Monthly Archives: June 2018

A little shopping trip…

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So with a public holiday yesterday, Marouda and I went out and saw Deadpool 2, which was fun. (Probably the funniest online review can be found here. 6min video. Beware, spoilers.)

Anyway, after that, we stopped in BigW, which is one of those discount department stores like Kmart or Target. While we were in there, we checked out the toy section. The $10 Star Wars Hot Wheels ship above is probably a tiny bit small for the actual Resistance Bomber in X-Wing, but Im sure we can use it as a proxy, or as a shuttle instead of the little card token, or even as a damaged ship “terrain” to replace an asteroid.

I also recently ordered Gaslands (should be here …soon!) and I wanted to look at the toy cars.

So we got these:

The above were all $2 each. (Yeah, we got 2 of the armoured cars.)

This triple pack was $6.50.

These Jurassic Park Armoured Cars were $4.00 each. $2.00 for the cars, and $2.00 for the licenced IP, I guess.

I also saw these Hot Wheels tracks there.

Which reminded me that I recently saw (what I think are) these very products in use as walkways on someone’s Necromunda table. I believe it was on someone’s blog, actually. As you can see, the size works for both 32mm and 25mm bases. They’re made from pretty soft/bendy PVC, though, so I’ll need to be careful with them.

So at $4 each… I picked up 5 sets. $20 for all the extra walkways I should ever need. With this many I can easily chop and shorten as many as I want to. Perhaps I can even glue a little circular bit onto some of my terrain to notch the walkways onto. Now I just need to find which locally-available (spray) paints will properly adhere to this soft and bendy PVC…

All in all, more of a preview post than anything else, but what (should be?) a Gaslands force each for Marouda and myself for $20.50, plus something for X-Wing and some Necro-scenery. Not too shabby.

Flames of War M4 Sherman Tank Platoons (Battlefront Miniatures) (June-it ’18)

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These ten M4 Sherman models are some of Battlefront’s early product – resin shermans with metal guns. I picked up these two platoons secondhand, and so they lack turret MGs (if these early models even had those). I picked these up as two sets of 5 tanks for £15.00 each back in 2012 – they were old and long OOP even then.

And that’s where this story ended. Or took a rather long intermission until very recently. While I was looking for something else, and had Marouda helping me look through the boxes and tubs of figures in storage, I spied the two sets of Shermans, and then decided to pull them from the shelf, and also grabbed out all the plastic Open Fire! Shermans as well (sadly, they’re the dodgy ones from the first edition of OF!) Thanks to Just Needs Varnish, and his endless stream of cool looking 15mm stuff, I decided it was time to get a few little tanks painted up.

They’re really nothing special. I got two versions of OD spray made up at the local paint store (I’ll need to get a Brown Violet match made as well, but I need to get the Vallejo paint first!). I used the darker as the base, then the lighter as a zenithal shade. I used the Battlefront decals (they’re fucking awful to use – they take forever to lift off the sheet, they’re thin and crinkle and tear easily) as I couldn’t get the PSC ones. I can out of Allied Stars and so found a larger-scale sheet of them from Warlord, and used the smallest ones. I’ll have to buy a bunch more of the Warlord ones, as they were great decals to use.

The ten Shermans have been painted in a rather generic style. I’ve gone for all-Allied Stars to save the ringed stars for later units. I figure I can use the turrets with top-stars on them as Platoon leaders as needed. Not that I’ve played Flames of War in many, many years now. Not since 1st edition, in fact. While I can recognise a lot of WWII armour in it’s basic forms, I don’t know them well enough to know where exactly to place all of the optional markings, or which of the many variants that these Shermans are.

Battlefront Shermans imitate the start of a typical round of World of Tanks.

What will I do with these? Well, I have a few different 15mm armies worth of figures and armour to build and play with one day. There’s obviously Flames of War out there, and plenty of other WW2 rulesets besides for that scale. At one stage I hoped to play Bolt Action with a bunch of 15mm models, using cm for inches, but it never happened. I have a DAK army that’s been in storage for well over a decade now that could probably be a project for both “Finishing Units” months as well as, obviously, Neglected Models. The problem for me is painting 15mm troops. Because as cool as they can look when complete, I find them painfully boring to paint.

I painted the turret ring area to visually represent destroyed/burned tanks.

I’ve been considering picking up that TANKS! game by GF9 as a bit of a light game. It would certainly give me an outlet to use some of these tanks with, not to mention potentially giving me some motivation to paint some additional 15mm armour. I suppose there’s also the Bolt Action side-game, Tank War.