Birds of Prey Miniatures:
We are pleased to announce the pre-order process of 1:350 scale miniatures
for Birds of Prey. We will be taking pre-orders for these in waves of four
jets at a time; the first four are:
- F-14 Tomcat
- F-5 Tiger II
- F-86 Sabre
- MiG-15 Fagot
Each of these jets will be sold in a separate blister pack; An F-14 blister
has two jets. The F-5E blister has four, the F-86 blister has four, and the
MiG-15 has four.
Some of these jets will likely be multi-part castings and take a bit of glue
to assemble.
Each blister has a price of $17.95. When the total number of blisters
pre-ordered hits 200 (whether that's 140 F-14s, 20 F-15s, 20 F-86s and 20
MiGs, or 50 of each), we'll start getting the ball rolling on production.
People who commit to the pre-order price get a 10% discount on the cost of
the miniatures, and get to know they're helping put these in production.
In general, going from 'hit the preorder threshold' to 'take orders on the
shopping cart' will be 1-3 months. Once we take orders on the shopping
cart, the lead time ranges from 6 weeks If the stars align properly to
twelve weeks if Reaper Miniatures is backed up on production, or a master
needs to be re-done.
Why 1:350 scale?
First, so that our jets will be compatible with the aeronautical diorama
community, who use the 1:350 scale as their standard for naval and fighting
aircraft displays.
Second, because we've seen enough jets at "just about" 1:300 to 1:285 scale
to know that that's a crowded niche, and the quality ranges from good to
awful. Our miniatures are created through a rapid prototyping process; the
detail you see on the rendered images is the detail you'll see on the
finished minis. We consistently get details as fine as a 0.3 millimeters to
show up on our spacecraft minis, and because they're generated at exactly
the same scale, they will be (within the limits of metal shrinkage, and
making wings that will survive casting) in scale to each other and their
real world counterparts.
Third, because they're the right size for the hexes most commonly used for
Birds of Prey: Air Combat in the Jet Age, large enough to show a lot of
detail, and small enough to work with our magnetic flight basing system.
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