Warhammer Quest – Cursed City: Captain Emelda Braskov

Warhammer Quest - Cursed City: Captain Emelda Braskov

Something different today – a Warhammer model that was released relatively recently! I started painting Emelda here after being inspired by seeing the female Stormcast Vanquisher painted by Wudugast, the creator behind the Convert or Die blog. When I first saw Wudu’s model, it was on my phone while I was out and about, so at first I thought the model was the Cursed City heroine rather than a Stormcast, so after I got home, I cracked open my Cursed City box and snipped the good captain off her sprue with the thought of getting her painted for Fembruary…

Warhammer Quest - Cursed City: Captain Emelda Braskov

It wasn’t until just a little bit later that i got back to actually reading Wudugast’s post, and found that the model which had inspired me was actually a different one to the figure I’d grabbed out and started work on, but by then it didn’t matter. As you can see by my photos, I pretty much went with “box art” as my colour scheme for this one – I figure I’ll go convert-happy with later copies of this model and can get interesting later on.

Warhammer Quest - Cursed City: Captain Emelda Braskov

Now that she’s complete, I’ve since been inspired not only by Wudugast’s Cursed City models but also very much by Alex of Leadbaloony’s fantastic series of Cursed City models and Dave Kay of Scent of a Gamer’s Cursed City series to add Cursed City to my roster of board games I’m actively working on. I also realised that I’ve got enough fully-painted models of all of the various kinds that we can probably play through the entire campaign using proxies – replacing them with the “real” models as I complete them. With this month also being “Monster MAYhem“, I’ve already got a few models getting through assembly and onto basing and priming….

Battlefront Sd Kfz 10/4 Light AA Platoon (GBX147) – Deutsches Afrikakorps for Flames of War

Battlefront Sd Kfz 10/4 Light AA Platoon (GBX147) - Deutsches Afrikakorps for Flames of War, 15mm, 1:100, 1/100, Battlegroup

The next little set of models for my Afrika Korps fit very much in the support role. A platoon of Sd Kfz 10/4 – halftrack mounted light Anti-Aircraft flak guns. This kit is actually the “Late War” version, as I was unable to get hold of the Mid War version, sold in both DAK and “Grey” boxes with identical contents for some reason. There’s a slight difference to both the gun model, the gun shield and the seating arrangement in these earlier versions, but I’m not about to get too fussed over a difference that small, and anyone who wants to get upset and count the rivets is welcome to count how many fingers I’m holding up. 🙂

Battlefront Sd Kfz 10/4 Light AA Platoon (GBX147) - Deutsches Afrikakorps for Flames of War, 15mm, 1:100, 1/100, Battlegroup

Painting was again pretty straightforward – For these, I just followed my established methods of painting DAK armour, and then eventually when I got to the crew, painted them in the same manner of my Flak88 crew – basically in their Luftwaffe Uniforms. I marked the command model by adding in an extra model with binoculars to the passenger seat of one of the halftracks to represent an Unteroffizer or other NCO.

Battlefront Sd Kfz 10/4 Light AA Platoon (GBX147) - Deutsches Afrikakorps for Flames of War, 15mm, 1:100, 1/100, Battlegroup

I did however run into a particularly painful issue – the vehicles are resin with metal tracks and wheels, the crew are metal, but the guns are plastic – this means that the guns end up looking like the one in the image above, unless you do what I did in the image above – and that’s to magnetise the bloody things so they stay down! My initial plan was to use metal ball bearings in the guns and magnets in the chassis – the theory that the bearings would add weight while also being attracted to the magnets.

Battlefront Sd Kfz 10/4 Light AA Platoon (GBX147) - Deutsches Afrikakorps for Flames of War, 15mm, 1:100, 1/100, Battlegroup

That did not work, unfortunately, and the bearings supposedly sent by the seller from eBay took more than a month to never actually arrive, despite them supposedly being in located in Sydney (a couple of days for the post, at most). So then I ordered another set from another place here in Melb, only to find that they didn’t work, and then to remember that I had some really bloody small rare earth magnets ….somewhere.

In the end they worked out, I guess. Now I need to decide on whether or not to also build the ground mounts that these guns can also slot onto (and paint the crew!) – they can be used in a DAK list as Fallschirmjaeger allies, so… maybe?