Always interested to hear your ideas.
Sets of national markings for WWI are a tricky subject: the problem is that there are so many variations in sizes and proportions - sometimes for the same aircraft - the SPAD XIII, for instance, had a myriad of subcontractors and broadly speaking, each one had their own particular cockade size, location and sometimes different colour proportions - and then we have the issue of french cockade colours..... British roundels varied with the chord of the subject machine's wing and sometimes there were also variations in colour ring proportions, early/late colours, with or without white outlines etc. The closer you look, the more of a minefield it becomes.
Another issue (particularly for 1/32nd scale) is the sheer size of the roundel decals and the space they take up on a decal sheet. Print costs are a function of area as well as sheet volumes and colours employed, so an A4 decal sheet with just large roundels on it costs as much to print as an A4 sheet using the same colours and providing markings for masses of different machines.
When we design decal sets for kits with known poor decals, I usually include national insignia appropriate for the subject and we'll continue to do so.
For 1/72nd scale the cost issues are easier to cope with, due to the smaller size and perhaps we can look again at producing some national marking sets in this scale.
Now that the website is jogging along I want to introduce a separate "subscription" section where I can seek support for specific ideas and proceed when there is sufficient committed interest. I am finding this tiny market of ours increasingly difficult to predict and this approach will, I hope, help prevent me having expensive shelf-sitters (like the RE8 set) and also give the chance for 72nd and 48th scale modellers to back their own scales. Keep an eye on the website for this development in the next few months.
Thanks for the ideas, chaps - keep them coming!
Rowan
