Buck's Blog

I completed another tank battalion and a few attachments for Look, Sarge, No Charts: Near Future and Science Fiction.  This battalion came from an ad hoc hodgepodge of things.  The vehicle above is from a set of small Russian kits I found on Ebay.  They seem to make these kits in both 1:48 (I have some for Combat Patrol) and 1:144 (for LSNC).

You can see the battalion laid out in this picture.

Most of the vehicles in this battalion began as Epic Warhammer 40k.  I then picked up a bunch of turrets from Iron Wind Metals at a convention and glued them to the Games Workshop hulls.  While it is clear how these vehicles began life, I think the effect is pretty good.  It will make a nice “irregular” force.

The vehicles across the top of the pictures above and below are not Games Workshop.  I got them in a flea market at a convention.  They are for a science fiction game I hadn’t hear of before, and I don’t think they or the game are still available.  I wouldn’t mind a few more of them.

Below are a few more of those Russian-made kits.  They provide a number of parts that are used to customize the vehicles.

These Russian-made kits are not assigned to any of the tank battalions.  I intend to use them as attachments from higher headquarters to weight the main effort or help balance the game somewhat.

I found this article on the Warlord site very good.  I always greatly curtail weapon ranges from their theoretical maximum when designing rules.  Typically, I use 25% of maximum effective range.  My only quibble with this article is that the term effective range IS defined:  it is the distance at which an average marksman has a 50% chance of hitting a man-sized target.  What is an “average marksman” can be determined experimentally on a range.  In any event, the rated maximum effective ranges of modern weapons are determined in this way.

This weekend I found another battalion of Reaper Car tanks that I had forgotten I had.  In the original Kickstarter fulfillment, Reaper was short a few of this type of tank.  They arrived after I had finished the other battalions (see previous blog posts).  I painted them in a variety of camouflage patterns.  I decided that I would paint these in a black “special operations” color scheme.

This picture shows the entire battalion: four companies of three platoons each, plus a battalion headquarters base.

Painting them in shades of black and gray seemed a little bit like cheating, but I am happy with the final result.  When we start play testing Look, Sarge, No Charts: Science Fiction, I think this battalion will have some sort of stealth or cloaking capability.

I am going to call this unit the “Shadow Battalion.”

I have been collecting Apple TV and iPod boxes for a year or so.  Borrowing an idea from Eric and Andrew Goolander, I wanted to make a space ship interior that is made from separate rooms that are placed in different configurations for different games.  These boxes are all about 3.6 inches tall.  I then covered them with “textures” I downloaded from different sites on the Internet to decorate the walls and give them a good appearance.

I put textures on the inside and outside of the boxes.  I mostly completed several today, but I need to scrounge more boxes of the appropriate height.  I have a limited amount of space ship interior furnishings, but over the next few months I’ll be looking for more.

These are the ones I “mostly” finished this weekend.  I figure this is about a third of what I need.  I will also be building some bigger rooms for a cargo bay, engine room, etc.  These will be placed on a based made of “granny grating” over MDF boards.

Around Christmas I found  a set of the Firefly miniatures on sale at our local hobby store.  I bought a box to make close air support units for the Science Fiction variant of Look, Sarge, No Charts that we are beginning to develop.  I like the shape of the firefly ship.  While very under-scale as a freighter, I think they look good as fighter bombers or gunships in a tactical game.

I enjoy the X-Wing game from Fantasy Flight Games.  The add-ons are all about $15 or more.  I thought it would be interesting to have some blown-up ships to put on the table, but at $15, the ships for the game are just too expensive to cut apart.  The Matchbox micro machines ones are about the right size (a little small) and significantly cheaper.  I’ve had a couple of Tie fighters, X-wing fighters, and a Y-wing fighter on the project table for close to a year.  This weekend, I finally got around to making my blown-up ship markers.

I started with white cotton batting like you would use to stuff a toy.  I then spray painted it with black spray paint.  This usually works better if you tear it into about the size hunks you are going to use before spraying it.  Otherwise, when you pull the batting apart, there will still be white areas.

In this picture the batting looks lighter than in person.  I often highlight the black batting with a light spray paint of gray paint from about two feet away to provide some highlights.

I think used a hot glue gun to attack wads of the painted batting to flight stands.

I cut the micro machines ships in half and then hot glued them to opposite ends of the batting to give the appearance that the ship exploded out from the center.

I think the effect is good.  I plan to place them on the table for one turn when a ship is destroyed in the game.  As a house rule, when a ship flies through this marker, they will take an attack with one or two red dice.

I recently found these ducks on Ebay.  They are old figures from the 1970’s I think.  The sculpting is of that vintage.  I couldn’t resist painting them in Donald Duck colors.  I am collecting a fair number of duck figures.

At last Friday’s HAWKs night we play tested a set of rules under development by Lee Sowers and Allen Kaplan in New Jersey.  The rules are for division-level WWII games.  They have some interesting concepts.

While Duncan was play testing his Cold Wars game, and we were play testing the division-level WWII rules, Eric was play testing his new fantasy skirmish game.

Last Friday at HAWKs night Duncan Adams play tested his Combat Patrol(TM): Napoleonic Wars game for Cold Wars in a couple of weeks.  It was a hard slog for the British.

This is the first in a set of linked scenarios.  Duncan will run this game using his Napoleonic supplement to Combat Patrol(TM).  If the British capture the church, they will be in possession at the beginning of the next, larger-scale scenario, run by Dave using Wellington Rules.  The outcome of that scenario will impact the starting setup of their combined Fate of Battle: Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars game.

I think the scenario went well, but it will be a difficult task for the British to seize the church.  Stop by Duncan’s table at Cold Wars and participate in this interesting fight.

I have been working some insane hours at work the past month, but this weekend, I finally had a chance to finish some figures I began a while ago.  The first batch are some Japanese infantry that I will be using with the South Pacific supplement of Combat Patrol(TM): World War II.   I don’t know the manufacturer of the figures, since I picked them up in a bag from a flea market.

To paint these, I first primed them in Krylon camouflage brown.  Then I gave them a very heavy dry brush of Vallejo 880 Khaki Gray and a lighter dry brush of 882 Middlestone.  I think they ended with the right yellowish green color.

This gives me a full Japanese infantry platoon.

I also finished up another 10 Russians for my Winter War (1939) project.  Zeb Cook and I are running a double blind Finland game at Cold Wars in a couple of weeks, and I thought I was short a couple of riflemen.  Again, these were in a flea market bag, so I’m not sure the manufacturers.

After texturing the bases with ceramic stucco, I painted them with dark chocolate and dry brushed them with territorial beige.  I then applied some of the Citadel Valhalla Blizzard to the bases for that snow effect.