Airborne Mobility

The 20mm British Airborne project is slowly approaching the conclusion, but not quite yet.  The latest instalment are three Jeeps, each with four removeable crew, to provide the force with some mobility.

The Jeeps are all the airborne variety by SHQ, including the trailer; the crews are by AB Figures and fit beautifully - they all have magnets in the seats of the Jeeps, and the figures so, they are really secure.  The decals were all home printed, and as I can't print white this means the decal sheet is white so I have to print a colour background that matches the vehicle.  They're not perfect but I'm quite pleased.

So, some close-ups.  First, the 'Command Jeep' with commander clutching a map, trying to work out where the bridge is, with his signaller, and radio, in the back.

Second, the 'Baggage-rack Jeep'.

And, third the 'Standard Jeep', which has a hook at the back for the trailer.

As can be seen, in this even closer-up image, the wash has tended to settle in the eye sockets giving some figures the appearance of black eyes.  I've left it as is, being 'Aggressive' troops in Chain of Command I think it only natural that several would be sporting black eyes.

Completed at the same time is a German staff car, that no doubt will be commandeered by the paras as they are allowed a 'car' in the support lists. 

All that remains to be finished are: the Airfix Horsa (which will have had a rough landing); supply canisters; and, collapsed/collapsing parachute canopies - the latter two from Empress Miniatures.

The Paras Have Landed! And About Time Too!

I have finally finished painting and basing my 20mm Airborne platoon[1], and support units for Chain of Command (CoC).  This has dragged on far longer than I hoped, and as usual the obligatory photo session shows up the faults like nothing else; albeit some are helped out by the poor focus in some of the photos.

So, with no more ado, here they are, in their new magnetised storage box.

The platoon commander and his platoon sergeant ...

... have at their disposal three sections like this one, consisting of a superior junior leader (Sgt), a 3-man Bren team, 5 riflemen, and a corporal with a Sten gun.

They also have a sniper in the platoon (I have painted 2 more as support options).

When it comes to support, they have the option to reorganise one section with two Bren teams, and they can also call on an additional section.  As the platoon lacks any integral anti-armour capability (other than Gammon bombs) I have four PIAT teams they can call on, all slightly different.

There are also three 2" mortar teams in the support pool.

Heavier support can be supplied, courtesy of a 5-man Vickers MMG team ...

... an Airborne 6-pounder anti-tank gun with a junior leader and 5-man crew ...

... a slightly blurry 75mm Pack howitzer, with junior leader and 5-man crew ...

... perhaps called up by their forward observer (FO).

And if I want to get really nasty, I have a 3-man flamethrower team.

Unfortunately, the opposition will also get nasty, with the inevitable consequences, 7 men hors de combat, 1 walking wounded and another being carried in for the medic to treat while two others rummage through supplies looking for more meds.

Finally bringing up the tail, are some bailed-out tankers (that got included in the painting batch).

The Jeep crews are also finished, but their mounts are not, so they will have to await them before they get a photo-shoot.  I also have the discarded parachute canopies, supply containers and wrecked Airspeed Horsa to complete before I can move on to something different.

Notes:

[1.] The vast majority of these figures are by Figures, Armour, Artillery (FAA), now in the States.  A few, such as the Vickers gunners are by Adler, and some figures used the Adler separate heads.

An Airborne WiP

The heat-waves (and, to be honest, the World Cup) has played havoc with my ongoing 20mm Airborne platoon project.  With the weather cooling (and the matches fewer) I've managed to get back to it, albeit with a bit of modelling rather than painting.  To build on this, and reinforce my mojo, I thought I'd post an update of where I am and how far I still have to go.

The completed figures, except for final varnishing and base texturing, are shown in the two photos below.

Support platoon + Brens, snipers, PIATs, 2" mortars & medic 

Gun teams, casualties & tank crew

Some of these, including about half of the crews for the 75mm pack howitzer and 6-pounder anti-tank gun were completed in my last post, but now the crews are complete a couple of shots showing how I crew my guns.

75mm pack howitzer, junior leader & 5 gun crew

6-pdr ATG, junior leader & 5 gun crew

This leaves the core platoon still to do.  I left them to do last, as this way I can't play games without them so I can't put off support items and extras for another day if I want a game.  

Three sections of the core platoon + a few extras

Each section has a junior leader with a Sten submachinegun, 3-man Bren team and 5-man rifle group (1 equipped with a Sten).  In the above one junior leader is missing as he was painted earlier by mistake and in his place is one of the support flamethrower team whose place he took in an earlier batch.  Also included are a couple of extra casualty figures cut down to size from a different manufacturer.

