Every Battlefield Should Have Some

6mm scale sheep from Irregular Miniatures.

Got Me Some Yanks

I have a few M60s, M113s and assorted other American bits as part of a batch of microtanks I bought last year.  With the Big Game coming up I decided to paint up a small US Army force just in case no one else  brought any.

I didn't have any suitable infantry so I bought a couple of Packs by mail order from Heroics and Ros.  This is pack M11; US Infantry Support Weapons (New Helmets).  

So that's a strip of six command figures, three 81mm mortar teams, three tripod MG teams, three TOW teams (to be honest I already have enough of these), six two-man M47 Dragon ATGW teams, three engineers with mine detectors, and three guys with shoulder-launched AAGWs.  Not a bad mix, thought I do tend to end up with lots of leftover mine detector crews.

Detail is OK, not too much flash.  I particularly like the Dragon crews and the kneeling radio operator on the command strip.

The we have M10, US Infantry (New Helmet). 

This contains five identical strips each with an NCO (pointing so as to attract attention to himself on the battlefield), and SAW gunner and his ammo carrier, seven grunts with assault rifles, an AT gunner with a MAW and his ammo carrier.  The way I base my models that'll make me a whole company for Cold War Commander with a few left over to decorate command bases. 

This is the first time I've ordered on line from H&R and I have to say I'm very impressed.  The process was very straight forward (email order, get back invoice, pay by Paypal) and the goods arrived very promptly.  Excellent customer service from Andy.

With no one carrying 1/300th stuff at conventions any more I'll be buying more stuff from H&R by mail order.

On the Workbench - end of the motorway pt3

Oh, the frustration!  I came home from work today to find that the card layers had delaminated from the top of the table-mat.  Turns out I didn't remove the thin plastic layer from the top of the mat.  I've now removed some of the plastic and scored the top of the mat prior to re-gluing with Uhu.

In the meantime, I've managed to complete this medium-sized bridge from The Baggage Train.

 

On the Workbench - end of the motorway pt2

So, with two layers of card in place I decided to try out some building layouts.  

The trees are made in bottle-brush style.  The trunks are soft iron wire from the garden centre and the foliage is teased out strands of green parcel string.

In the picture below I've chamfered the edges of the mat using a Stanley knife.  In a couple of places the bottom layer of card hasn't stuck to the surface of the mat.  I've since introduced some more PVA and weighted down the card with a bottle of whisky and a cast iron casserole dish.  Middle class wargaming at its best!

The numbers are to show the position of the buildings.

On the Workbench - end of the motorway

One of the main terrain features for Crisis Point is the A73 motorway which runs along the western-most table to the town of Venlo.

We already have a terrific Autobahn (well, Autosnelweg in Dutch, I believe) that Stuart Adams built a couple of years ago for the Krefeld Salient game.  You can see it in use here. The problem is, though, how do I connect the motorway to the town?  I've decided to build an end-of-motorway terrain unit to connect to Stuart's road sections.

The base for the town section is an old table-mat but this is a little thinner than the 8mm MDF Stuart used for the Autobahn sections.  I'm therefore adding two layers of shaped card to the top of the mat.

By chamfering the edges of the card, I'll be able to have the roads gradually slope down to match the height of my magnet foam roads.

At this stage I'm waiting for the glue to dry on the first layer of card.  The books are to weight down the card and keep the whole flat whilst the glue dries.

Defacing My Bases?

I photographed these WW2 Americans after I'd experimented with a new base texturing mix.  The mix uses Woodland Scenics coarse turf, tea leaves and static grass.  I'm not happy with it and I don't think I'll be pursuing this approach.

However, looking at the figures did remind me of something I've always meant to check up on.  Am I committing a crime by basing my figures on currently circulating British coinage?

More than once I've heard wargamers insist that either it's illegal to use coins in this way or that's illegal if you glue the figure to the side bearing the Queen's head!  An offence of "defacing the coinage" is quoted (though some of the more traditionalist types speak darkly of treason).

Personally I'm no royalist (I've a lot of sympathy for the American idea of separating Church and State) but it's always pleased me to follow what I see as a wargamers' tradition and glue my figures to the tails side of the coin.  My friend Sebastian, on the other hand, positively revels in his Irish republican roots and actively ensures that his soldiers stand directly on the face of "Smiling Eileen".

Anyway, I decided to do a bit of research*.    It looks like Sebastian and I may be in the clear.    

Apparently there was a modern prohibition on defacing the coinage under the Coinage Offences Act, 1936 (penalty, imprisonment not exceeding one year!).  Prior to that the 1861 Coinage Act imposed the same term of imprisonment but with hard labour!  However the 1936 Act was repealed by the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act of 1981.  

However, in earlier times defacing the coinage was a serious economic problem.  Coins were "clipped" by unscrupulous people who melted down the trimmings to make new coins thus increasing the money supply and generating inflation.  Medieval laws against this practice many not have been formally repealed.  Maybe I should find a source of 0.02 Euro coins?  

* OK, I searched for defacing UK coinage on Google.

Wild Weasel

Family issues have meant that I've not got near my workbench for the past few weeks but this morning I managed to spend an hour or so painting this USAF Phantom.

It's not a great paint job - just enough to resurrect a rather tatty model I picked up as part of an eBay purchase.

Very roughly it represents a Wild Weasel Phantom II based at Spangdahlem AFB in West Germany in the mid-1980s.  In April's Big Game it will carry HARM or Shrike missiles (treated as PGMs in Cold War Commander).  I'm going to restrict it to attacks on SAM or AAA targets to reflect its doctrinal role.