"1/600 Cold War WarPac Roundels?" Topic

Dom's Decals does some very nice 1/600 Polish and Soviet aircraft roundels, but those seem to be the only ones available. I have some East German ones, but does anyone know of Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, or Bulgarian decals?

I'm not aware of any.

I was afraid of that

Perhaps someone will be along shortly to counter that.

Alternatively, if you have a color printer, you could try making your own.

I made some custom ones, back in the day, including East German markings, and they turned out quite nice.

It isn't that difficult to do.

I just used MS Word to produce them, and an inkjet printer.

I can't seem to get the resolution fine enough. They look a bit fuzzy when I do them. After all, they are just a millimeter or so.

Set your printer to max res. (1200 dpi is recommended, and with a fresh, or freshly cleaned color cartridge, if possible), and when working in MS Word, zoom in to get the level of detailing desired, e.g. 200 or 400% zoom.

I've had decent luck with printing my own, after making them by hand, in Word. Copying images, and then reducing them may, or may not work, due to the very small sizes.

Many roundels are just overlapping circles of different colors, so shouldn't be too hard to do, with a little effort. Certainly, much easier than trying to paint them by hand.

The more complex ones, like the East German markings, are a bit harder.

Make sure to test print a copy on paper first too, before using up the far more expensive decal film

Being computer challenged, this is easier said than done

Unfortunately several of those are horribly complex designs at such a small scale. Czech remain on my "when I actually find some free time" list, with East German a possibility, but Romanian / Hungarian / Bulgarian, with their "roundel inside a star with a really narrow border" designs are an alignment nightmare as "commercial" decals, since the white undercoat layer and the colours on top need to be utterly perfectly aligned – even a tenth of a millimetre out will mean the print's going straight in the bin….

How unfortunate

Dom, I'll buy the Czech and East German ones whenever you get to them

My strategy has been to just do Soviet a/c and then if some scenario calls for them to belong to someone else in the WarPac, they'll have to make do. That's mainly due to being cheap and not wanting to buy yet more MiG-21s etc. – I've got enough between the Soviets, the Arabs, the North Vietnamese and the Chinese! But the decal thing factors in a little bit too.