A Wargaming Smorgasbord of Sorts

A period of global impact - not one I am hugely familiar with but needless to say there is cunning plan of sorts….

….and it may be something like this! Available from the Wargames Vault, David Manley’s supplement covering the Russian Civil war to go with his excellent Steamer Wars rules. 

Saturday morning saw the arrival of the second part of my Father’s Day haul - the latest book from the renowned military historian, Antony Beevor (see the first picture). I must confess to having a very limited knowledge of this particular period but hope that this book will fill that gap or at the very least give me a nudge along yet another project….

I know of several good rule sets that cover this period as well as figure ranges so who knows? I may have a Portable Wargame sized dabble at some point.

Laurel and I had an impromptu day out to the Promenade Park in Maldon for the Armed Forces Day. I took a few pictures and picked up a dash of sunburn as well fed some very enthusiastic ducks! The picnic with friends was great fun and it was nice to get out for the day. A selection of the items on display are below:

A wise wargamer once said “you can never have too many trucks!”

Lovely looking and with a Bren mounted

I always remember the Matador from the Airfix kit with a 5.5” gun

I was rather taken by this heavily armed jeep - just the thing for securing a parking space!

The first in a selection of display pieces

Paratrooper attire - note the Bangalore Torpedoes bottom left

The unmistakeable Bren LMG

Typing up orders, requisition forms or leave requests!

There were rather a lot of jeeps in evidence but the armed version caught my eye for sure - sporting weapons galore!

Sadly time was against me in respect of any progress with the Portable Charge! Wargame but I was able to spend some time earlier this evening messing about with turrets in advance of the great pre dreadnought model build. The first examples are based on a circular design typical of early turrets - for example on the U.S.S. Monitor. The model for this style of turret was originally designed to use standard bamboo skewers for the gun barrels - for smaller calibres, say 6” or smaller, I will use cocktail sticks. Ironically the turret you see in the picture below is actually the first I have built that features gun barrels - all the ACW and Russo Turkish types merely have the gun ports. Given that the weapons were muzzle loaded I merely assumed that the guns were inboard being loaded!

Examples of large calibre main gun turrets - these are 20mm across with the bottom ‘slice’ 3mm thick as is the middle ‘notched slice’ whilst the turret roof is 2mm thick. The gun barrels are a little on the thick side but not overly so and besides, they fit in well with the overall simplistic building style I will be using.

I have looked at many turret styles and it would be easy enough to reflect national differences but that kind of flies in the face of what I want to do. I have a design for a more ‘modern’ looking turret in hand and have decided that I will stick with the above circular type and the new version for simplicity. 

I built the above just to see how it would work out and more importantly, how it would look on one of my standard large hull templates. The answer is fine!

All in all then, it was a rewarding weekend although not quite in the way I had planned it and so hopefully next weekend I will be able to catch up!