Switching away from painting minis for a moment so that I don't lose enthusiasm I dug up a Revell kit of the front-line Polish fighter of 1939, the PZL-11c. I have built this kit in the past and know that it is a quick-build model that looks the part when it finished. Assembly was quick and the parts-fit was exemplary. The kit does come with a pilot, but, well you will understand when you meet him.
I keep plugging away at the pile of metal trying to get these Indians finished so that I can move on to completing a few other projects before the end of the year. Simple figures with a very simple palette, if the paint dried faster I could get twenty-four of these guys knocked out in a day!
Hinchliffe was one of the original "kings" of British manufacturers of historical minis. Their catalog was huge and always expanding, I awaited the new issues of Battle magazine to see what was coming down the pipeline. It seemed that they would eventually produce figures for every conceivable conflict. Roman testudoes to Darius on his throne! I would hoard my funds to buy a few of them at a time. I ended up with thousands of them and am only now getting around to painting them!
I decided to dip back into painting ancients by finishing off my collection of 25mm Hinchliffe Indians. I have been toting these minis around for nigh unto forty years now and have only gotten some infantry painted and based. These chariot models have been doing service in a state of nakedness (based and primed but nary a spot of paint) for simply ages, it was time that they had their status upgraded. I sat myself down and started work, I kept an example of one of the painted figures from the army in hand so that I could make an effort to match the style of the existing troops. After three days of steady work I had my six chariots finished and I am rather pleased with them. The simplistic style of the minis argued for a simple approach to painting, much like my "toy soldier" approach that I used on my 3-D printed Swiss, so I stuck with bold colors applied in a blocky style.
In an effort to fully establish my Polish air-force I was hunting around on Ebay when I discovered Southampton Books. These fine folks have (aside from a significant collection of books) have a surprising array of 1/72 scale kits, many of which are of very unusual subjects. I picked up a pair of Ruch PZL-23 Karas Polish bombers for the 1939 Polish campaign and another pair of L-S G3M3 Type 96 Nells for my collection of Sino-Japanese War, all for under forty dollars. Both sets of kits are older than most wargamers but the quality of the casting and fit of the parts (especially on the L-S kits) was top-notch.
Having painted a zillion tiny minis I decided that it was time to take a break and build a machine. To this end I thought that it might be relaxing to add to my 1930s collection by adding to my pre-war Luftwaffe. The Heller Focke-Wulf FW 56 Stosser is an excellent kit of an important aircraft. It bears the hallmarks of it's age (raised panel lines etc.) but captures the outlines of the original quite well. On top of that it is an excellent kit that goes together almost flawlessly.
After foolishly adding some boats to the DBA project I then needed to add water. As this all needed to fit into one of the two boxes that I had arbitrarily set as the limit for this little undertaking I was constrained by the dimensions of the interior. The boxes I am using are from Uline who make boxes in almost every imaginable size. The ones I'm using are for letter sized paper so the longest dimension is 11.5 inches. DBA being played on a 4'x4' table meant that I would need to make river sections that worked those dimensions as well. I settled on 8" lengths with a 2" width. The next mission was to run to my local Arts & Crafts store and buy a sheet of medium blue matte-board. Once this was in hand I set to work.
I was sitting in the workshop glumly contemplating painting the windows on all those buildings I had made for the built up areas for DBA when I decided to take a break and do something entirely different. DBA rules allow for shorelines and waterways and also allow for ships to navigate them. Thus I needed ships (we will talk about waterways later). A quick look at some basic references refreshed my idea of what a trireme looked like and I was off the the races!
With the soul-crushing tedium of painting the minis out of the way I could turn my attention to a subject I truly enjoy; terrain! Having already sent out hills and woods with the 2D Pike and Shot game I could concentrate on buildings.
As this all started with a sprue of Romans it seemed proper to start with a Roman base camp in the manner of a Roman marching fort. The dimensions were compressed to fit into the area allowed under the rules for such a camp. This left the model a little truncated but it still bears the hallmarks of the temporary fort that the Romans built at the end of each day's march.
One of my friends is currently stationed near El Paso Texas. The few gamers in his unit are mostly 40K players and he has been trying to interest them in historical gaming. One of the guys in his unit mentioned an interest in the Thirty Years War after seeing a book on Joe's shelf. He is currently a 40K player but said that he would love to game in the Pike and Shot era. Of course the Army isn't much interested in providing soldiers vast amounts of storage for toys so any gaming set-up would have to be seriously conscious about reducing volume.
Joe mentioned this in conversation the other day and I asked if he had his copy of Tercios with him, he stated that he did . I told him that I could get him set up to play in short order by printing out top-down views of units and sticking them on base-sized rectangles of matte-board. I promptly popped over to Junior General and copied a bunch of top-down views of units. A little tinkering gave me representative views of most of the units found in a typical Thirty Years War army which I then printed out and glued to heavy matte-board
