A return to Andreivia?

With Steel Lard out of the way, my thoughts have inevitably returned to Crisis Point in the Spring. I'm tempted to have a theme of Return to Andreivia. This would enable me to run a substantial game of Arc of Fire without having to organise a single, huge game that might have to accommodate somewhere north of 18 players!

Freed to consider something other than Puebla in 1863, the creative pixies that inhabit my brain suddenly stopped drinking themselves into oblivion and got back to work. Within a couple of days I had the complete outline of a multi-player scenario depicting the long-anticipate Russian offensive into Andreivia's Northern Hills.

This in turn tempted me to dig though the boxes of partially-complete and unbuilt stuff for the Cold War period in 20mm scale. The result was a headquarters unit for my reinforced-platoon-sized force of Russian paras.

I picked up a set of the old Atlantic 1/72nd scale Jeeps at a bring-and-buy many years ago. They are very crude, made from soft polythene and not particularly realistic as a representation of the GAZ-69 but they'll do.

This first one has the platoon CO and his driver. I added bit of camouflage to the latter's head. The Atlantic figures are small in stature but bulking up his helmet this way (painting with PVA and then dipping in mixed flock before finally sealing with matt Modpodge) helps him blend in with chunkier white metal models.

I have at least one more Atlantic Jeep that I'll probably model either empty or with just a driver for when the platoon HQ is deployed on foot.

Next we have an AGS-17 automatic grenade-launcher. 

Memory has it that I was gifted this team at an SOTCW event many years ago. I suspect it was originally painted by either Richard Baber or Neil MacDougall. It didn't quite fit in with the rest of my collection as all of the weaponry was painted in Panzer grey and the base had some peculiar bottle-green static grass. 

A bit of research suggested that the body of the AGS-17 should be black (with a brown panel on top), the magazine should be green and the tripod could be green or black. Most pictures of the weapon in service show a little silver colour where the paint is worn away around the tip of the barrel. With these changes the model is much improved. I repainted the crew's AK assault rifles too and dry-brushed yellow to tone down the unrealistic grass.

A couple of hours' work in total and my miniature VDV have some enhanced mobility and firepower! They may see action at Christmas as I want to test the new Arc of Fire activation system.