And finally, the most recent bit of progress, the crews for the Jeeps.

Jeeps and crew + Tatra T-57K Kubelwagen & airborne supply canisters

The Jeep crews are by AB figures and sit in the SHQ Airborne Jeeps really nicely.  To make them removeable, yet secure, they have had magnets added to both the figures and their positions in the Jeeps.

A nonchalant Jeep passenger ...

... and the magnets holding him securely in place

The last photo also shows some greenstuff, tidying up the holes where the magnets were inserted and providing a footing for those Jeep crew whose feet didn't touch the floor.  

So, now I just have to paint up this lot and I'm there, well except for the Horsa glider kit still in its box - does it ever end?

Eindhoven Reached - But Not Taken

Painting an Airborne Platoon for Kampfgruppe von Luck

A Work-in-Progress (WiP) - 1st update

A few posts back I posted (here) the 20mm figures for my next project, an Airborne platoon (and supports).  At that point the figures had all been cleaned up and primed.

Since then, I've have made some progress and reckon I'm almost a third of the way through, excluding the vehicles and glider - hence the rather silly title for this post.  But enough for an excuse to post a few photos.

First, the two guns: a 75mm Pack Howitzer; and, an Airborne variant of the 6-Pounder Anti-Tank Gun.

Each should have a crew of 5 men plus a junior leader, but the other figures are not finished yet, and can be seen in some of the later batches below.  BTW, by 'finished', I mean they are fully painted but have yet to sprayed with matt varnish and their bases textured and painted.

Next up, a mixed bag of a medic and assorted casualties (most of whom look beyond his help) and a bailed-out tank crew.

I've had the tank crew for ages so thought I'd include them in this batch.  The set included 5 figures but I didn't like one of them with an MP40 so he didn't make it out of the tank.  

Now, a Vickers medium machine gun with its full 5-man crew (no junior leader).

These are Adler IIRC (most of the other figures are FAA) and slightly bigger, but not enough to show.  Firing the gun is 'Lofty', so called because he has oddly long legs, and if he were to stand up, would tower over most of his comrades in arms.

Last of the fully painted figures are three 2" mortar teams (two of them have a second figure in a different painting batch), a figure with a supply canister (to serve as a supply point), and three individual paras (not sure why they went into this batch).

And, coming up behind these, are three more batches.

They've all had their faces and hands done and outlined in black, and the batch (what I call a plastic container's worth of figures) on the left has had the Denison smock painted and the webbing picked out in black. 

The only other progress has been assembly of the three SHQ Airborne Jeep kits, shown with some more supply canisters that will be used for jump-off or supply points, or maybe just battlefield scatter.  

The Jeeps will have magnets counter-sunk into the seats, which will hold in some AB Jeep crews I have - they will have magnets inserted where the sun doesn't shine.

Compared to many others I've seen, this is slow progress, but I'm fairly pleased with it.  Unfortunately, we're just running into another week and a bit of hot weather (by UK standards).  Not only do I find painting unpleasant when a bit sweaty, but also the paints dry quickly, and trying to keep them a suitable consistency makes it even more trying.  In short, I expect progress to slow over the next ten days or so.  But I shall try and keep them ticking over.

Dragoons Go West

I finally finished my two new units of dragoons, and they are:

Sir William Waller's (guidon is for the 5th company, Sir Wiliam Turpin's), ...

... and, Lord Hopton's (guidon is conjectural but pretty)

The dismounted components of both units are new figures, freshly painted.  The coat colours for neither regiment is known, so I wanted something different to my other two regiments in red and blue.  I went with green for Waller's as suitably parliamentarian and functional for troops that spent so much time skulking around in hedges.  For Hopton's I plumped for yellow because, I like it, and there's a period reference to Hopton's yellow-coats that goes against most references that list his foot as blue-coats, so I rationalised that as a mistaken reference to his dragoons - well disprove it if you can.

Waller's mounted dragoons are all, with the exception of the ensign, old figures from my other two units with the coat colour repainted (just the sleeves really) and few other minor embellishments. 

The ensign, with the guidon for Sir Wiliam Turpin's, 5th company is a new figure but the ensign is a repainted one that was spare from the reorganisation of Wardlawe's dragoon unit.  Likewise, the horse-holder, and the horses, which seem to be giving him some trouble, are all new.

