Religious Psychics? Harrassment And Interdiction Fire!

A potentially confusing title now I'm writing the post to go with it, but hey ho. Last night I finally finished the Grey Knight Terminator Squad I've been sitting on for a while, despite a moment of gut-wrenching, heart-stopping, scream-into-your-pillow frustration. The very last figure, fully painted, was about to be based. I had begun to apply brown paint to the base to take the sand. Then I dropped him. The back banner snapped off! ARGH! Then when I picked him up, I forgot I had the brush in my mouth, and smeared brown paint all over his silver left arm.

Much rage was had. But despite my worst fears, the damage was easily repairable! Hurrah! And you can see the fruits of my labours below:

So that takes care of the religious psychics. This lot - led by a Justicar with a Nemesis Daemon Hammer and equipped with storm bolters, Nemesis Force Halberds and an Incinerator - are available here on my eBay shop for £48 including P&P.

But what on earth do I mean by harrassment and interdiction fire? Well, H&I fire missions were widely used during the Vietnam war to attack the Ho Chi Minh trail and known areas of VC/NVA activity, and such missions were carried out by batteries of 105mm howitzers located in firebases all over the country. Batteries like this one:

This battery of Peter Pig 105s is available here on my eBay shop for £23 including P&P.

In addition to those, I also put all my North Vietnamese Army and various VC-related units up for sale:

Civilian casualties (something for the Free World Forces to avoid, probably) and objective markers - including tunnel entrances - available for £15 here on my eBay shop.

The infamous NVA platoon, with the two scratch-built hidden bunkers typical of the log-and-undergrowth construction found throughout the jungles of Vietnam. Available for £30 here on my eBay shop.

You've seen them before, but now you can buy them: VC porters carrying supplies for the revolution! Available here on my eBay shop for £10.

And that's it - Force Generica's 1 Squad and vehicles are still waiting attention, sadly, and I am currently building up some Plastic Soldier Company 28mm Red Army figures for Bolt Action. Still, at least I got paint to figure!

Painting Points: 4
2013 Total: 122 (82x 28mm, 2x 54mm, 2x tanks)

Macro Function, And Victory In The Morning

For a long time I have heard much about the semi-fabled 'Macro' function on digital cameras, enabling close-up detailed photographs to be taken of small things. Like toy soldiers. Until yesterday, I didn't think I had a Macro function on my current imaging device (a mobile phone). Then my partner, S, told me that it did, in fact, have that... so after kicking myself, I enabled it, and took some photos of some things.

First of all, I dug out my decade-old 15mm Vietnam collection. When I was a teenager, my then wargaming partner (even more of a butterfly than I am) decided we should game Vietnam in 15mm. So, thanks to Mr Pig of Peter Pig, and the now sadly deceased Mike Ruffle's utterly amazing website Grunt! Online (since renamed Eleven-Bravo and now no longer online), I got stuck in. Fairly quickly I had amassed a Vietnamese village, a full-strength reinforced US Infantry Company, a UH-1D slick, an M-48, a platoon's worth of M113s, and some Brown Water Navy assets. Even more amazingly, for me, the whole thing got painted! Meanwhile, my friend painted (but didn't base) the NVA platoon that... I... bought... for... him.

Yes.

So, anyway, they did see one game, but for over ten years they have sat, neglected and alone, in a shoebox and I have decided - now that Flames of War are doing the American War, as the Vietnamese know it - to sell it on. So have some photos of Vietnamese villagers and US hardware:

A US Mechanised Platoon's vehicles - an M113 'ACAV' for the platoon commander's track, and then four basic M113s supported by an M-48 tank. Available here on my eBay shop for £25!

LVTP 'AMTRAC' 'Big Momma' in both overland and waterline versions, with a PBR - immortalised in 'Apocalypse Now'. Available here on my eBay shop for £20!

A Vietnamese village - complete with paddy fields, hooches, VC porters, a tiger, pigs, and two Buddhist monks. Available soon from my eBay shop.

And then I rummaged around in my 25mm EuroFed police v rioters tray and discovered that I had five of Ground Zero Game's New Swabian League troopers which I have been using for, well, the European Federation Defence Force in my Tomorrow's War project. I put them side by side to see how I could integrate them into the short platoon I already have (and experiment further with Macro):

Then I thought it'd be fun to see how my painting style had changed in the rough decade or so since I painted up the urban EF troopers, by comparing two of the same figure side by side:

I prefer the figure on the left - although the scheme on the right makes a great one for urban civil pacification/suppression units!

