2008-8-15 Wizkid’s Crimson Skies game is one of several games in the same setting; the original Crimson Skies was a more standard hex based airplane game with record sheets, and there have been a few computer and video games in the same setting.
While I like the premise and much of the material in Crimson Skies I was disappointed over what was left out. I was hoping for more focus on all military aspects of this “alternate” era but of course it’s called Crimson Skies, not Crimson Sea, Air, and Land. I was also disappointed with many of the airplanes it showed. They advertise “faster planes and bigger guns” but you actually seem to get “bigger planes and odder guns.”
Fairchild F611 Brigand
The best example for me of this would be the “Brigand.” In the original boxed game there is a nice CGI picture of each of the included aircraft. The Brigand is HUGE. You can see the tiny pilots, two, on top of a massive aircraft. That just doesn’t “look” or “feel” right to me. This is just one example of many where the image just doesn’t “fit” what I would expect from even advanced pre-WWII aircraft. Some of the weaponry also, to me, doesn’t “feel” right either. Aerial Torpedoes, Rockets, and even lightning bolt guns (from the XBOX game) “really” stretches the limits of believability for me and hurts the sense of “immersion.”
If it were cleaned up some so that it made more “sense” then it would have been a much more enjoyable game for me. So in “My Crimson Skies” I will attempt to adjust and expand on Crimsons Skies so that it makes more sense, at least to me. My ultimate goal would be to take actual aircraft from the late 1930’s and early 1940’s and simply rearrange the “pieces” to make them look more like “swashbuckling” airplanes.
Bigger Guns?
Something that I thought was clever but struck me as wrong was the “caliber” scale used for weapons in Crimson Skies. I think it was clever to stick with the inches scale instead of millimeters because that is what we used at the time. Beyond that I would expect the “Fractured States” would stick with that scale for a longer time because of North America’s isolationism. But come on; look at that scale compared to the actual weapons shown.
Look at the size of those guns compared to the size of the pilot. They must be some awfully big guns right? Wrong, according to the material the “Fury” only has two .30in (7.62mm), two .40in (10.2mm), and one .70in (17.8mm) cannon. Those guns look like 1.0in (25.4mm) to 2.0in (50.8mm) monsters at least. So once again I find myself being pulled out of immersion instead of in to it.
The standardization we take for granted today did not exist in the thirties. Most “major” countries had weaponry that was locally designed, built, and supplied. Also, by the late thirties, some pretty heavy cannons were being put in “light” aircraft. The best example I can think of off the top would be the Mitsubishi A6M, historically called the “Zero.”
The A6M entered service with Japan in 1940 with two 20mm cannons and two 7.7mm machine guns. While this was three years after the “present date” of Crimson Skies, 1937, the general state of aviation technology was at least several years ahead of that year in our history. So that means a front line fighter had two .787in caliber cannons and two .303in caliber machine guns when the heaviest weapon listed for Crimson Skies aircraft is .70 inches?
This is another case of something in Crimson Skies hurting instead of helping “immersion.” So I would guess that the scale should be upped a bit. In fact I should probably just create a table that compares inches and millimeters.
The standardization we take for granted today did not exist in the thirties. Most “major” countries had weaponry that was locally designed, built, and supplied. Also, by the late thirties, some pretty heavy cannons were being put in “light” aircraft. The best example I can think of off the top would be the Mitsubishi A6M, historically called the “Zero.”
The A6M entered service with Japan in 1940 with two 20mm cannons and two 7.7mm machine guns. While this was three years after the “present date” of Crimson Skies, 1937, the general state of aviation technology was at least several years ahead of that year in our history. So that means a front line fighter had two .787in caliber cannons and two .303in caliber machine guns when the heaviest weapon listed for Crimson Skies aircraft is .70 inches?
This is another case of something in Crimson Skies hurting instead of helping “immersion.” So I would guess that the scale should be upped a bit. In fact I should probably just create a table that compares inches and millimeters.
Caliber | Note |
English (in) | Metric (mm) | |
.219 | 5.56 | M16 Assault Rifle |
.295 | 7.5 | |
.30 | 7.62 | AK-47 Assault Rifle |
.303 | 7.7 | |
.312 | 7.92 | |
.315 | 8.0 | |
.354 | 9.0 | |
.40 | 10.2 | |
.45 | 11.4 | Forty-Five |
.50 | 12.7 | Heavy Machine Gun |
.60 | 15.2 | |
.70 | 17.8 | |
.787 | 20 | |
.80 | 20.3 | |
.90 | 22.9 | |
1.0 | 25.4 | |
1.46 | 37 | WWII Anti-tank Gun |
1.5 | 38.1 | |
1.57 | 40 | |
1.75 | 44.5 | |
1.97 | 50 | |
2.0 | 50.8 | |
2.24 | 57 | |
2.5 | 63.5 | |
2.95 | 75 | |
3.0 | 76.2 | |
3.31 | 84 | 18-pounder |
3.45 | 87.5 | 25-pounder |
3.46 | 88 | Eighty-Eight |
3.94 | 100 | |
4.0 | 102 | |
4.13 | 105 | |
4.5 | 114 | |
5.0 | 127 | |
6.1 | 155 | |
16 | 406 | Battleship Cannon |
18.6 | 460 | Yamamoto Cannon |