Towing the Line

We're a month and a half into 2019, and I'm only half a month late with my first "monthly" post. This is going... not "well", exactly, but maybe "close to adequate".

So let's crack on. In 2015, Warlord released the Germany Strikes! book, which Pete and I acquired almost immediately. Now, just 4 short years later, we're in danger of actually playing one of the scenarios.

We're planning to tackle the battle of Orp first. It's a tank battle so requires both forces to be entirely mobilised, and the French force also needs to be based around the Somua S35.

I already had two S35s, from Blitzkrieg miniatures, which I painted back in November. I needed one more, and fortunately I had one from Warlord that I'd had lying around for an embarrassing amount of time.

Painting this made me wish I'd gone for Warlord models for the other two!

It's a much more detailed model, and was also a lot easier to paint. I think this is mainly because it wasn't so heavily caked in release agent as the Blitzkrieg versions. It scales with them fine though, so I'm happy to use this as the command tank and claim it's a slightly different model or something.

Then, I needed to tow some guns around, so I got myself a couple of Laffly W15T tractors.

These are from Mad Bob Miniatures. They're nice clean casts but don't come with crew, so I've used spare tank commanders - not quite the right uniform, but it seems reasonable that a tank platoon would round up spare drivers from tank crews if they were short handed.

I've also added the machine guns to these. It seems like that would be a very useful thing to have on a vehicle that will hang around some otherwise very exposed artillery crews.

I didn't have any French machine guns I could use for this, so I carried out careful analysis of the available options... and then thought "sod it" and ordered some Japanese weapons so I could chop at Japanese machine guns. I also fiddled about with bipods to make some mounts - these would be improvised mountings anyway. The end result seems reasonable, provided people don't look too closely or think about it too hard.

I'm happy with how this all turned out, which is all to the good as I'll probably lose the actual game. So what's happened to my all-new 2019 tally?

Well, I got some stuff for Christmas, and I've been to Vapnartak where I encountered fantastic special offers...

... so I'm not into the black quite yet:

Acquired: 16
Painted: 3

There's more to come, too, as the 7TV Apocalypse kickstarter gets closer to delivery. I'll need to pull something out of the back for next time.