Ebay find: 6mm Baccus Achaemenid Persian army

I've been meaning to get around to do Persians to oppose my Hoplite Greek army for a couple of years now, but have been kept busy by other projects. Then I noticed a Hungarian guy using the name klviktor2012 selling a fully painted Early Achaemenid Persian army that was based for Warmaster like my Greeks as well! Obviously I bid for the army and got it for a very nice price indeed. Everything went smoothly with klviktor2012 and I received the carefully packed army today. I'm really happy with these models! I now have about 1000 Warmaster points or 3-4 Hail Caesar divisions worth of troops for each army, plenty to get me some Greek & Persian Wars action!

The whole army

Closeup.

And my Greeks for comparison. The base colours differ somewhat but it only serves to distinguish between the sides.

Finnish Airforce Museum BF-109 simulator

There is an beautifully modeled BF-109 fighter cockpit and a simulator at the Finnish Airforce Museum in Tikkakoski. My wife treated me to a session so I got to take it for a spin!

The simulator has a BF-109 cockpit with working switches, gauges and the like. There's even a gunsight projected on glass, just like on the real thing. The craftsmanship on the cockpit was really impressive. There is a 270-ish degree wide field of view projected by three projectors and the simulator was running IL-2 Sturmovik, a WW2 flight simulator classic.

Overall view of the simulator. Three projectors are used to display a wide field of view to the virtual pilot.

The cockpit.

Trim and flaps control.

Landing gear and engine controls.

Centre stick.

A projection gunsight.

The rudder pedals and such.

I had an hour booked in the simulator during which I got to try out taking off, flying around and landing (got down in one piece!). I also flew two different combat flights and did ok. It's funny to experience your brain being fooled by the wide field of view into thinking you are in motion. Doing quick turns even made me a bit dizzy.

I have flown IL-2 on my computer using a joystick before and this experience was definitely more immersive. It was also my first time flying with rudder pedals which will take some getting used to. In addition, having the gauges in the cockpit instead of on a screen meant that I could actually read them during the flight, something I find really difficult to do normally. Still, flying this thing wasn't as difficult as I thought. I recommend trying it out if you get a chance!