Dust Tactics Supply Drop Boxes

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No wanker jokes, please…

Since this became a thing last week (along with a roof leak that has had half of the house lights out of action only the night before), I haven’t been doing much proper painting, and typing has been limited to pecking at the keys with one hand. So neither painting nor blogging have been all that much of a thing, and my cleaning up of the paint desk got halfway done (underneath) but I only got as far as cleaning up the Old Citadel/Coat D’Arms/P3 style pots that were scattered about. I’d been wanting to write up a post about the second squad of Minotaurs Space marines I finished recently, but my mood hasn’t been great enough to concentrate on it, so I’m doing this one instead on the scenery I’ve just finished up with this weekend.

Minotaurs Space Marines

Allied DUST Tactics Supply drop crates.

I have done a little bit of painting of sorts though – more simple scatter scenery. These crates come from the various DUST Tactics boxed sets I’ve accumulated over the years. Like so much in my collection, they sat around unused for ages before I got them out and primed them with PSC US Armour and Dunkelgelb Warspray cans. I did that several months ago, before winter set in and made spraying in any form very difficult. Since I could do very little else with my wrist as it is, I got Marouda to help me out over the weekend and tried out the Plastic Soldier Company spray stains that I purchased several years ago but have avoided using on my models in favour of more controlled washes and so forth applied by brush. I didn’t really enjoy using them, but they did the job – especially once I went over them with a drybrush afterwards (and a little dark spot wash on the US ones). I completed them with a gloss polyurethane varnish afterwards for hardiness, followed by Testor’s Dullcote to give them a nice matt finish.

Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marines

Axis DUST Tactics Supply drop crates.

The Axis crates were painted in the same manner as the US ones, though painting them and even looking at them now brings huge annoyance, as the assembly line workers in China seem to have mis-assembled several of the crates, as they have three different types of end-cap mixed across two different types of chassis. Still, if I don’t look too hard, I’ll be able to get past it.

Abwurfbehälter with Fallschirmjäger

Abwurfbehälter with Fallschirmjäger

Abwurfbehälter with Fallschirmjäger

This style of supply drop canister is loosely based on the Abwurfbehälter that were used by the Fallschirmjäger during WWII. The real ones went through several iterations – beginning as wood and finally ending up in a metal style that was the most common and well known. In WWII the Abwurfbehälter had specific markings that denoted their contents, though in the case of these Dust ones, I’ve decided to keep mine entirely without markings – so as to be more generic to work more easily across more games – From DUST (if I ever play it) to Konflict ’47 to 30&40k, various 28mm Star Wars games and hell, even moderns or Bolt Action.

Little Boxes …from Mantic’s Mars Attacks/Terrain Crate

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All 4 sides of Mantic’s Mars Attacks box stacks.

These boxes are not on the hillside, nor are they made of ticky-tacky, but they are (almost) all the same.

Ok, this is a scenery post, and a simple one at that, as it deals with a few pieces of minor scatter terrain. A long time ago, I backed Mantic’s Mars Attacks Kickstarter, and amongst all of the stuff that I received (and still haven’t used.. shhh!) was a few sets of the scenery accessories.

Mars Attacks Accessory Pic from Iron Saint’s Children of the Kraken Blog – go visit!

Naturally, I forgot to take a photo of the Accessory pieces before I started on any of this stuff, and Mantic’s photos don’t show them very well. It is in fact a very good gaming set. It turns out that I had four of them. Unless I find another 1 or 2 in boxes someday. I actually started painting the post boxes and rubbish bins back in summer, about 9 months ago, but managed to mess up the salt weathering. So the whole project went into limbo. A few days ago I spotted the box-barricades sitting on my painting desk and so decided to clean them up in a vaguely useful way – by painting them!

So here they are. Exciting, no? I kept them as generic as possible so they can work in as many settings as possible, from historicals through moderns, zombipocalypses and to sci-fi in about 28 to 38,000 years’ time. (When most things are still oddly recognisable when compared to nowadays.)

Crates. Probably from Grendel.

I also found a couple of resin crates that had been bought in the 90’s and sitting around part-painted for years, and spent the whole of 10 minutes that it took to finish them as well. I have the attention span of a flea, sometimes… I think they’re probably originally from some set by Grendel/Scotia Grendel, since that’s where most of my really old resin junk originates from.

Mantic Mars Attacks Boxes

Size and thematic comparisons.

Finally, some Zombipocalypse survivors, Space Marines and Dwarves help out with showing the scale and how they fit in decently well with all three disparate types of model. They’re a little on the small side, and while they’ll work well as meeples for barricades in games of Zombicide, they feel a little like those annoying foot-high “walls” that videogames use to keep our otherwise athletic heroes from straying outside of the designated play area… They might work better stacks on top of other items to create useful cover, but even as is they make for decent ground clutter.