Back seat & terrain purchase

As the Wessex Wargamers Winchester Club's Back of Beyond campaign (as run by Jim of Jim's Wargames Workbench) has just started, this imagi-nation project will have to - unfortunately - take a back seat until my White Russian force for that campaign has been finished. Hopefully that won't take long as I have half-a-dozen cavalry to finish painting and the rest of the force's bases to do.

Meanwhile, I've bought some bits for terrain for this project. From Supreme Littleness Designs, I've bought their 10mm terrain base pack to use as roads; below is a pic (from their website) showing what's in the pack (doesn't include the building or figures!)

I'm very pleased with this pack - it's a lot of stuff for £6!  I might get another pack to paint as rivers, or maybe I'll use some of this pack ... really not sure at the moment!

Some Finished!

As I mentioned in the post I just made on my other blog, I've been doing the bases for some of the mini's for this project. I've managed to do quite a few, but will have to put the rest on pause for a while, for reasons explained in the post I linked to above.

Here are pics of what I've finished so far

Timoni armoured recon company

Timoni armoured company

Timoni mechanised infantry company

Timoni 40mm Bofors, tows & 120mm mortars

Well, when I say finished, what I mean is not quite finished! but all I have left to do is some coloured unit markings on the edge of the bases and the national insignia* on the vehicles, so not much!

* - actually a small purple blob for the Timoni forces!

More Progress Made

Over the week since I last posted, I've made quite a bit of progress on this project.  One of the things I did, was start the bases for some settlements and then place the buildings on to see what they would look like.

In the 2 pics below you can see the 'towns'. The church in the left picture isn't finished as yet, but all the other buildings are. I need to add some roads to the bases, I'm not sure what to do at the moment, but I think I'll just paint them on,

The two pics below show the 'villages' - basically just smaller bases with fewer buildings.

This next pic has some of the 'reinforcements' I've painted recently, including the 'moving' bases for the Timoni 120mm mortars, more 'moving' bases for the Pumbaanish ATGs and some company command bases

And finally for this post, group shots of both sides with their bases 'sanded'. Not particularly good pics perhaps, but still indicators of progress

Pumbaanish

Timoni

Nothing to see here ...

The clue is in the title ... no pics for this post!

I did make progress over the weekend, managing to add sand to all my 3mm 'Wars of Turkmenistania' figures. I've also 'sanded' some bases for the buildings so I can have some BUA areas.

My small Warbases order arrived on saturday morning - the usual speedy service from them - so the bases for the towed Pumbaanish ATGs were there for me to stick the mini's on and undercoat them.

All good progress, but it doesn't matter how soon they're all ready as I have no terrain for them to fight on! I'm not that bothered by this - if push comes to shove, I'll use books, etc, on  the table as I have a cloth to cover them.

So remaining steps are (in particular order):

• put some scatter on the mini's bases to break up the sand
• satin varnish the minis
• create some terrain

I'm going to use 5Core Company Command for my first game and I already have a scenario in mind:

  A Pumbaanish company-sized force has been ordered to seize a Timoni customs post & hold long enough for a secret police unit to 'disappear' inside Timoni, for reasons that the assaulting company does not need to know ...

  Timoni Defence Ministry has intelligence that Pumbaaskaya forces will raid a border post, but not which one ... units have been sent to reinforce multiple locations; as a result they are not as strong as could have been hoped ...

Work in progress pics & more on painting

As I posted about before, I've painted the reinforcments that I got from Fighting 15s and the other night I 'put the dip' on them. As I was doing so I noticed that it was giving a better shading effect than it had given to the previous batch, probably because I'd shaken the tin of dip much more thoroughly this time ... so I re-applied the dip to all of them.

Here are some pics of the figures as they are now ...

Pumbaanish command base

Timoni command base

Timoni tank company command bases

Timoni infantry section & 120mm mortar

In my post 'Painting the little blighters' I said that it was not worth painting boots or windows on figures this small as details like that simply cannot be made out when the figures are on the table. Well, that is true, but after posting that I was looking at Just Jack's post 'Forces for the 1952 War' on his blog 'The Hakuna-Matata Wars' that was the major inspiration for this project.

In that post he has pics of the infantry that he painted (which are all prone) and he did paint their boots. So I looked at the prone infantry I've got - 4 Timoni support bases - who didn't have their boots painted ... and as it looked to me like they were wearing onesies I painted their boots. I was very surprised at the difference it made - they looked so much better! As you can tell in the pic of the infantry above, I haven't painted the standing infantry's boots, but I will now for all prone infantry. I don't have a pic of the 'prones' beore painting their boots, but here's a front and back 'after'

Something that I didn't mention at all in the 'painting' post is the way that gun barrels are modelled by Oddzial Osmy (OO).  Unlike larger scales where barrels are unsupported - and in my experience bend really easily! - OO make them as one piece with the casting. This means that there will be a piece of metal connecting the barrel to the rest of the model. It can look really strange if you paint it the same as the model, so I paint it black. Hopefully, you can see what I mean in this pic showing the Timoni anti-aircraft 40mm Bofors gun (both deployed & towed).

None of the mini's in these pics have had their coat of satin varnish to tone down the gloss of the dip, so that will be the next stage, followed by sanding the bases. 

Command Vehicles & Airpower

One thing that I didn't mention in my last post is that when digging out the buildings I managed to find several other things relevant to this project.

First was the Oddzial Osmy 8th Army HQ pack that I got from Fighting 15s ages ago. You can see what's in it in the Fighting 15s website pic to the right. You get 5 of each of the bits shown, so some of my HQ stands have Dorchester command vehicles and/or despatch riders and MK VI light tanks as radio vehicles. They make nice additions to the bases IMO.

I also found a couple of packs of airplanes that I got for a different (stalled) project - Korean War air combat.

Wikipedia Sabre pic

One of them was a pack of Tumbling Dice's F86e Sabres. I wasn't sure, but a bit of interweb research has confirmed that the RAF used Sabres, so with that fitting my background - i.e. Timonistan uses British kit - the Timoni Air Guard (TAG) now has half a dozen Sabres to complement the 4 Venoms that Jim kindly gave me before our game last week.

Wikipedia MiG-15 pic

The other pack is (again from Tumbling Dice) 6 MiG-15s so these have been conscripted into the Pumbaaskyan Army Air Force (PAAF) to defend the heroic people's army.

For once, it seems that a project is still making progress!

(Hopefully those aren't famous last words ...)

Good news!

I placed the order I wrote about in my last post with Fighting 15s on Wednesday evening last week and on Friday when I got home from work I had the red card from Royal Mail saying they had tried to deliver it! So a trip to the local post office on Saturday morning and I had my new toys in hand - very quick service!

Even better is that I managed to paint them all over the weekend! They're just awaiting an application of dip and they'll be done - I  intend to do this when I've finished the last few bits for my Back of Beyond White Russians, so hopefully one evening this week.

As a result I didn't manage to get any basing or terrain done, but I did manage to dig out the Brigade Models Middle Eastern Village that I had already painted (over 3 years ago!) and will use for this campaign - just need to base it now!