Monday, 23 May 2011

6mm Fedayeen

Last night I had a crack at sculpting some "Darth Vader" helmets on some H&R Soviets to create Fedayeen Saddam figures. 
I'm finding that the "greenstuff" is drying out to much as I'm working with it - I'll need to look online for solutions.  Looking at the line-up you can tell that the figures in the middle are the ones I started with, and the I moved to the ones on the edge of the sprue.  As the putty dries out, I'm finding it becomes harder and stickier, resulting in worse sculpting.

My plan is to mix Darth helmets with balaclava'd figures (next conversion job!) to create my fedayeen for Road to Baghdad.

For those of you who aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, here is a google image search for "Fedayeen Helmets" : link

I couldn't find any images I could satisfy myself about ownership/copyright in the short time available to re-post here.

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

6mm Moderns begins in earnest

The new Force on Force and Road to Baghdad have pulled me away from my Vietnam project.
It's now on hold until later this year.
I picked up some mid east buildings form ebay before easter.
I'm inspired.......

Monday, 18 April 2011

Quick "Road to Baghdad" Review

I'm going to cheat and post a quick review I knocked up for Book Depository.  After I've had a chance to read through RtB more thorough over the Easter break I'll post more detailed thoughts:

The Road to Baghdad is a return to roots for Ambush Alley Games (AAG). Their original game "Ambush Alley" was firmly rooted in the events of the 2003 invasion of Iraq - Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As the first offering from their new partnership with Osprey, AAG have served up a wargamer's treasure for this conflict. The book is 104 pages, soft cover, and full of colour art and photos as you would expect from an Osprey publication.

After a brief introduction, 11 pages are devoted to the an overview of the war, with the timescale stepped out.

After this comes the real "meat in the sandwich"; 19 scenarios for the conflict spanning 83 full colour pages with maps, force lists, suggestions for alternate and augmented forces, and the all important historical outcome. These scenarios are design for use with the Force on Force ruleset, but could equally be used with any ruleset focusing on about a platoon per side.

Finally there is an overall listing for US, British and Iraqi forces to enable further scenario creation, as well as a bibliography of further reading.

If I have one immediate criticism of Road to Baghdad, it is that there is so much information crammed into the 104 pages. Skimming the book it can be difficult to pick individual scenarios immediately, as there is very little whitespace (camouflage space??) free in this book to delimit the individual scenarios and they often run on into each other. The Table of Contents obviously helps here, but this is a lot of content in a compact form.

Force on Force Arrives...Early!

My colleague who sits next to me just came back from the mail area with two packages.
Inside was this:
The books look very nice and are more compact than the A4 printouts I had of the original rules.
More details after I get a chance to have a flick through over lunch.
But for now.....Back to Work!!!

Nice 6mm Terrain

Up late working on a number of customer proposals for work.
I take little breaks to look at other stuff, took keep me going.
Just found out I't missed a great post on the Ambush Alley Forum for 6mm.
Check it out here:
http://www.ambushalleygames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6155

Not a lot of progress here at the moment.  Just behind my laptop on the desk are this VC conversions I need to finish.....

Friday, 8 April 2011

Conversion Attempt - part 2

A couple of days ago I took a quick comparison shot of my new "VC" against the H&R US figures.

 Unfortunately it turned out to be against some of my worst hat work, but the size comparison is significantly better that vs the Irregular figures.

Since then, I've started basing the figures.  This was a bad move, as I need to file off their webbing to represent poorly equipped Local Force troops in just "pyjamas" and a rifle. 


Note also in this picture the figure who is missing their hat because I tried to file some of the wonkiness out of it.  He's so depressed that his rifle barrel has gone droopy.....

The dodgy hats will need replacing rather than fixing it seems.
Plenty of work to get them to where they need to be, but it's a start!

Saturday, 2 April 2011

Conversion attempt

Found myself with some time last night, so I had at putting some rice hats on some warsaw pact figures to convert them to Local Force VC.
Converted H&R Warsaw Pact Infantry

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Conundrum

Okay folks, I have a bit of a problem.
I've gotten some more Heroics and Ros 6mm figures.  This time it's their modern US, that I plan to use for my 6mm vietnam project.  That's all well and good, but I need some opponents for them.
H&R don't make any VC figures.  I could try to convert their Warsaw Pact range, but that's likely to be a fair bit of work.
As far as I can tell, there are a few manufacturers who make VC and NVA in this scale:
  • Mainforce - too big
  • GHQ - too big and too expensive
  • Irregular - my usual choice, but big against the H&R.
Below is a comparison shot between H&R US infantry and some Irregular VC.  I've lifted the H&R to account for the base on the VC, and they aren't too bad:



The problem really arises with the comparison against the NVA (really Main Force VC for the most part) range from Irregular:

Not as close....
Every time I look at the second picture, my response ranges from "That's not too bad..." to "that's awful".
My budget appears to have backed me into a corner on this.

Sunday, 6 February 2011

15mm Cthulhu-esque action

You need to check out the fantastic Octopus Cultist and their eldritch Octopus-God overlord coming soon from Khurasan:
http://tinysolitarysoldiers.blogspot.com/2011/02/khurasan-eldritch-horror-minis.html
I'm seriously considering getting rid of my 15mm and making a move completely to 6mm for cost and space reasons, but these have really made me pause.

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Another 6mm Comparison Shot

Below is a shot I took earlier, comparing the H&R German Infantry to a couple of vehicles, from both H&R and Irregular (don't forget to click for the full size).
Left to Right we have; Irregular Toyota Pickup, H&R Panzer IV H, and Irregular M113 ACAV.
Scaling wise, I think the H&R infantry scales quite well.
As a result I ordered some more bits and pieces from them today......