Another great I Ain't Been Shot, Mum! battle report from the Mark Luther archives.
This is a follow-on game from his last AAR: this time the its the Germans who are on the advance, counter-attacking towards Mouen.
Click on the picture below to see all...
I've been wanting to get some Soviet SU-100 tank killers for some time. I've had the lesser SU-85s for ages...but, frankly, they are so last season...and I just wanted the ones with the bigger guns...and I wanted them now! The trouble was, I didn't fancy shelling out for the metal versions at £8-£9 a time.
Fortunately Battlefront came to my rescue with the release of their box set allowing you to build five plastic SU-100s for the princely sum of £23.40 or £4.68 per model.
Now I actually quite like plastic tanks. Yes, nothing beats the heft of a decent metal or metal-and-resin tank, but the relative pricing (allowing you to build big units), incredible detail, and the way that they paint up make plastics a very viable option. I'd almost go as far as to say I prefer plastic tanks: try dropping a plastic and a metal tank and see which one survives better!
The box set comes with all sorts of options, including just what I wanted: five SU-100s.
The kits go together very easily (less than 5 minutes a tank) and paint up very well indeed. These were done with an undercoat/basecoat of Army Painter spray, washed with GW Agrax Earthshade, then highlighted with one of lighter GW greens...Loren Forest IIRC. I put together, painted and based all five in about four hours in all.
Excellent value, great kits: which is a good thing as I have another box of them to do for the Egyptians for the Six Day War!
Things are starting to motor along nicely now, with twelve people (including me) now having sent in their first or even second and, in one case, third, entries for the year.
Today, in no particular order, we have:
Today's pictures are some of Mark's tanks, some of Mr Helliwell's Germans and Jon Davenport's Hessians:
Some of Mark Luther's Jagdpanzer IV 70s in action
Andrew Helliwell's command post/objective marker
New entrant Jon Davenport's Hessians in 28mm
As always, you can see everyone's full roster of submissions in their galleries, and the Scorecard will be updated tonight from my home PC.
One of the great things about Battlefront is the huge range of models they produce, even if sometimes the vehicle or gun that the models are based on only fought in one particular theatre or weren't produced in very large numbers.
Their recent Berlin supplement and its related new releases contain many good examples, one of which is the giant Soviet 203mm howitzer: something that, showing appropriate restraint, I ordered as soon as it hit the streets.
This thing is a monster. It's also easy to put together, easy to paint, and looks absolutely cracking. A very worthwhile addition to the arsenal!
This weekend, I played my first game of IABSM in 2016. Wanting to make it a bit of a special one, I decided to empty my terrain cupboard of all buildings with a possibly Soviet flavour and play a giant Stalingrad-style city game.
Click on the picture below to see how it went...
There are some of you obviously determined to start the TFL Painting Challenge 2016 off with a bang!
Already we have entries from:
Today's pictures will, I think, all have a sci-fi theme. Here are Ralph, Doug and some of Kev's entries:
Ralph Plowman's figures from the new moongrunt range from gzg
doug melville's aeroneuf submission
some of kev's x-wing models
Remember that you can see all the entries in the various people's galleries.
NB The scorecard will be updated tonight, once I can load the numbers onto my home PC
Fellow Lardy Patchen1863 posted the following battle report and photos on the TFL Yahoo Group recently. Hopefully he won't mind me reproducing it here so that people can see the words and pictures together.
Click on the picture below to see the AAR:
First chance I've had to publicise the arrival of the TFL Xmas Special 2015, available as a pdf for just £5 from the TFL website by clicking here.
For those who aren't familiar with the format, the specials are a twice-yearly collection of Lard related articles and features that provide hours of good reading and gaming. Here's what's in this one:
Here's another CDS after action report from Marcus B.
This time he's playing a scenario auto-generated from the rulebook. Click on the pic below to see all:
Here's an I Ain't Been Shot, Mum! battle report from the excellent Tracks and Threads blog.
Click on the pic to see the action:
Happy New Year to everyone!
I hope 2016 brings you joy and happiness...and me a T-34/85!
Looks like everyone has made a huge effort to get their last minute entries in under the wire.
In no particular order we have:
Pictures for what may be the final post of this year's challenge? A mixed bag...
