A bit of naval painting and some 4WDs

This long holiday weekend, I did manage to keep a bit of my free time out of Mrs. History PhD's greedy grasp. 

A small shipment from Shapeways arrived Saturday, which included some 1/600 West German DKW Mungas:

That's with light grey primer, so that you can see them. They look like 1970s US Post Office delivery jeeps. They'll be nice for tarting up command stands. 

Also included in the Shapeways box were some 1/2400 WWII French Naval vessels and I've finished two of them. The Marne class aviso Somme, which unlike her two sisters, had only one funnel (the others having two):

and the aviso Tahure, the name ship of its class:

As an aside, the Tahure and the Somme's sister ship Marne both took part in the Battle of Koh Chang on January 17, 1941, when a small French squadron decimated the bulk of the Thai Navy, much to Mrs. History PhD's consternation. 

Both classes served in WWI and WWII. If you're not a naval aficionado, "aviso" is a term the French used as a catch-all phrase for any kind of warship smaller than a corvette, but larger than a patrol boat. Other navies used the term "sloop".

I also polished off the Greek minelaying cruiser Helle (by Panzerschiffe):

The Helle was torpedoed at anchor in Tinos harbor by the Italian submarine Delfino on August 15, 1940, two months before Greece entered the war. However, it's still a good model for "what if" scenarios. 

That will do it for this weekend. Hope you had a good Labor Day holiday. For my UK readers, I believe this was also September Bank Holiday. I guess the rest of the world just lost out. 

Grenadiers make me go "hmmmmm"

I've been working on some Saxon grenadiers for 1806, which I've painted as Battalion #6 (von Liechtenheyn), and I've run into a fundamental snag. Hmmmm....

For those who may remember my earlier posts on Saxon infantry (Dec 13 and 20, 2014), I painted stands that could represent a company for smaller games and a battalion for larger games. In other words, four stands:

as a battalion (minus the grenadiers and schützen) or one stand:

as the whole battalion. That's both battalions of the Kürfurst Regiment. It seemed a very sound and flexible system to me.  

Now the snag. Most (but not all) armies of the Napoleonic period stripped away the grenadier companies of each infantry regiment and combined them into composite grenadier battalions that served separated from their parent regiments. "All well and good", you say. However, this means that half the battalion has facings of one color and the other half has a different color (for Austrians, it's three different colors!). 

Saxon grenadier battalions had four companies (two from each of its two parent regiments), so in my small game system, I need four stands; two of each facing color, but for my large game system, I need one stand, painted half and half! Damn it! There goes the simple interchangeability. I'm not in favor of having to paint up grenadiers in both systems!

So, I've decided to drop the "one company per stand" and go with just larger games, which is after all the entire reason for doing 3mm. Here's my grenadier battalion:

My only gripe (don't I always have at least one?) is that even at 3mm, it's blatantly obvious that these guys are wearing French-style bearskins. They look nothing like the modified Austrian-style that the Saxons wore:

and certainly not even remotely like the Prussian grenadier cap:

I know these guys are tiny, but come on! There are some things that paint just won't cover up!!

Anyway, the von Liechtenheyn battalion in 1806 was a composite of the grenadiers from the Kürfurst (#1) and von Bevilaqua (#10, the former von Bünau) regiments, faced red and a medium blue. As per the convention of the time, I've put the troops from the senior regiment on the right. 

As this is a long holiday weekend (Labor Day), I'm hoping to get in a fair bit of painting and maybe a second post, if Mrs. History PhD cooperates. I know...."yeah, right."

More next time...maybe. 

Jack of all trades and master of none

This weekend, I've spent varying amounts of time working on 3mm cavalry, 3mm Cold War artillery, helping Mrs. History PhD with the details of her new FOW Vietnam vehicle, and I was badly bitten by the 1/2400 WWII naval bug (after about three years since the last bite), so I've painted a number of Bay Area Yards' wonderful resin ship bases and dusted off a couple of GHQ ships. All of the above is a very verbose and evasive way of saying I haven't finished a damned thing, despite a considerable amount of time at the hobby desk this weekend! Does anyone else suffer from hobby Attention Deficit Disorder or is it just me?

In any case, here's one of my ship bases:

That's a British Abdiel class minelayer on it. As you'll notice, the stand is finished, but the ship is still in basic 507C light grey. I have yet to shade, detail, and add a camouflage scheme.

