Monday, April 20, 2020

From TeemuL: Lee and Grant (16 points)

Something completely different again, as you might guess. A couple of 15mm World War 2 tanks to reinforce my Allied tank group for TANKS! (if I ever get to play the game).

Lee


These both are from the same box, it is possible to build two different variants from the parts and luckily I bought two of these on a sale. Since I expect to play TANKS at some point in this scale rather than any other game, I'd think it would be nice to have lots of different kinds of tanks rather than multiples of one. I might be wrong.

Grant


They were easy to assemble and fitted my approach of painting very well. I used my See-This-Is-A-Camouflage method on these, brown spots on green to indicate that they have a camouflage. And because I plan to use them on TANKS I didn't need to pay too much attention on historical details, so I skipped all the markings and weathering etc.

Later Grant has different guns and lower turret
These two bolster my Allied force on TANKS and they also use much less space when assembled and painted compared to having them non-assembled in the box, so I get my first ones on the S list.

U: 0 (total 3)
N: 0 (total 1)
W: 0 (total 1)
F: 0 (total 12)
R: 2 (total 14)
S: 2 (total 2)
Points:
16 points for 2 15mm vehicles (total 158)

From Minion TeemuL:
It is nice to see those M3 variants and I like your simple camouflage!

From GregB: 10mm Prussian Artillery for FPW

10mm Prussian artillery, ready for battle - models and figures from Pendraken.
Some more FPW progress that I'm happy to share - a bunch of 10mm Prussian artillery pieces and crews.  There are two Krupp "4 pounder" guns, and six Krupp "6 pounder" guns. The guns and figures are all from the excellent Pendraken.

Divisional guns - Krupp "4 pounders" - there were four batteries equipping each Prussian division.
The steel breech-loading artillery of the Prussian army hit very hard during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The artillery was far from the only reason the French lost, but it was a major difference on the battlefield and, as you might expect, accounted for a significant proportion of French battlefield losses. I use air quotes around the "poundage" of the guns as I believe this rating was a theoretical one, the size of rounshot that might fit in the barrel. The actual shells were heavier, had a much better range and hit harder than the equivalent roundshot. Bruce Weigle has an excellent overview of the artillery and firearms from the war in his rulebooks, which are 150% worth buying even if you never intend to play the games...

The BIG GUNS...Krupp "6 pounders", six batteries in a Prussian corps' artillery reserve.
It will be a tough thing for the French player if/when this lot deploys on the table...
The "4 pounders" were divisional guns for the Prussians, with four batteries equipping each division. The "6 pounders" were corps-level reserve guns, with six batteries available to each corps.

Another view showing the great details on the models and castings - Pendraken is fantastic.
Painting artillery is always tricky. Curt summed it up well for me with two words - "spoked wheels".  He is right, that is probably the worst part, but just in general I struggle to paint artillery and crews from any "black powder" era. I'm just not very confident about what the guns themselves "looked" like, or any of the equipment that went with them.  These were no exception, so it's great to have them out of the way!
  
I don't enjoy painting artillery, so it's great to get this bunch of it finished!
This lot will round out the artillery contingent for the Prussian side of the Wissembourg OOB - the German allies will have 18 batteries of artillery they can bring to bear on the poor French! My brushes now must turn to Prussian infantry and a few more command models in order for me to finally reach my goal of completing all of the models necessary for the battle in 10mm. I suspect, however, that there may be a diversion to different subjects along the way before progress on my 10mm FPW project resumes...

From Barks: Soviet NBC troops

Is there anything scarier than Soviet gasmasks? I used this quarantine challenge to finish off ten of these Eureka figures I started many years ago, and to add another five from scratch. I had to try and match my originals, and both my paints and style have changed in the meantime!







I was surprised at how quick they were to paint- no faces, camo, hands, boots, extraneous wargear, purity seals, skullz etc... They're lovely figures, and now I've gone and ordered myself a copy of Zona Alfa...