One More Post on 15mm Models...

Sticking with Team Yankee, most of the British force is ready for paint, so i took a break from Soviet kit to paint up a troop of Scorpions.

These are from the BF kit - fit is pretty good, stowage is a bit sparse, some of the 3D modelling that was done before the model was cut could have been done better by the average high school kid (check out the tools on the sides of the hull). Paints are pretty much entirely Humbrol enamels, with 86 Olive Green forming the base colour.

And, in the words of Bugs, that's all, folks!

And Another Post on 15mm Models...

Almost done with the catch-up posts. Still working through 15mm BF products, but skipping forward to 1985 and Team Yankee, Cold War gone hot in Germany.

I started with a Russian force, to provide opposition to other players while I waited on the British to come out, then I bought an American force because we suddenly had too many Soviet players, then the British I had been waiting on came out, so...I have lots of TY models to work through.

There's the possibility of a firestorm campaign for TY in August, so I have been concentrating on the Soviets, hoping to get the entire army assembled and painted in time. Here is part of it.

First up, a battery of six 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled 122mm howitzers. three of these are Zvezda plastic, three are BF multimedia. The Zvezda ones are cheap, accurate, go together well but the detail is shallow. BF's ones are expensive, go together OK (but not as easily as the plastics) and have very deep details. At the end of the day, they look OK mixed together. Main colour is from Tamiya, to match (if teh interwebz is correct) the dark green used by Soviet Russia in the 1980s. Note that the photos show how much difference is made by ambient light - same models, different lighting conditions, the green changes shades).

A pair of Zvezda plastic Shilkas are providing air cover. Cheaper and nicer than BF's multimedia offering.

Then, a BMP horde. BF models.

 Scouts, BMP-1s or BMP-2s.

last up, a PRP-3 artillery spotter vehicle, model from Old Glory:

Long Time, No Post 5.

Still working through 15mm models. Seeing a theme here? Onto Soviets now. Here's a nationality that I had little interest in for a long time, but then I discovered their late war forces - forward detachments and massed T-34/85s. plus, they're fairly quick to paint, because Uncle Joseph believed in quantity and standardisation.

The forward detachment force has a couple of lend lease M3 scout cars in the mix. BF models with Soviet crews from BF:

As the Soviet steamroller pushed them back towards Berlin, the Germans left a lot of equipment on the field, which the Soviets happily put back into service. Detachments of cunning scouts - spetznaz troops - would use captured vehicles to get close to German positions. So, we have three German halftracks being used by the Russians:

All the models are BF, resin for the Sdkfz 250, plastic for the bigger ones. The 251 models don't go together as well as one would wish for a BF product - there are slight gaps in various corners, but again, at 3 feet, it's hard to see these flaws.

Long Time, No Post 4.

Still working through the boxes of 15mm models, we are now on to German guns and vehicles.

For the period 1939-1942, a pair of "88"s. This box was made in New Zealand and harkened back to version 1 of the game, when gun teams sometimes faced a long edge of the base.

Guns need transports. Again, dark grey, so good until the end of 1942 or early 1943. the field car came in a two-pack, so there's an extra for now.

In the painted models storage there are half a dozen Sdkfz 251 halftracks for a panzergrenadier force. In the primed stash were some more. It seemed like a good idea to finish the primed ones and stick them all in the same place. these are PSC plastics. Nice vehicle kits, figures are a little slender by comparison to BF ones, but nothing that stands out when they're all painted.

Long Time, No Post, Part 3.

A little more desert-themed stuff for Flames of War.

BF released plastic kits for various tanks for 1942 in the desert and I ended up with a few, just to see what they were like. The Grant kit contains parts British Grants or American Lees (different turrets, cupola, longer barrel for the optional M3 75mm gun for the USA). The kit goes together very well, but is short on stowage, leaving one with a handful of near-identical, 'clean" tanks. I already have a squadron of Grants, so I threw two of my three models together as Grants and one as a Lee and them painted them all differently.

The two Grants, one in Light Stone and Dark Green with black and white edging, appropriate for May to October 1942, the other in Desert Pink and Dark Green, as ordered shortly before Second El Alamein.

The Lee, US Olive, yellow turret band for the Torch landing and subsequent fighting in Tunisia and Algeria.

I've had a bunch of Crusaders sitting half-painted for nearly a decade, so this seemed like a good time get more paint on them. Most of the models are Old Glory, assembled as either 2pdr or 6pdr gun tanks. A pair of BF resin-and-metal tanks had been made up as the close support tanks with howitzers. All the tanks had been sprayed with an Army Painter primer that worked for Lightstone.

I started with the squadron HQ, to practice the camouflage pattern and figure out what order to paint details.

Since these were painted, I discovered (thanks, Tank Museum) that the objects on the back of the tank that I painted as rusty possible-exhausts are actually the air intakes and filters, so they will get repainted soonish.

Lastly, I painted up one of the old objective markers from the stash, the wrecked Crusader. Many Crusaders did not receive camouflage over the basic Lightstone, and this is one of them.