And I did manage to finish two squadrons of the Saxon Prinz Clemens Cheveauxleger Regiment for 1806:

Just another three squadrons to go. 

Hopefully, I'll be more ambitious next weekend. See ya!

50,000 views!! And thank you to Arrigo!!

I went past 50,000 views overnight! It took 25 months, so I don't suppose that it broke any records, but still...yay!!!!

In addition, Mrs. History PhD would like to pass on a big thank you to Arrigo the Crazy (one of my followers). He was kind and generous enough to dip into his spare parts box and send her a couple of M60 machine guns, a good quality M2HB, and a few other odds and ends. Stand by for one of them to put in an appearance in Mrs. History PhD's next FOW Vietnam project. Thank you Arrigo!

Kob khun ka (the female version of "thank you" in Thai).

The eternal wargaming question

First off, this is my 200th post!!!

Yay!!! Not bad for just 25 months. Ok, now where was I....?

Tonight, as I was sitting and painting some 3mm minis (Napoleonic cavalry and Cold War West German howitzers), Mrs. History PhD said "Ok, I'm confused."

Her: "Your main projects are supposedly 3mm Cold War and 6mm Vietnam, both of which are moderately well progressed, with lots of vehicles, buildings, some terrain, etc. So at some future point, you'll obviously be able to be finished with them and use them for gaming."

Me: "Correct, my love. But because new minis are always being released, I doubt I'll ever reach total 100% completion on either project, but 'finished', more or less."

Her: "So why are you fiddling with samurai and Napoleonics and talking about ACW and WWII North Africa? Will you honestly ever get those projects far enough along for them to actually be useable?"

Me: "Almost without a doubt, never."

Her: "So why do you dissipate your effort, limited free time, and very limited financial resources on things that you already know will never come to fruition, when it would be much wiser to devote those resources to projects you are likely to finish?"

Well, therein lies the conundrum. As I explained, much of what I do at the hobby desk generates enjoyment of its own accord, regardless of whether it will ever be completed or not. Hobbies aren't taken on as a cold, calculated exercise to be scheduled and quantified and held to a deadline (well, maybe, as my Dad's family is German, but my Mom's family is French, so no). It's supposed to be an engaging and entertaining way to unwind and pass the time. It's art, not science. 

If you're not born with the wargaming bug, I think you'll never understand, nor will any amount of explaining it help you. The point isn't the destination; it's the trip. As Oscar Wilde said "Arriving isn't important; traveling is." Having a huge, beautiful wargaming army all completed would unarguably be wonderful and I hope I get there, but really, it's the endless messing with creating it that is my real hobby. 

In Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story The Nine Billion Names of God,

a sect of monks had devoted centuries to collecting all of God's various names from every culture that ever existed, forgetting the old story that once every name was known, time would end. At the end of the story, as the last name was written down, the stars began to quietly go out, one by one. Maybe if I ever actually finish anything, I'll find that I'm not interested in it anymore. Or maybe I'll inadvertently destroy the entire universe. Hey, it could happen!!

3mm cavalry is a real pain in the ass!

This weekend, I've been fiddling with my long-neglected 1806 Saxon chevauxleger regiment. My chosen stand size for Napoleonics, 40mm x 20mm, should each hold two cavalry squadrons. When I have a regiment that needs an odd number of squadrons, I'll do a 20x20 stand as an end cap. 

Unfortunately, O8s cavalry is cast as files of two and not ranks (which would've made basing soooo much easier). So I'm having to go through the slow and painful process of gluing a file to the base and then texturing a thin line next to it, then gluing down the next file:

etc, etc, etc. It's the only way to get into that tiny, narrow space between files. Talk about tedious!! 

But I have discovered that painting 3mm horses is a breeze. This is always one chore that I absolutely detest in 6mm, but here, the details are so tiny that they can safely be slopped over with a suitable "horse colored" paint, of which I have three or four (I can't honestly have all the horses looking identical, now can I?). Stone Mountain Miniatures does a really great line of paints, part of which is an excellent selection of horse colors. 

So, on I go. More on all this when I have a few squadrons that are presentable. 

Marcin's 155s need Viagra!!

