Thirty Years War Dragoons & Guns

Dragoon unit (mounted & dismounted) from Warlord Games' "Epic Pike & Shotte" range.

I will borrow Mike F's recent and perfectly expressed sentiment - this is another "Dereliction of (Posting) Duty" post...I have been absent from blog posting for months owing to a series of work projects and a change of computer. I don't know what it is about getting a new computer, but each time I get a new machine it is harder and harder to get the access to the blog. Life getting in the way doesn't help, but, well, that's life, right? There just hasn't been time to sort the posting stuff out.

Judging by the blog posts, it would seem my brushes went still at the end of the last Painting Challenge and have stayed that way since. Not so! I have been painting. My mental health tends to stress when I can't paint, after all. But my painting has been really scattered - even by my own already scattered standards. There has been no constructive focus on a single project. Rather, it has been a couple figures for one project here, a stand of figures for another project there...nothing is really accumulating. Between demands of work, a lot of travel and other life things it has been tough to find the time to really power through and focus. My painting has instead been just a few minutes at the end of the day...finishing part of on 28mm figure, or three or four 10mm figures or whatever...

Anyway, there are a few things that progressed sufficiently to count as "finished" - among them are these additions to 30 Years War project. Here we have a unit of Dragoons and a group of light guns. These are all plastic from Warlord Games' "Epic" Pike & Shotte range. 

Dragoons

Officer and ensign. I think that is an Imperialist flag?

In the "Pike & Shotte" games the dragoons rate as lighter cavalry, but ah, not only can they skedaddle around the battlefield, they can dismount and fight as infantry! Thus Warlord Games provides sufficient figures to represent the unit mounted or dismounted. 

Rear detail on the sculpts - not too bad, they manage to keep a lot of character on the cavalry, and the poses look fine from an arms-length away.

There are fewer mounted figures than in the usual horse units, to convey the lighter/thinner aspect of the dragoons compared to the other mounted units while in the saddle. 

The sculpts look best "from the side", as you can see there are some challenging "cuts" (I think that is the right term?) on some of them, especially those carrying the muskets, but overall I still like the look. They get the job done. 

The small flag is meant to represent an Imperialist unit, but I couldn't tell you anything about the flag, and if you told me "well, actually, that is a Protestant unit" I could not prove you wrong :) I mostly just want to ensure I use the ensigns where I can to add some character to the unit. 

Dismounted dragoons, ready to hold some ground...

I like the mix of poses in the group....some firing, others grappling with getting those old-timey muskets loaded and ready to go!

The flexibility inherent in the idea of "mounted infantry" is a tempting thing for gamers...but it never seems to have been a major factor in large battles? I'm so used to the whole "oh, the dragoons are actually just used like other cavalry" thing common in many later horse & musket historical settings that I don't know what I would actually hope to accomplish with the whole mounted infantry aspect of these troops in a pike & shotte engagement...but it would be fun to try!

Light Guns

Light gun battery, ready for action!

These three guns would/could represent a single battery of lighter guns for the 30 Years War period. Again, I am in the process of painting up an Imperialist force, so I suppose these are Imperialist/Catholic guns, but really nothing about them in terms of their colouring marks them as one side or another. 

So much red cloth on that one crew...the officers will need to keep an eye on that lot!

They are ready to open fire on whoever they are told to by those paying them, or promising to pay them!

So that's all for this post...I hope I can regain some discipline/focus both in painting and in posting photos on the blog! I have to say, seeing photos of the chaps all set up does give a little boost of motivation, so I'm hoping that will help a bit as we go through the summer. 

Moongrunt Terrain from Brigade Models

 

So with the completion* of two 15mm forces for "Moongrunt" (Chinese PLSF taikonauts and United States NASA astronauts) the next thing was whip up a bit of terrain for battlefield dressing. Rocks and craters are great but a couple of structures would be ideal. Enter Brigade Models (UK).

These little structures are excellent. They're one-piece resin castings (the dish on the larger building is a separate metal part) and practically no cleanup is needed before painting.

 

I primed this Storage Dome with matt white spraypaint and painted in the grey panels (Mechanicus Standard Grey), then applied some oversized decals I'd had made for my Hammer's Slammers project in 2012!

The other building (Utility Dome) was primed grey and that was an error I won't repeat. The panels took a million coats of white paint to get smooth. Ugh.

I built this structure with the comms dish. I got two metal comms dishes from Brigade in a small baggie - but unfortunately they didn't include any parts to mount the dish to the port on top of the structure. So I had to scratch build that out of scrap plastic sprue. Annoying but not a major problem.

I also got a couple of large fuel or oxygen tanks with cool little keypads. I really shoulda taken some closeups of these eh!

 
The structures are great and will be useful when we set up a game. Service from Brigade was great, shipping was expensive as it always is from the UK. Easy to paint of course and nice to get this out of the way and back to the Little Bighorn project...

*I said "completion" but the project likely isn't complete... I had an email exchange with GZG's Jon Tuffley who said that he's got some crew-served heavy weapons for Moongrunt coming down the pike in the next few months... I can't wait!

Dereliction of (Posting) Duty

 Wow! I really fell off the posting. This will be a photo heavy post as I’m doing this on my phone and can’t bang out a huge amount of text. These have been printed for a while. Before PrairieCon actually! The two squads of sci-fi troopers are for my fallout Brotherhood of Steel army. The models are from Northstar Miniatures Stargrave troopers. They’re excellent wargaming miniatures that come with just the right amount of detail. Very easy to paint. The only drawback is the shoulders look a little bare compared with the rest of the body armour. That was a simple fix with an order to anvil industry for some shoulder pads.

 These guys I took to Prairiecon for The Doomed. All 3 are from Knightmare Miniatures and are metal! I forgot to add a model for scale, but they’re large monster sized 28mm on 40mm bases.

This last model is a kitbash for The Doomed. He was extremely overpowered in the game and 12 year old Con attendee Xavier used him with ruthless efficiency!

I also have some more models for The Tyrant’s Legion which I have yet to photograph. I should get on that.

Thanks for visiting!

Milestone: Five Million Pageviews

 

Confession time - I tend to be a "milestone marker." That's not to say that I sit by the Interstate with a "Mile 35" sign in my hands, but I do like to recognize milestones when they come up. For example, I've been wanting to do a Little Bighorn game for quite a few years and since this year is the sesquicentennial of the battle I've used that as motivation for the project. Hopefully it comes to fruition despite (numerous) distractions!!

So when you look way down to the bottom of the page you'll see a milestone. By the time you read this post our blog will have had well over five million pageviews. I think that's pretty cool - not that we're famous or anything, but this number (as well as appearing in the pages of no less august a publication than Wargames Illustrated, a few years ago) gives us a bit of visibility, and I hope credibility, in the hobby.

Thank yous are in order, first to my fellow posters on this blog, but mostly to the readers (including hopefully not too many Russian bots) that generate all those pageviews. As I've said before, if you keep on reading, we'll keep on writing, and please leave comments, we love to hear what you think.

Dallas