Over the weekend and this week I finished my Drantakh force. The Drantakhs are figures manufactured by Badger Games. They are science fiction figures with dinosaur-like heads. The sculpting is nice, and the molding is almost without any flash.
In a previous post I showed the headquarters personnel and the heavy weapons. This weekend I completed the rifle squads. Most of my science fiction figures are organized like the US Army in squads of two fire teams. I decided that the Drantakhs would be organized more on the US Marines model of a squad leader and three fire teams. Without grenade launchers and light machine-guns in each team, this really doesn’t have much effect except that in Combat Patrol the squad will have four command dice instead of three, which should provide more flexibility and guard against those turns when no cards are drawn for any part of the squad. It is subtle and doesn’t show up very well in these pictures, but the small arms on each of the three teams is a slightly different color to make it possible to tell the three teams apart on the table.
Lat night I completed two hover tanks to round out the Drantakh force. These required no filing or sanding; they were very clean. Some of the parts were on sprues and had to be cut off and trimmed a bit. The figures and machine-guns are separate purchases. The hatches can be glued open or closed.
The the Drantakh infantry wear’s sliver, Lost-in-Space-style suits, I decided that the tanks needed some sort of camouflage pattern. (I came ver close to painting them silver too.) I like the swoopy, almost Naboo look to the tanks. While I’m not sure how you would manufacture such a vehicle, the shape of the hull would probably be very effective on the battlefield. The pronounced turret ring means they probably lose a lot of turrets and tank commanders, but maybe they have a lot of turrets stockpiled to get the serviceable hulls back into the fight.
As suggested earlier, I’ll be using these with Combat Patrol(TM): WWII. The rules work just fine for science fiction skirmish games.
