A Friday’s gaming: 18th Century and Vietnam CSAR.

I’m please to say that the occasional gaming meet ups on a Friday have become a regular occurance. I thought I’d share with you some recent pictures. We have a regular venue which has the added bonus of serving excellent food. For someone who always thinks with his belly this is very important.

Firstly we trialed a set of 18th century rules that Tim has been writing. Great 54mm fun in the best traditions. Rifle fire was pretty nasty at short range and melee, especially involving cavalry, very deadly. Party poppers made a welcome return to represent grapeshot too.

After lunch and after that game had been finished and packed away we set up for a quick Vietnam themed Combat Search and Rescue scenario. 1/72nd aircraft were used with 54mm infantry. The pilot was randomly located in a grid (we used the symbols on the carpet) and a Forward Air Controller had to coordinate the search and rescue as well as directing aircraft to try and stop the NVA overruning the downed pilot. A great little game that we got through twice.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: IDF Achzarit in 1/72pics.

The IDF was the first army to use heavy APCs and I figured it would be interesting to explore their tactical use on the table top… so given I’ve got some suitable figures knocking about I turned to my 3D printer and went to Wargaming 3D and bought this file

The Achzarit was built on the chassis on the T55 tank, the Israelis had captured so many of them in the 73 wars that they decided to convert them to APCs given the losses suffered by their M113s in Lebanon in 1982. The turret was removed, the engine turned sideways which allowed for a back door to be fitted and a whopping 14 extra tons of armour added. They were first used in combat in 2002. In IDF service it is slowly being replaced by the Namer APC that is purpose built on the Merkava IV chassis.

The 3D printer allowed this project to be done affordably given that the kit is either available from Butlers Printed Models for a rasonable price or Cromwell in resin for a high price, assuming you can get hold of it anyway. Printing time was about 18 hours at the finest resolution and some of the detail is a little over scaled after scalling it up so much but it is more than adequate for my purposes.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: Beute Panzer Platoon.

One of the tank history blogs that I follow (and highly recommend) is http://www.tankarchives.ca – a bit ago they did a post on French tanks in German service after 1940. After reading it I thought it would make a nice project for my 3D printer.

The tanks were sourced from the ever prolific Bergmann from Thingiverse. Doing this project really made me appreciate my £d printer as it is not something I would have done if I had to buy the resin models as before.

The tanks were actually all printed out a long time ago- just after the publication of the blog post- but have waited for paint until I got the decals for them. I wanted to num,ber them properly as one platoon: 331-335, third company, third platoon, tanks 1-5 with number 1 being the command Somua.

I may yet print out more and do them in the later camo scheme for use in Normandy and the Balkans towards the end of the war….

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: Turkish Leopard

This has been another tank that I’ve had for ages half finished. Inspired by the news I painted it up in Turkish colours but never really got round to finish it. I tried to go with the offical MIG pigments fixative liquid, not quite sure it worked well. I think less might be more with them…

The base model is the 1/72nd Hasegawa Leopard 2A4.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

From the Shed: Zuk Vans

I got the stl file for this Cold War Polish classic from thingiverse, rescaled it to 1/72nd and ran a few off my 3d printer. It should make a great little run around for my Warsaw Pact forces.

I’ve been asked by a friend to print him out a larger one as a transport for his Zone Alfa team. Can’t wait to see what he does with it.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

In memory of John Dowman ‘Mausman’

Just before the COVID pandemic hit i was greatly saddened to hear of the death of John Dowman. I new him for many years through various forums where he always went by the name of Mausman. Today would have been his birthday and The Wargamers’ forum, of which John was a moderator, organised a build in his memory. John loved tanks, German ones in particular, and combat oin the Eastern Front, he also had an interest in experimental vehicles… all things I shared. Although he did get rid of his experimental stuff in the end I was happy as some bits made their way into my collection. He was a a talented model maker- for a short while he ran a resin terrain company with a friend. He always belived in getting things out of the stash and on to the table as quickly as possible- something every gamer can agree with I think.

For the build I decided to do a 1/72 Dragon E100 with commander from SHQ. I hope he would have liked it.

 

I used to meet up with John once or twice a year when me getting down to the wargame shows in Newark coincided with his shore leave (John worked on the diving side of the off shore oil industry, he tried to get me to be train as a diver once, the pay sounded good but rather dangerous, maybe if I were 10 years younger at the time…). I’ll miss my chats with him.

 

 

From the Shed: Dodge Ambulance and air field equipment.

I’ve just finished this rather smart little ambulance in 1/72nd scale from Academy.

I struggled a bit with decals, even after all these years of making models it is still something I find problematic.

The tractor and bomb trolley makes for some nice extras- they’d go well with the old Airfix figures on a air base set up.

Both should be good for my WW2 games or even into the Korean War.

 

Cheers,

 

Pete.

From the Shed: Merkava IV

Apologies for the nearly month long silence… been busy irl- all of it good thankfully.

 

Anyway here is a little something I’ve finished a Hobby Boss IDF Merkava IV MBT to give me a pair in 1/72nd.

 

As usual it was painted by brush in acylics them weathered with oil paint and pigment powders. I need to find a suitable figure to go in the commanders hatch that I left open.

 

Cheers,

 

Pete.

From the Shed: Dug in E100.

The Entwicklung series of tanks was an attempted rationalisation of the German tank production towards the end of WW2. You can read more about it here and here.

The E100 was a heavy tank,  comparable to the better know Maus, armed with a 128mm gun and a coaxial 75mm L48 gun.

I bought this 1/72nd Dragon kit many years ago to use the running gear for resin conversion (into an even sillier 150mm armed jagdpanzer version) as such I’ve had the spare hull and turret sitting around planning to do it as a dug in version. A group build on the Wargamers Forum link gave me the impetus.

 

Next job is to come up with a scenario to use it in… I’m thinking Russian Engineers or Commandos sneaking up at night to blow it up….

Cheers,

 

Pete.