Sam admiring the fine workmanship of the six-barreled semi-automatic shotgun
From a previous post, you know that I’ve been working on some props for an upcoming GASLIGHT photo shoot. One of the props I’ve been working on is this six-barreled, Colt-Webly shotgun.
The six-barreled shotgun is difficult for aimed fire, but it makes a swell area effect weapon!
The high mounting of the ammunition magazine makes it difficult to aim. The weapon is designed to be fire by a heavy man to repel boarders or discourage large groups of unfriendlies.
Closer look at the left side of the receiver.
This is a closer a closer look at the left side of the receiver mechanism. Note the double trigger. The front trigger is for semi-automatic fire. The rear trigger is used to three-round bursts.
Right side of receiver
This is a view of the right side of the receiver. Note the copper dial near the near brass strap. This is used to adjust the amount of gas vented after each round. When set properly, a round will fire every time the front trigger is pulled. If not adjusted properly, the receiver won’t cycle properly. Sometimes this can cause rounds to mis-feed. In extreme circumstances, particularly when firing a three-round burst, it can cause the receiver to explode. This has been known the ruin the day of the operator and make him quite surly. This is another reason the weapon is most often employed from the hip.
A couple of posts back, I mentioned an Officer Professional Development (OPD) Chris, Sam, Ed, and I ran for the 114th Signal. I posed a couple of pictures. This weekend Sam gave me a disk of photos taken by the battalion’s official photographer.
The officers of the 114th Signal Battalion
The group photo was taken right after Chris and I arrived before we started setting troops on the table.
Sammy give the rules briefing to the players
Sammy gave the rules a nice plug, but this was about teaching some tactical lessons and team building, not selling books.
"No, in WWII you don't want to put your folks in square. A line might be better."
Sammy came up with the caption for this photo, and I couldn’t resist using it!
Yesterday, Sam Fuson (who set up the OPD with the 114th Signal) invited a bunch of us to his house to play a scenario he wrote using LSNC. The situation involved an ahistorical combined US/German attack on the Russians right after WWII. The “allies” (US and Germans) had to cross the Elbe and attack a large Russian force. The scenario was excellent. We played from 1030 to 1700 with a short break for lunch and had a great deal of fun. My 11-year old daughter commanded a battalion of Russian infantry. Kid luck kicked in, and she almost couldn’t miss. I think she had precision guided mortar rounds!
Sammy providing GM guidance
Sammy uses 1:72 plastic figures and similarly sized vehicles. This has allowed him to create his large LSNC: WWII collection pretty inexpensively. At 1:72nd he uses a single vehicle to represent a platoon. He has taken the base label information, reformatted it a bit, and rubber banded the labels to the vehicles as shown. He also uses different colored rubber bands to denote different organizations. While I prefer the look of 10mm for this scale of gaming, what Sam did was quite effective.
Base labels affixed to vehicles with rubber bands
He mounts his infantry just as indicated in the rules. There is not a huge different in the look of the infantry between the 10mm and 20mm figures.
Pre-game deployment of some Russian infantryGerman advance
As the game progressed, on the “allied” left, the German player aggressively pushed toward his objective near the little town shown in the picture above. He may have been too aggressive. He kept pushing his tanks and infantry forward without softening us up first. As a result, we Russians were stationary blazing away at him while he was moving. With a combination of “kid luck” from my daughter’s infantry and an equally aggressive Russian player pushing his tanks and mechanized infantry around the German flank, we were able to eventually grind up this attack and retain control of the town.
Sammy provides tactical guidance
Even compensating for her medicine wearing off, my daughter was very excited by this game and is really looking forward to a future battle. Her tactical instincts are good; although, sometime she wanted to be too aggressive. One time I let her advance out of cover to go after some German tanks. She had a great time, but probably should have remained in cover, since the Germans ran up some Panzer Grenadiers and a hot firefight ensued for three turns. Sammy did a good job as GM; the scenario was very good; the gamers were there to play, rather than test their manhood; Sam’s wife kept us well fed; and all of us had a great time!
