I have a new project about to start

It is in 15mm again and it is WW2. Here are a few teaser pics;

As you can see there are British and Indian infantry in Tropical KD uniforms, enough for two platoons and a variety of support options and there are also three vehicles, undercoated in Russian Uniform green. 

Can you guess what theatre I am going to do? The colour of the vehicles and the large one in front should be clues.

The figures are all Peter Pig 8th Army and the vehicles are 3D prints from Butlers Printed Models. These are my first venture into the world of 3D printed and I have mixed feelings. The striations from the printing are pretty noticeable which is annoying, and the models needed a lot of cleaning up when they arrived, but I think that they'll do on the tabletop. I added in the Carrier drivers from some leftover figures from my spares box.

You can just see the armoured car's turret behind the body of the vehicle.

These are for Chain of Command. Hopefully, I'll have them pained up pretty quickly.

Cheap MDF houses

I bought a load of cheap MDF houses from eBay just before Christmas, because I needed a lot of basic houses that might do for my games. Specifically, I wanted houses that would mostly work for WW2 games, but maybe also be useful for earlier periods. I've finally got round to photographing them. There are thirteen buildings of varying sizes in total. Scroll down to see them all and read what I did to zhoosh them up a bit.

 As you can see, I've given them all a rough plastering with ready-mixed filler and roofed them with printed slate paper. I've also given some of them little gardens with bushes, paths and vegetable patches.

The base models were very cheap. The whole lot, plus a church that I've stuck together but not done anything else to yet. They came as a three separate plastic bags of bits with no instructions, so working out what went where took a fair while.

Quality-wise, they are very basic and I had all sorts of issues with getting them to fit together properly, the roofs being a particular problem. You can't actually remove the roofs, because they have to fit into slots cut into the end walls. Therefore, only the multiple storey houses can have figures put inside them. I converted one of the longer single storey buildings into a barn, which doesn't look that great, but it'll do on the table.

My aim was to make them look a bit run-down and bedraggled, which I think works OK. The main reason for this is because they lack any detail and I couldn't be arsed to spend much time on them and I also didn't have much time because I needed them for my 15mm Big Chain of Command game that I ran at BIG a couple of weeks ago. I'll do a separate blog post about that.

I thought that I'd finished my Soviets ................

 .... but I decided that I needed to paint up a fourth section of scouts for my recce platoon.

I already had the figures but after play-testing the scenario I will be running at Winter Wonderlard at BIG on Saturday 12th February, it became apparent that what I was planning wasn't going to work in the time allowed, so I re-wrote the scenario. That meant trimming down the size of the opposing forces and beefing up the scouts a bit, so I quickly painted the remaining squad.

Nothing different to the previous lot here, Junior Leader with SMG, 2-man LMG team, four men with SMGs and four with rifles.

Still, the bonus here is that my game will run a lot more smoothly.

I've been thinking about what to do with the various bits I have stripped out and my plan is to turn this scenario into the opening one of a PSC (a pint-sized campaign). I am thinking about four or maybe five separate scenarios that will expand upon the narrative that drove my ideas for the initial too unwieldy one I've had to slim down. I shall have to see how it goes once the inspiration pixie has come to visit me.

 

My two final Soviet tanks

.... well, final for now. There may (i.e will) be more later on.

 These two are also Zvezda 1/100 scale models. On the right is the later T-34/85, which entered service in 1944. The version here is the M1944 model with the ZiS-S-53 85mm gun. 

Around 84,000 T-34 tanks were built during WW2, with 49,000 being armed with the 85mm gun.

The other, larger tank on the left is the IS-2 with the powerful D25-T 122mm. Derived from the earlier KV series tanks, nearly 4,000 of these monsters were built during WW2. The D25-T gun was adapted from the 122mm A-19 M1931/37 and its AP munitions could penetrate the frontal armour of a Panther at 2,500m range and could knock out a Tiger I at around 1,000m. Demonstrating its origins as a heavy artillery piece, the HE shells fired by the D25-T were devastating against infantry and could also knock enemy tanks out because of the massive explosive force generated. 

I've chosen to paint these two tanks in a battlefield condition, with plenty of mud. I've also given them the white aircraft recognition stripes on the turrets, again looking a bit irregular and hand-painted as with the one I did on my earlier T-34/76. Looking at various photos of Soviet tanks in action, these stripes always look a bit scrappy and temporary.

A couple more Soviet tanks

 These are also Zvezda 1/100 scale kits. The tanks are both KV-1 heavy tanks from the early war period.

Yes, they look pretty much identical but they are actually different.

The tank on the right is the earliest production model, the KV-1 M1939, equipped with the L-11 76.2mm tank gun, which was also fitted to the earliest model of the T-34. This version was prone to mechanical problems and only 141 were built.

The left hand version is the KV-1 M1940 with the F-32 76.2mm which was also used on early T34 models. Later models of both tanks were given the F-34 76.2mm ZiS-5 gun, which had a superior performance to both earlier guns.

The only visual difference here is the shape of the gun mantlet.

When painting these, I chose not to paint any markings on the tanks, which was quite common on real-life Soviet tanks. I also chose to make them look quite muddy. I like my tanks to look used and battle-worn rather than suitable for victory parades in Red Square.

I am thinking that these will be useful support options for Barbarossa-period games.

I've also been working on some more later tanks, which I'll post separately.

Most of my time has been taken up with buildings, though; cheap 15mm MDF ones that I bought on ebay and have been zhooshing up so they look presentable on the gaming table. I'll do a post about them separately, too.