Taxila sector aircraft
If you have watched any of our previous streams, then you know we’re not content to just play a boring old Aeronautica Imperialis game with the basic GW-standard aircraft! Without trying to totally break the mold, I set out to give the Taxila Sector aerial forces an aircraft that looked distinctive, but played fairly similarly to one of the GW Imperial fighters.
Of course, the first thing I settled on was the model - I found some awesome aircraft over on Cults3D and immediate downloaded them and sent them over to Chris for printing. Of course the scale on a few of them might have been a little outside what I was looking for - at least for Aeronautica!
But anyway, nevermind the HUGE Stormbird. We’ll get back to that model, later!
A quick paint job of GW Aethermatic Blue Contrast with Stormfang drybrushed over the top gave it the look I wanted. Canopies were a new experiment, this time I used Army Painter Contrast 2.0 Magic Blue and it worked well, on the bottom aircraft in the photo below:
For the stats, I based it on a Thunderbolt fighter, but with one minor tweak. In Double Eagle, the Thunderbolts have boosters that they can only use to take off rapidly from Forward Air Bases (F-A-Bs). I opted to give the Pterodons the Rocket Boosters trait for two reasons - it gave them an ability to disengage from a fight easily at Altitude 3 and it fit part of the narrative that these fighters were able to quickly react to situations that a Thunderbolt would slowly trundle over towards. (The players might run into that more in a later mission!)
Here is the card that we used in Episode 1 - even thought the local Pterodons mostly just flew around the board and had the Megafauna taking swipes at them. For their sake, I hope they perform better on their next outing, or else the Imperial Training Officers might have to investigate their pilot logbooks!
