Swap-Meet Successes!

       Michigan Toy Soldier held their annual Summer Swap Meet this past Saturday. Thanks to my eagle-eye buddy Steve I was able to get my hands on a PZL P-7, a PZL 37 Los and a Lublin R-XIII thus filling out my Polish Air Force of WW2. You will likely be seeing builds of these kits in the near future. I also added to my pile of of what I call "Spats and Losers" which is made up of aircraft with spatted fixed undercarriages and Aircraft that were absolute losers (admittedly a highly subjective group). Currently the "Spats" category is way ahead, but I did find a Fairey Battle, certainly one of the biggest losers of WW2.

Making my own cannon; Scratchbuilding 4.7" guns for the destroyers

but of course it turns out that there aren't any suitable 4.7' mounts in 1/200 scale

       Much to my chagrin it seems that there aren't any suitable 1/200 scale 4.7" mounts with shields to fit the destroyers that I am building. I am almost happy for it; this way all of both models will be entirely scratchbuilt. A rather perverse way of looking at it, but I will have to live with that.

Gaming Update 13AUG20 1900hrs

Like the title says, we will be gaming this Thursday, 13AUG20 at 7pm

Probably something from the Gluttonian Campaign

Heller 1/72 PZL P11c Polish Fighter

 

another one of those dusty models I re-found during the lockdown

       This is hardly a review (although I understand that this kit is still in production). This model has been around since the late 70s/early 80s. It is an excellent kit and is of an aircraft that I have always liked. This is pretty much just a walk-through of the build. This would be an excellent subject for an early-war air combat game like Check Your Six.

Seeing Double, a pair of scratchbuilt 1/200 British A class destroyers

 

drawings were much easier to find (and of much better quality) than the Dauntless project

       Another chapter in The Housemartin's endless efforts to exploit my free time; this one is entitled "The Destroyers". He needed two British "A" class Destroyers to go with his light cruiser for the Operation  Ironclad campaign. Nothing fancy about the construction, just my usual foam-with-card-glued-over-it method. Fortunately (unlike the Dauntless project) there are plenty of drawings and photos of A class British destroyers so figuring out the details and placement was a simple task.

 

scaled-up template glued down on a slab of blueboard

Details, details.......

       The 1/200 Dauntless project is coming to it's close. I am currently deciding whether to add portholes and doorways. My inclination is against it, but then, I look at all that empty hull side.....
But, before I descend into that madness, it occurred to me that I would likely take my chances with the Shore Patrol before I went to sea in a warship that lacked lifeboats and/or life-rafts. That settled my next task. Those items would help fill up that empty deck.

Gaming Update, 2AUG2020

I will be hosting a game on this Sunday 2AUG20 at 2:00PM
Game TBD

Tell me again what was the problem with gray ships? UPDATED

 

I just knew that something was going too well........

here we are back to all white 

       One of the things that has always kept me away from WW2 naval combat in any scale is that they just couldn't be happy with gray, or blue, or any other single color for that matter. Worse yet they didn't have the class to pick something attractive like buff over black. No, no such luck. They went with a "changing by the day" selection of camouflage patterns involving silly colors and a disturbing cross-breeding of cubism and impressionism. "Never you mind that HUGE column of smoke rising out of the funnels, this goofy pattern will make the ship disappear before their eyes....."

       That little rant out of my system I spent some time trying to pin down the camouflage scheme that was in effect for RN cruisers in the Indian ocean during the period May-Nov 1942. It seems that they used three colors and had an "official scheme" (of which I was never able to find an authoritative source). As I read on I found out that although there was an official pattern the ship's captains had a great deal of latitude in putting it into effect (to the point where, even in Scapa Flow, the home of the Royal Navy in wartime, some captains simply refused to repaint their ships and left them gray). This left me with little to go on. 

       In addition the HMS Dauntless seems to have been one of the least often photographed ships since the invention of the camera. I found myself trying to use photos of  her sister-ships (black and white, of course) to try to reconstruct the camo-scheme. Needless to say, none of these pictures reflected the same pattern applied across all the ships, leaving me to think it was more of a guideline than an official instruction. In the end I decided to use the patterns as a guide and just went ahead and sketched out the scheme and started putting paint on the model. This means that, without fail, I will now promptly encounter someone who has made it his life's work to document the Dauntless and all of the possible permutations of its appearance over the years. So be it.

Wargames Atlantic Great War German Infantry 1916-1918

       Fresh off the press and into my hands! I spotted these at my local brick and mortar (Michigan Toy Soldier Shop: michtoy.com) and just had to pick up a box. I have long awaited seeing this subject in hard plastic (despite having painted large armies and sculpted a 6x4 terrain board in 20mm). Well, my wait has finally been rewarded, and in grand style no less! This set will supply you with all you need for skirmish level games from 1916 on taking place on any front that the Kaiser's soldiers fought on (the one possible exception being on the Ottoman fronts, but they were largely advisors). I can also see them in a lot of post Great War actions during the chaos in Berlin and serving under the Friekorps against the Soviets in the east. Swapping in some spare 40K weapons might even provide an ersatz Death Korps of Kreig force. Priced at just over a dollar each they are a great bargain as well.

       The models are all cast in a hard gray plastic with very good detail. Anatomy and positioning are in-scale and and naturally posed; no freakishly large heads and hands so often found on metal figures. The equipment provided is also all scaled properly and offers a wide variety giving you the opportunity to build standard German troops or the dreaded Sturmtruppen that so nearly won the war during the Kaiserschlacht.

Off the ways and awaiting trials....further progress on 1/200th Dauntless

       I had a little time so I pushed ahead with one of the models of the D Class light cruisers. It is almost ready for armament and has shaped up into an elegant little vessel. I just need to add some details to eat up all that open space, life rafts, searchlights etc.

 

last we saw her she looked like this....

I swear, it's not MY fault!

       I admit that I have a nano-second attention span. I have learned to work with it and it doesn't disturb me very much. But, in this case, it isn't my attention span that is at fault. It is that my mouth is far more ambitious that my brain. The Housemartin (how often does THAT character show up in stories like this?) is building the forces for his Operation  Ironclad campaign game and intends to use Blood Red Skies for the air-combat portion of the campaign. For some reason inscrutable he has decided that he needed the ships to scale with the aircraft. For some even MORE inscrutable reason I agreed to build the ships. I'm still not clear why we had to use the 1/200 scale aircraft models from the rules........any scale would work and there are lots of ship/aircraft scale matches already out there.      
       Be that as it may, I am currently building some ships for him. I'm starting with the old "D" class light cruisers.

 

apparently this is the ONLY drawing of the ship on the internet

Thursday Night at the Fights

       Old Sarge has finally gotten his Bionic Man refit completed and showed up for a go-round of European Warfare using my home-brewed One Brain Cell French and Indian Wars rules (which had been slightly modified to reflect the different troops types). We had a jolly good time playing, talking politics and discussing the advances in 3-D printing, so much so that I took too few pictures for a proper report. All I can tell you is that I had a significantly stronger force that was tasked with breaking through a well-guarded pass and I failed. Enjoy the photos.

 

the forces arrayed for battle