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Flying for the Imperial Japanese Army in Yoshi's 'Battle of Chishima' campaign! Having recently had a lot of fun spending more time with CFS2, one campaign I was keen to revisit was 'The Battle of Chishima' by Yoshitsugu 'Yoshi' Nagata, which I'd last enjoyed maybe 10 years ago. My original interest in this campaign sprang from an interest in Japanese WW2 warplanes. One of my favourite 1/72 kits 'back in the day' was Revell's Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon). I had my model painted up just like the box art, silver overall with wavy green camo on top and yellow leading-edge prop warning panels. By pulling off the two-bladed prop you could remove the engine cowling to reveal the radial engine, the cockpit canopy could slide back and I even managed to make the undercart retractable (albeit they didn't pivot, but could be manually pushed in place, either up or down. My kind of kit! The real Hayabusa was very popular with its pilots despite being rather underpowered, under-protected and under-armed by the standards of the time, even it first entered service in 1941. According to Osprey's 'Dogfight - P-40 Warhawk -vs- Ki-43 'Oscar' ' only 40 were in service by the date of the attack on Pearl Harbour and the first models had a two-blade fixed-pitch prop and just two rifle-calibre machine guns. However, its superb handling and manoeuvrability reportedly endeared the US-dubbed 'Oscar' to its pilots and it was certainly more modern that the even more manoeuvrable but slower, spatted-undercart Ki-27 that it supplemented then replaced as the IJA's premier single-seat fighter. Vulnerable to enemy fire it may have been, but it was no pushover. CFS2's Hayabusa is, I believe, the Ki-43IIb model with more powerful engine, stronger, shorter-span wings, some protection for pilot and fuel tanks and two heavy MGs, in full production by October 1942. Although it's one of the Artificial Intelligence-flown planes in CFS2, this is one sim that has no shortage of freeware and payware mods, including ones to make the AI planes flyable. The only catch is that some of these come with no cockpit so you just have external and 'gunsight' views (with the reticle hanging in a clear sky, not what I'm used to but great for gunnery and a good view!) This time around I wanted to fly the Hayabusa in both CFS2 and IL-2. The former is first up for a mission report here at CombatAce and features Yoshi's Chishima campaign. Chishima is better known to Westerners as the Kurile Islands, which stretch in an arc from the north-east tip of the Japanese mainland all the way to Russia's Camchatka Peninsula, just across the northern Pacific from Alaska. In mid-1943, US air raids began to probe the Japanese defences in this region and it's these relatively small-scale tussles that this mini-campaign represents. There's a set of five single missions designed to be flown in sequence, which is fine by me as I can live without the rather excessively goal-oriented CFS2 approach to campaigns. The Chishima missions aren't all intercepttions: for example the third mission has you providing air cover for a submarine whose engines have failed. Here's the link for the campaign: http://simviation.com/1/browse-Missions+%26+Campaigns-85-2 And here's the brief for mission number one. It's short and sweet but you get the picture! There's no indication of the enemy's strength, but I was leading a flight of no less than eight Hayabusas so, sensibly or otherwise, I was feeling fairly relaxed about the odds. Given that the local air defence set-up was liable to be a tad primitive, I suppose the limited 'int' is perhaps realistic! We were operating from Kitanodai airfield, which was on the island of Paramushiro (see pic of the real airfield here: http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/P/a/Paramushiro.htm ) and was apparently used as a base by the 54th Sentai. The sim crashed if I tried to open the map (it's on the 'Advanced Info' tab) in the briefing screen so without further ado, I kicked the tires and lit the fires, and consulted the map once the mission had loaded. Here it is. The enemy bombers - as in, the red plane icon - are evidently targeting installations on another island just across a narrow channel from our sea-side base. Sensibly, you can see that the only mission goal is to survive; there's no silly requirement to destroy at least a fixed number of enemies. And here we are, good to go. I've always liked this camouflaged natural metal finish on the 'Oscar' and the CFS2 version, though designed for the AI, is fully up the the high standard of the CFS2 player planeset, complete with animated parts like extending flaps and wheels which bounce on their oleo legs as you roll on the ground. Bring on the Yanquis! ...to be continued!