Sunday, July 5, 2015

Progress on a Soviet VDV battalion

Both Mrs. History PhD: 
and I:
have been feeling a bit under the weather this holiday weekend, so painting has been at a bare minimum. However, I have managed to complete a second company for my VDV battalion, this one being equipped with BDM-1s:

As I said in my last post on this subject (June 21, 2015), battalions with mixed vehicle types would almost never have happened in reality, so shame on me, but I don't need masses of VDV troops and I do want to use both BMD-1s, and BTR-Ds:
which means that in MY Soviet Army, this battalion will have two companies of BTR-Ds and one of BMD-1s. 

Here's my second company:
There's the extra SA-14 Gremlin launcher kept at company level. 

Stand by for the third and final company (BTR-Ds again). After that, it will be time to do up a few support units and then the battalion will be finished. Finally, something/anything that actually gets finished!!!

5 comments:

  1. Cute blue berets :-D

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    1. Thank you! Obviously in reality they would have worn a standard helmet with a camo cover to match their uniform, but I just can't resist the blue beret! I do the same with a dark red beret for my Polish airborne.

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  2. Airborn same the world over see a camera and outcomes the beret, when you say no mixed fleets does that include the support weapons elements? so in a BMD 1 equiped Bn do the AGS 17 travel in BMD 1. also in BTRD equiped `bns do they have an AT pl like BTR Bns? If your only doing 1 Bn why not do a DShV unit? VDV in battalion size ops seem a bit rare?

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    1. No, most support units would have BTR-D, UAZ-69, or the air-droppable version of the GAZ-66. Basically, this unit is just to support my East Germans and was born mostly from the need to use BTR-D and BMD-1 models that I already had. VDV certainly had the ability to operate at battalion and even regiment level, but it was uncommon. However, WWIII would've been an uncommon situation, so I'm going for it.

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    2. Also, BTR-D battalions do have an AT platoon, which was transported in BTR-Ds. BMD-1 battalions had no such platoon, as the AT capability of the BMD-1 itself made anything else unnecessary.

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