digging through ebay for cheap kits, I found a seller who had plans for RC aircraft, and had C-130 plans in 1/19 scale. I fired off a message to him to see if they were scalable. I got a fairly quick replay yes (I just had to add a note asking for this when I purchased the plans). I’m not able to purchase a model, so I’ll build one.

I got this.

Anyway, to get ready, I took an outline of a C-130 and sketched out the changes to get a good idea of how it would look. 

I found some technical drawings on a UK forum and used a few different pages to blend into this. Sadly they were hosted on Photobucket (yuck) and are covered in their watermark. The location and shapes come from those and these photos of the surviving YMC-130 that had been on display at Robins AFB, GA. 

Though it was moved to a New York aerospace museum in 2018. You can read about it at Aviation Geek and C-130Hercules.net.

---

Now I just need to wait on the plans to get here… 

Up, up, and away!

A topic I’ve been noodling for a while, has been scratch building a set of YMC-130s. Whats a YMC-130? Glad you asked. Its a crazy one off design of the venerable C-130, made to land in a soccer (football for my European readers) stadium in Tehran. They were the lynch pin of Operation Credible Sport. Two things put a kink in plan though: one of them crashed -with no casualties- while testing the retro rockets, and Reagan got elected.

Lockheed engineers had decided to strap 30 rockets to each plane, and they would have been used for both landing and then taking off again after the hostages had been rescued. Check out this video of them in action, but forewarned, about a minute and a half in is the video of the crash.

---

---

Holy crap right? As a wargame scenario, the idea is a perfect “What if?”. Looking at Google maps, the whole thing looks doable.

A standard field is ~110 yds (330 ft) by 70 yds (210 ft), so two C-130s could fit.

I just need to figure out which scale to build it in.