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 

 

"Seven Days to the River Rhine" Cold War Battle Report!

                                         

On the occasion of a recent visit by Conscript Greg I hosted a game of Seven Days to the River Rhine, a Cold War game that Greg has taken a shine to (our usual go-to rules for the period is Team Yankee and I was curious to see how these compare). And when I say "I hosted" that's what I mean - Greg supplied the scenario, ran the rules, and brought his lovely Canadian and Soviet forces here all the way from Toronto!

We set up a table located "somewhere in West Germany"... there's a secondary highway and railway lie running across it and a Shell service station (at top) and an Aldi convenience store (at bottom) along with several abandoned cars and trucks. We had to include the big electrical pylons too of course! Anyway the Soviets entered from the short table edge at right and had to push through and off the opposite short edge. The Canadians deployed within 12" of that short edge and had to stop the Soviets. Easy-peasy!

 

Conscripts Bill, Frederick, and I played on the Canadian side. We had four Leopard C1s, five M113s filled with infantrymen, two M113 TOWs and two Lynx recce vehicles. We split these assets pretty evenly across our zone, taking care not to occupy the open ground along the highway, as we were warned by Greg that vehicle weapon ranges are unlimited and "if you can see it, you can kill it." Duly noted!

The Soviets had a platoon of T-80s, a bunch of BMP-2s full of infantry, and a BRDM recce vehicle. They lined up across from us ready to come at the Canucks.

Here is the Canadian left flank.

                                        

And here's the right side.

                                        

Soviet deployment across their start line.

The Soviets moved some of their BMPs and their BRDM up the middle with the tanks coming up their left flank. You can see some of their vehicles on the road.

 

The T-80s hooked around beside the Aldi... you can see a flaming Leopard in the Shell parking lot... this is the result of an aggressive move by yours truly... I pushed one of the tanks up to put some pressure on the Soviet right and knocked out a light vehicle or two, but I wasn't mindful enough of the "dismounts"... one of whom knocked out the tank with an RPG :-(

While the T-80s seemed fairly impervious to our 105mm guns and TOWs, the Tornado airstrike did the trick!

Here's Bill surveying the scene. While the Soviets made a late push with the T-80s and the Canadians lost a couple M113s, a Lynx, and one or two Leopards (can't recall), as Greg predicted it came down to army break points. In SDttRR each model taken out contributes to army morale loss, basically the owning player rolls a die and the result is subtracted from your army morale . If your army morale total gores below 40, your force bugs out and you lose the game. On (what turned out to be) the last turn, we had some order tokens left and I decided to unload everyone within LOS on a Soviet infantry squad cowering in the Aldi parking lot. We ended up destroying the squad, which was the only loss on either side that turn. The Soviets rolled for the morale loss and it came up big, taking their army morale below 40 and losing them the game. We were lucky we hadn't lost anything that turn as our army morale was only at 42! It is entirely possible for both sides to lose, of course...!  

Here's the gang of combatants, L to R me (and Keke), Dave V., Bill, Mike F., Hugh, Greg and Frederick. A great time was had by all, both in the game and in generally catching up. My thanks to Greg for running the game and supplying the models, it all looked very good indeed and the game was great fun! 

15mm Moongrunt Project from GZG

Well this is what I've been up to hobby-wise, instead of painting Plains warriors and Seventh Cavalry troopers. But now I'm done this and can get back to the Little Bighorn project. But let me talk a bit about this one first.

I posted a couple weeks ago about how visiting the Museum of Brands in London, England got me onto Space:1999 and the Eagle spacecraft, and how buying one of those got me back into 15mm astronaut combat, and this post is the culmination of all of that. I wrote about how I'd bought and painted some astronauts in EVA suits from Ground Zero Games, but together with that order came two "armies" from GZG's "Moongrunt" range - a Chinese PLA space force and some British that will stand in for NASA astronauts - I just liked the look of the British models and their suits better than the GZG Americans. The NASA gang I've painted from the GZG British is shown in these photos.

The GZG models are sold in packs of six, and I wanted a decent platoon on each side, so I ordered four packs, in this case three packs of "riflemen" and one heavy weapons pack. These I divided up into three sections of seven models each (fve riflemen and two with rocket launchers), and a platoon command section comprised of the platoon commander and two flunkies.

The models were painted pretty simply, with heavy overbrushes of Celestra Grey, Corax White, pure white, Nuln Oil wash, then pure white again. Guns were Leadbelcher with Nuln wash, and I painted a red armband on the platoon commander and blue ones on the squad leaders.

I also built and painted a vehicle and passengers for the force. This is a pretty cool little 8-wheeled buggy that carries driver, squad leader, and six passengers. 

I used some Lunar "NASA" decals on the vehicle.

You can remove the passengers. I superglued them together in groups of three (one on each side of the compartment) to make that easier.

I also added some weathering on the vehicle hull. I suppose that dust and tiny micrometeoroids would weather stuff on the moon.

Here is the opfor - the Chinese People's Liberation Army Space Force.

I organized the force the same way as the other one, but the Chinese have more heavy weapons, so they get four in each squad of seven men. I know that eight is an even luckier number in Chinese culture so I might either reorganize the force or just buy another pack of these guys.

First squad. The leader has a red stripe on his helmet. I first heavily brushed the models with Celestra Grey, then painted the suits Mephiston Red and Evil Suns Scarlet, then finished the helmet, boots and gloves with Corax White and pure white. Guns are Leadbelcher with Nuln Oil.

Second squad, contains two heavy rifles and two rocket launchers.

Here's the transport - a rocket-powered hovering sled. I made a base for it using magnets on the support post and underneath the vehicle.

So when the vehicle lands, you just take it off the flying stand.

Of course the passengers are removable (they are all superglued to the central seating construct) and the vehicle can be used as a cargo transporter!

I did a rough job on some cargo for the bed.

Well that's this project finished for now! This will let me get back to the Little Bighorn and I'm trying to motivate myself with some new reading - "Hokahey - A Good Day to Die" by Richard Hardorff, that chronicles the Plains warrior casualties of the LBH battle.

Anyway the next thing to do with these models is have a game of some kind. I also have to get a larger terrain mat, probably 4x4 feet. If you have any suggestions please put it in the comments!