By comparison, Hopton's ensign and horse-holder (again all new apart from the re-painted guidon) seem to be having a more relaxed time of it.

Hopton's mounted dragoon figures are mostly re-used surplus figures from Washington's unit with sleeves repainted yellow (plus a few other touches), but with the need for mounted ensigns on the horse-holder bases, two new mounted figures had to be painted up to match.  Can you spot the new ones?

This took much longer than expected, but I am pleased I have finally got round to long planned refurbishment of my dragoons to give me two units a side in place of just one each.  Hopefully, some will get an outing soon in a planned refight of Second Newbury. 

Dragooned into Shape

With things flowing well I decided to stick with the current 're-visiting' theme and reorganise my Hinchliffe ECW dragoon units, Wardlawe's[1] and Washington's[2].  For some time I have wanted more than one unit a side and felt that the number of mounted figures tied up in these units is wasteful.  When dismounted, I represent my dragoon units with three bases of figures, two forming a firing line and one representing the horse-holders, thus ...

       Washington's    &       Wardlawe's          

... and when mounted they are each represented by twelve mounted figures.

    Wardlawe's      &     Washington's

As these units tend to spend most, if not all, of their time dismounted it seems wasteful to use so many mounted figures in this way, and on four bases as they only occupy three when dismounted.

The solution I came up with, was to reduce the mounted representation to just two bases of mounted figures but use them with same horse-holder base used with the two dismounted bases.  Furthermore, I decided I would have only one guidon per unit, and that would be with a mounted figure on the horse-holder base.  This would require some re-basing so into the paddling pool they went to soften up the PVA and sand basing.

This was watched, with some trepidation, by those elements of the units that did not require re-basing from the safety of a nearby window sill.

This all went pretty smoothly apart the need to replace the reins of the horses from Washington's horse-holder base as they broke when being de-based.   

So, here's the new-look Wardlawe's and Washington's, dismounted ...

 Wardlawe's       &    Washington's

... and mounted.

Wardlawe's     &    Washington's

I rather like the end-result.  The extra mounted figure on the horse-holder base makes the horses more prominent in the dismounted unit, and it blends in fairly well as part of the unit when mounted.

To complete each new unit using the surplus mounted figures, I have to paint: ten dismounted figures; a mounted ensign with guidon; a mounted dragoon, and a horse-holder with two horses.  Additionally, there will be some re-touching of the figures taken from the old units to give them different coat colours and their new regimental guidons.

The identities of the two new units will be revealed in a future post.

Notes:

[1.]  A Parliamentarian regiment of dragoons of the Earl of Essex’s army under Col. James Wardlawe, later reduced to an independent troop, commanded by Capt. George Dundas', and later by Capt. Jeremiah Abercromby (source: wiki.bcw-project.org.uk).

[2.]  A Royalist regiment of dragoons, originally under Col. James Ussher, and later Sir Henry Washington; also known as Prince Maurice’s Regiment of Dragoons.  It fought as part of the Oxford Army, and at Marston Moor, then converted to a foot regiment in the garrison of Worcester (source: wiki.bcw-project.org.uk).

Last of the Rings

The speed with which I finished off the figures in my last post left me feeling up for more quick retouching.  To this end I dug out two lots of Warhammer Lord of the Rings (LotR) figures I'd been intending to re-touch for some time.

First, the 'Dead' that I bought painted off eBay (for less than the cost of the basic figures) but wanted the paint job modified from a 'stone grey' to an 'ethereal green' and the basing changed to match the other figures in my collection.  I did an earlier trial 'touch-up' in an earlier post (Link) so this was a fairly quick bit of dry-brushing and re-basing on this bunch of 21 figures.

En-masse they look good, but up close the basic nature of the paint-job is more apparent.

Second, I had a unit of 12 Rangers of Ithilien painted by Fernando Enterprises.

While I like the green used for their cloaks, it is the same as that used on all my Rohirrim figures and I wanted to differentiate them.  To this end I re-painted the cloaks in more muted colours, better suited for Rangers seeking to blend into the woods.

While they make a coherent looking unit, I did them in two groups of 6, one lot with paler 'greyer' cloaks as Rangers of the North (Dunedain) ...

... and one lot in darker green/brown cloaks as Rangers of Ithilien.

This gives me some flexibility with these figures as they could all be used as the same troop type / unit, but they can also separated into two smaller units that can be distinguished visually.

Apart from a few metal personality figures, this effectively completes my LotR collection ...  

...  for now?