Mr Hodge's rather fine Spanish Guerillos
Some dwarves from Leif
Sapper's SYW French Currassiers du Roi
The Mad Padre's 20mm Revel Krupp Protze truck with AT Gun
I played the third scenario from the Fall of the Lionsgate scenario pack this week with the boys from Benson. Two great games featuring plenty of action. Click on the picture below to see the full reports:
Huge numbers of figures have obviously been painted over the Christmas break. Here are today's submissions in the run-up to the end of this year's challenge:
I was tempted to have today's picture being Joakim's nativity figures, but it's the 28th and the moment has passed. Here are Pedivere's resting legionaires, Jason's Gauls, and Matt's Amazons.
Still a few days to get your entries in!
For those who need to buy some more Lardy products (cough, my scenario books, cough*), Rich is running a 15% off sale over at the main TooFatLardies webstore. You can get there by clicking here.
Not sure how long the sale will last: Rich says until he's finished the Xmas Special...so Easter then!
*all my scenario books are updated for IABSMv3...and if you don't fancy them, there's always Q13!
Earlier this year I added Waugh Games to the list of WW2 figure manufacturers. If you remember (assuming you follow this blog fairly regularly) I ordered three Opel Maultier from them at the bargain basement price of £2.50 each: under half the cost of the Battlefront equivalent. I've now had a chance to paint them up, giving my Gebirgsjaeger a bit of additional transport.
So, how did they turn out?
The first thing to point out is that they come with a HUGE base built in i.e. on one side of the truck the base sticks out at least an inch; on the other, at least a centimetre. I'm not sure why they come like this, but they do. Here's the picture from their website that shows what I mean.
The other thing the picture shows is the holes in the resin: you can see a big one on the door, and lots of little ones in the main body's wooden panels.
Well, I could do something about the bases - snapping them off to a decent distance from the tracks wasn't too difficult - but I decided to ignore the resin bubble holes: far too fiddly to fiddle with.
A black undercoat was followed by an all-over coat of a medium dark grey. I then dry-brushed the canvas top in a lighter grey, then dry-brushed both canvas and body with white. The windscreen and other glass was dark blue and then my (only slightly successful) attempt at a glare effect. The tracks were my usual gunmetal covered with flesh wash. Here they are:
As you can see, the resin holes aren't really significant: they just look like wear and tear. The bases are still a bit thick, and aren't very even...but that won't show on the tabletop either. The only real disappointment is the bit between the tracks and the main body paneling: there's a big resin bulge that looks like, well, a big resin bulge.
In all, however, not bad for £2.50 a time. The old adage that you gets what you pays for has certainly held true!
I'm settling nicely into my Christmas holiday now: no work until the new year!
Here's today's patch of painting challenge entries:
Today's pic has to be Matt's familiar, but unavailable, figures:
Well, there is one more entry to come. Treadhead has submitted a picture of his brand spanking new games room. I can't score this for the challenge, but I can include the pic here:
Very nice!
Still plenty of time to get your entries in for the challenge. Doors don't shut until midnight on the 31st!
It's been a long time since I've needed to do a mid-week update, but the weight of entries now coming in demands it.
Mind you, a lot of them come accompanied by a note that says "this will be my last entry this year...". Rubbish, I cry, plenty of time between now and the new year to get something done!
Anyhow, in no particular order, we have:
Today's pictures? Well, see below...
Stumpy's Russian air Ambulance
Carole' hover bikes
Steve Burt's little ships
Scorecard will be updated today or tomorrow, once I can get to it on m home PC.
Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days: been horribly distracted with real world affairs.
Anyhoo, to get back into the swing of things, here's a quick post showing my latest 15mm building for anything from WW2 right up to sci-fi: Sarissa Precision's factory.
The factory is mainly a single building with a nice roomy inside. There is a walkway halfway up one wall, and the windows and doors are made from heavy card stuck to the inner walls: nicely robust. There a small powerhouse plus chimney on one side, and the kit comes with a steps-and-gantry walkway that leads to one of the doors portrayed on the upper floor.
Now this is quite a challenging kit to build, but the instructions are excellent and easy to follow. It's just a bit fiddly in places, and I don't really do fiddly! The result, however, is definitely worth the time and effort. The outside looks brilliant, even with my rather crude paint job, the gantry is a very nice touch, and the inside is amazing. That walkway is surprisingly easy to build, and will provide a nice little fire step.
On the whole, highly recommended.
I'm making sure I keep ahead of the end-of-year rush here!
Today we have submissions from:
Today's pictures are from Ralph Plowman and Carole. First up are Ralph's marines/sailors from the late 19th Century:
And here are Carole' sci-fi figures for Q13:
Just twenty days to go to get your final entries in for 2015.
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
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