IL-2’s newest Collector Plane is one of the more unique entries in the series and its just gotten a big shot in the arm when it comes to content because the aircraft now has a free campaign available that should appeal to fans of the aircraft. Let’s have a look!
Fly “The Little Brother”
Created by Sandmarken, this free 10-mission campaign is intended for owners of the IAR80/81 and IL-2 Battle of Kuban. It’s a notable development because the IAR is still quite new to the series having only been released over the last several months (in two parts) and so getting a scripted campaign for it so soon is welcome sight.
The campaign creator notes that they received community support in creating the mission with well known mission and campaign designer Jaegermeister (I did Q&A with him not too long ago) as well as Andrei Tomescu providing research information and MarcoPegase44 plus Obelix’s livery work being featured in the campaign.
Here’s the description:
The 4th Fighter Group of the Royal Romanian Aeronautics (Grupul 4 vanatoare, Fortele Aeriene Regale Romane –ARR-) was first composed of 2 Squadrons (Escadrila) the 45th and 46th both equipped with the Polish PZL 11, and mainly tasked with training and home defense duties. In July ’42 they converted to the IAR-80 A which was a better performing plane, although inferior to most of its opponents. So it’s pilots didn’t take part in the offensive against the Soviet Union, but once the now famous 7th and most of the 8th fighter groups were decimated at Stalingrad and slowly rebuilding men and material (109G6 for the 7th and IAR-80 Cs for the 8th ), the 4th fighter group received a new squadron, the 49th , hastily converted to the better IAR-80 C, and was sent to the eastern front, where the axis forces were now retreating towards the Crimean peninsula, pushed back by a more and more strong and determined foe: The mighty Red Army.
Check out the campaign’s thread on the IL-2 forums here and be sure to check out the download link there to play through this new campaign. I’m plotting to spend a bit of time flying it myself soon!
Stormbirds 
Having been reading the blog since I got into this sim years ago, it is a great honor to have me and my campaign mentioned here. Thank you! 🙂
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Hey! Great work with the campaign. What very limited time I have with it looked amazing. I can’t wait to dig in!
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Please, would you be able to do a journal on what you think IL-2 is going to do in the future? I think many of us reader would really appreciate that. I’m not trying to butter you up but I think you have done a with job on that in the past.
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Hi J. I’m always happy to write but I guess I would need to figure out what my topic would be beyond what we already know. The summary I did back at the end of 2023 basically is all that we know. https://stormbirds.blog/2023/12/30/a-summary-of-1cgs-brief-room-episode-2-with-lots-of-new-details/
It’s still worth considering something new but I’ll have to give it some thought as to the structure of what I’d say.
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Hey J,
The IL-2 developers said that they may announce the new game engine/project this month and after that, they said that they will start to give us regular updates. I’m pretty sure that Shamrock will write an article about the big announcement, when it comes.
We already know that the first module with the new game engine will be Korea. And the new engine will use PBR textures for the planes. We also know that there will be a FC4 (probably in the old engine). And there’s the third party Odessa map, but Shamrock already reported on that.
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