Today I received a small shipment from Picoarmor, included in which was a pack of O8's U.S. 155mm howitzers (the post 1962 designation for which is M114) and the barrels have a very pronounced droop!!

Hmmmm, that's not good! All the other artillery will laugh!! I think my UK readers would call that "brewer's droop". Marcin, those molds seem to need some corrective attention. 

A bit of this and a bit of that

This weekend, I've been kept quite busy with the "honey do" list, which Mrs. History PhD produced with almost satanic glee, so hobby related activities have been at a bare minimum. 

However I did manage to sneak in a platoon of West German Skorpion Minenwerfers (in English, that's "mines thrower"):

These are from National Cheese Emporium on Shapeways. I think they're slightly sub-scale (or maybe O8 vehicles are slightly over-scale), but they are very nicely detailed, although exorbitantly expensive for being just four tiny slivers of plastic. Hopefully O8 will get cracking on putting out other vehicles for my projected West German engineer company. 

And for my East German panzer pioneers, I finished a platoon of BTS-2 armored recovery vehicles:

These were based on a T-54A chassis and oddly, the dozer blade was mounted on the rear. Similar western vehicles always mounted the blade in front. For 1981, I should be using BTS-4s:

with their massive snorkel, but Marcin has provided only BTS-2s thus far. 

Actually, ARVs were not part of pioneer units in the NVA (nor in any other army, as far as I'm aware), but clouds of them would've followed any WarPac armored unit and attaching them to my pioneers seemed reasonable, at least for storage purposes. 

That's all I've been granted time to do this weekend. When I said that hobbies were far more important than chores, I got this face:

Hmmm. More next weekend (hopefully)!

Decals for my samurai

The 6mm samurai decals from Baccus arrived today and unlike the samurai minis themselves, these arrived in record time...well, 16 days, which isn't bad at all. 

As you can see, they are Takeda mon. 

There are enough for 24 figures wearing sashimono and bigger ones for 6 nobori. At $9.50/£6.25 including the postage, this just isn't going to be a financially viable option. With even a moderate-sized samurai army, I'd get through several hundred decals!

And I've already detected a problem:

The decals don't quite fit. As small as they are, the decals hang off the back side of the sashimono to a noticeable degree, though maybe it's not as obvious in the photo. Trimming the decal paper smaller won't help, as it's the actual image that hangs over. 

Well, I'll use these up, as I paid through the nose for them, but I'll have to find a cheaper, smaller, bulk alternative. Damn it!! Any ideas?

Oh! My Osprey on the Battle of Nagashino has also arrived, so yet more reference work to wade through! More meanderings from me on the weekend.

My first regimental command stand!

This weekend, I completed the third battalion (a T-55 unit) for an East German panzer regiment. It's two battalions of T-55s: 

and one of T-72s:

It's part of my East German 9th Panzer Division (It will be either the 21st, 22nd, or 23rd Panzer Regiment, all of which were part of the 9th Division in 1981, as was the 9th Motor Rifle Regiment). 

That being the case, this is the first time I've ever needed a Cold War-era regiment/brigade command stand. As a visual aid, I go with the number of vehicles on the stand to quickly identify its command level; one vehicle for company command, two for battalion, etc. I have always used 1"x1" (25mm x 25mm) for my command stands. There's ample room for two vehicles to fit quite comfortably (and even a bush here and there):

However, three was just too many. They looked like they were on top of each other! As I doubt that I'm ever going to need command stands for dozens of regiments/brigades, I really don't want to buy a whole pack of a new, larger size square stand. So, after rummaging around in the numerous sizes I already have, I settled on 40mm x 20mm. It's what I use for 1/600 Napoleonic infantry:

Looks fine to me. As this regiment is partly T-72s, I've assumed the regimental commander would refuse to be seen in older equipment. You know how officers are. But the 2IC is still in his T-55. I threw in a BTR-50PK:

to represent a staff vehicle. Also at the regimental level was a forward air control (FAC) vehicle, a BTR-60 R975:

As usual, the best I can do is a filed down BTR-60PB.

Now all I need to do is convert my pre-existing motor rifle pioneer company into one for a panzer regiment (four extra MTU-20 AVLBs, tracked transport for the pioneers, and lose the ditch diggers) and I'll have the entire regiment completed. As soon as I can convince Mrs. History PhD to let me clear off the kitchen table, I'll let you have a look. 

More next time!