And, finally, although this probably doesn't count towards my Painting Points, this is what I've been working on of late:

With AK-47 To Africa

Many years ago, when I were a lad, a schoolfriend and I decided to get into the modern imagi-nation period of post-Colonial Africa. We were devout followers of Peter Pig, who remains one of the finest 15mm manufacturers in the world, and so it was quite soon thereafter that I bought the first edition of that wonderful rule-set 'AK-47 Republic', and put my school number and name on it, to ensure that the cads and bounders of St George's School, Windsor Castle didn't steal it during prep. This was quickly followed by several purchases of little metal figures to build the armies of my fictional African statelet, Gshandemala. This country actually had some 'history', for a few months before getting the 15mm bug, the Darkest Africa craze was in full swing, and the aforementioned friend and I had bought a handful of Wargames Foundry Africans to try and do some 19th Century African skirmishing.

Neither project ever came to fruition back then. However, while the Darkest Africa figures were abandoned in a box and are yet to see the light of day, my AK47 force slowly grew over the years, and I have now three reasonable forces for a Dictatorship (Gshandemala), a Superpower Backed Client Force, and a White Settler/Colonial Power. There are plenty of stands left to paint, and I will crack on with them over the next few weeks with the aim being to get them finished so that I can start adding to them again.

Here are some pictures of some of them. Featured here are forces from the People's Republic of Mbantuland (Soviet-backed) and the Gshandemalan Armed Forces (dictatorship).

Above: Mbantuland Army. On the left are five infantry platoons, a weapons platoon, and a HQ platoon making up the 'uWele' Company of the 7th Regiment. On the right rear are a BMP and BRDM from the 19th Armoured, right middle are a T-55 and a T-34/85 from the 1st Armoured, and at right front two UNIMOGS with their AAA guns from the 329th Artillery Regiment. At the extreme right can be glimpsed a Gshandemalan BRDM.

Above: Some of my Gshandemalans. In front is a reinforced platoon of Civil Defence Force militia with their Land Rover 'technical', and behind them are a platoon of the feared Internal Guard security troops with their trademark black berets. The BRDM is an Internal Guard vehicle.

Above: Finally back to Mbantuland, and the shameful unpainted. These are an understrength company of Mbantuland People's Militia - a part-time territorial force that is of better quality than many militias, but still less reliable than a regular unit. They are, however, well equipped, with each platoon having a DSHK 12.7mm HMG and a stand of RPGs... not to mention the recoilless rifle with the HQ!

Tomorrow I will post the rest of my Gshandemalans, and show off my white colonial force (which is, of course, mostly black Africans) together with some of the (in)famous 5 Commando!

Good Lord! Signs Of Life, Doctor!

Greetings! Well, with my last post occuring in August 2010, you'd be forgiven for thinking me dead, possessed, or otherwise out of action.

In reality, all that happened was that life put toy soldiers on the back burner for quite a while. I have been doing various bits and pieces, not least of which has been Dark Eldar related (more on those in another blog post). However, due to cashflow issues and time demand/supply - e.g. I demand x hours but am supplied with y hours instead, a highly unsatisfactory situation - I haven't been able to post about anything I've done for quite a while.

To give you all a brief update, I've been thinking long and hard about consolidating and cataloguing my array of projects and figures before I launch into any more. Note I said 'thinking', not 'doing', as while I was engaged in this Khurasan Miniatures had the gumption to release 15mm Gran Chaco War figures. Together with Peter Pig Assault Guards, QRF Vickers Type A and Type B models and Old Glory's Vickers Carden-Lloyd mk VI tankettes, a pleasantly sized Bolivian force can be easily built; the Paraguyans will need to comprise large numbers of the very nice Khurasan figures for now.

Anyway, I suppose what I'm getting at in this short and rather rambling post is that I'M BACK and daily updates will resume once again. Pictures will start coming back towards the end of the month, once I get my laptop back from the repair shop and once Sky connect the house to the interwebulatron.

In the meantime, I will be boring (or intriguing) you all with tales of my various projects and my need/want list(s). I trust you'll stick around, or at least come back for pictures...!

For now, I'm off back to work to try and fund some Khurasan purchases in the near future.