He 51 B2

I bought a Classic airframes 1/48 scale Heinkel He 51 biplane fighter for the next Rocketman campaign and I'm building it at the moment. Its been almost twenty years since I built a model aeroplane so I'm feeling a kind of nostalgia in the process, especially when I smell the polystyrene cement which has a pleasant scent of pears. The idea in the game is, the bad guy (Baron von Schöenberg) has a secret island base some where in the Indian Ocean and this island is guarded by a pair of these aircraft fitted with pontoons.

Heinkel made a sea plane variant of the He 51, designated B2 (sometimes labelled He 51W), but alas, this variant is not available in 1/48 scale . In order to make it, I had to acquire a pair of floats from another source, so I also bought a 1/48 scale Arado Ar 196 A/B. This aircraft was a dedicated seaplane and so it comes with two pontoon variations allowing me to convert my He 51 by adding the double pontoon set up from the Ar 196 A. If it works, I'll not only have a 1/48 scale He 51 B2 for my next Rocketman campaign, but I'll also have the parts to build an Ar 196 B, though I have no use for it. Instead I shall build the Ar 196 B as a 'downed aircraft' terrain feature. I'll add images when I build it.

Due to the nature of a table top skirmish game however, the model is only a terrain feature. The range and speed of an aircraft means as an element in the game, the aircraft would always be off table, unless it just happens to be passing directly over the table after a strafing run.


The Heinkel He 51 is an interesting aeroplane in that it was a German front line fighter in the mid 1930's, and used to train up luftwaffe pilots prior to the introduction of the more sophisticated Messerschmidt BF 109 (first introduced in 1937, the year after the next Rocketman game takes place). 700 Heinkel He 51's were eventually built, in a number of variations and some of the first saw action in the Spanish civil war in 1936 with the Legion Kondor where they saw initial success against older biplanes but were soon outclassed by contemporary Soviet built Polikarpov I-15's and I-16's. The technological development curve in those days was immense. Where as our modern war planes are expected to be replaced by a new generation within a few decades, inthe late 1930's, the next generation of war plane was only six months down the line and the He 51 was already obsolete the day it entered service.

This makes the He 51 perfect for Rocketman, or rather for the Baron, since von Schöenberg operates in a shadowy counter world where weapons and resources are skimmed off the top of existing national resources and old stockpiles. No one in authority has noticed two He 51's ear marked for Spain's civil war, have never actually arrived. Instead they were loaded onto a ship for the Indian ocean where they were immedietely fitted with pontoons and pressed into service guarding the secret island base of the Shwartzerkreutz bruderschaft (Brotherhood of the Black Cross) by machine gunning nosy local fishing boats into oblivion, so the diabolical mad scientist Herr Doktor Metzger can carry out more of his insane, unnatural experiements, recklessly tampering with forces beyond human comprehension in the urgent desire to find and perfect the secrets of nature and enhance them in the pursuit of creating, the Ubermenneshe (the perfect human being).

Note that the Shwartzerkreutz bruderschaft are not Nazi's but are in fact an ancient splinter faction of the old, and now largely defunct Teutonic Order of Knights (in other words, they're mad old school Christian fundies) with their fingers deep in German industry and international banking. They have however had previous connections with the Nazi's which is why they show similarities in equipment and uniforms but as Hitlers madness became ever more apparent during the early 1930's, they've quit Germany to become a truly international bunch of Mad Scientists TM.

This way I can set my games in 1936 yet avoid glorifying the Nazi's.
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