More Preperations for Barbarossa

This past couple of weeks, I've been moving along with my Barbarossa campaign preparations, adapting the GDW Barbaroosa 25 campaign for my own use.

The Barbarossa 25 campaign book includes roster sheets for the units involved in the game.  These are essentially TO&E sheets listing every stand and vehicle in each unit with check boxes to check off lost elements and vehicles when using the Command Decision rules for which the campaign was designed.  

In my case, I will be using my own rules with 1 to 1 representation of equipment, and either individually mounted 15mm infantry or 6mm team/section/squad stands.  So a big chunk of my preperation is to convert the roster sheets to work with my rules.  This turned out to be rather more involved than I had anticipated.  

The German and Romanian sheets came together pretty quickly.  Doing them in 1 to 1 makes for much more complex roster sheets, and the German division comes in at 7-9 pages, but most company to brigade rosters still take one to two pages. 

The Soviets were a little more work.  Between 1939 and 1941, there was a lot of evolution and reorganization in the Soviet army, and originally, I was hoping to include a lot of this in the campaign, but after working through all of the infantry formations for the numerous Soviet tank and infantry brigades, battalions, and supporting units, I've decided to reduce the range of unit variations that will be represented in the campaign. 

There will still be a variety of Soviet tank organizations represent, involving the many different models of tanks in Soviet service, but the infantry brigades will be less varied, with only 2-3 different organizations included in my game.  This came about because of the number of infantry figures and formations that I would have had to paint.

In 6mm, the scale in which most games will be played, I have around 150 Soviet infantry painted, another 250 that need painted, and before the reduction in the range of units, I was still going to need over 1000 more infantry figures to represent a good range of the Soviet units accurately.

Having each infantry TO&E physically modelled would be the easiest method to manage the figs and represent the units on the table, but I just don't want to spend that much time painting extra and really, redundant figs.  It would have resulted in lot of extra work, for not that much effect on the table top.  

In the end, I'm going to change my method of identifying/labeling the infantry stands and units, which will allow me to build modular battalons and companies.  This will still give me a range of different organizations, take little more than the figs I already have, and will allow me to field probably three battallions of infantry and much of their battalion and brigade support on a single table top.

At this point, I am done converting unit rosters and have printed out sheets for all of the formations at the start of the game.  I've also created sheets for formatons that will be introduced in later turns of the campaign.

Barbarossa unit roster sheets completed.

I mentioned Romanians roster sheets above, the things about Romanian forces is that I don't actually have any yet.  The plan in the coming months is to build both 6mm and 15mm armies.   Infantry from GHQ along with a small number of new models, and proxies from my German and French forces will suffice for 6mm.  And, I'm going to see what happens with the old True North line of miniatures, and assuming that they are re-released, will build 15mm forces around those, adding a little of the French stuff that I sculpted and cast years ago for 15mm.

Elsewise, Ive started on the remaining 6mm Russian infantry figures, so that should keep my brush busy for a the next couple of weeks.

Getting a start on Soviet 6mm infantry.  The little white squares

 are styrene plastic bases for the infantry.  The little dark 

squares are the finished portion of Soviet infantry.

Still expecting a late summer, early fall start of the campaign.

Someday, I'm going to actually play a game (I like to tell myself that).  

15mm African Buildings Serviceable

Well, I'm not sure that I can call them done, but they are complete enough to go into service.  It is just a matter of them holding up the show, and I want to play some games.

Adding rust to the roofs turned into a kind of frustrating thing, as I ran out of four colors of paint from manufactures that are no longer in production.  Additionally, I'm temporarily working with one eye (minor, but annoying medical thing), which has made life a little more interesting. I finally just reached a point, where I did a very light weathering and called it a day.  The buildings don't have doors, and there are a few other details that should be added, but I'm going to try using them in their current modular state, and see if they work out okay.  

I had intended to make replaceable wall sections, showing battle damage and whatnot, but some of the pieces are just so light, that they may be more hassle than they are worth.  If the parts tend to get nudged about and mis-align, I may go back and just mount all the bits on fixed bases.  We'll just have to see.  In the mean time, here are some pics:

I'm pretty happy with the ruined buildings, 

less so with the others.

All in all, not great, but serviceable.

I don't know if I'll get a game on the table this weekend or not; it will just depend on how fast the eye thing heals up.  If not this weekend, then likely next.

Odds and Ends (Feb2023)

Last week, I was all over the place and without accomplishing any single big project, I still got a lot done.

Imagi-Africa

Regarding the 15mm African houses, I've got nothing new to show yet, I lost a big chunk of last weekend to some things that had to be done around the house, and will likely lose this coming weekend to for the most part.  Amazing how a 3-4 day project (if I got full eight hour work days free) ends up taking six weeks to complete.

Barbarossa Campaign

I have made a lot of progress on the unit rosters for the Barbarossa campaign, the Germans are done, and the Soviets are in process.  Converting the Germans to one to one figure representation was pretty straight forward, the Soviets are a little less so, but moving along.

I've also been doing some research on Soviet defensive positions, found some great info for concrete bunkers, though haven't explored how useful they will be for the campaign, and have roughed out some designs for field fortifications and entrenchments and how to work them into my modular terrain.

WWII Romanians

Tied to Barbarossa, I've been looking into adding Romanian forces in both 6mm and 15mm for Barbarossa.  I haven't found any 6mm infantry, so expect to use proxies, maybe French or Dutch figs to represent them.  For 15mm my initial plan had been to go with True North figs from Old Gory, but those to have been removed from their website, and my e-mail chase to find the status of them has failed.  

QRF and Flames of War has them, but QRF are limited in the scope of the range, and I don't want to sell a Kidney to be able to afford the FoW figs.  I may chase down some of the out of production True North and/or Legions East figs (depending on price) and fill in gaps with QRF, or maybe I can find some FoW at a little discount to make the pain a little less.

1940 France Campaign

I was playing around with my terrain for some of the 1940 battlefields, and realize that I'm going to have to break down and make some 6" square terrain modules for 6mm roads, rivers and streams.  I have the foam, and it won't be a huge amount of terrain or work, but it is another project added to the list.

Painting Table

Still on the painting table are both 15mm and 6mm 1950s vitage aircraft models in various stages of paint, some just needing decals.  A platoon of 20mm PAVN troops from Elhiem, and some 6mm H&R Soviet troops for Barbarossa are all awaiting basing.  No recent progress on any of those, as all of my "building and painting time" has been spent on the African houses, which are very close to done.

Despite being behind on the African houses, I've pretty muched been using all of the free time for one hobby thing or another, and had a pretty productive week.  It seems that I've been on a bit of a roll the last couple of months, as i've made progress on several fronts (Get it? Fronts?), and wake up every morning excited about what I will accomplish through the day.

I'm off to work now, and looking forward to this evening's progress.  Take care and be safe out there!

Barbarossa Campaign Progress

After doing a goodly amount of research and exploring the options, I've decided to use the old "Barbarossa/25" "bathtub" campaign booklet as the basis for my upcoming Barbarossa Campaign.  The campaign basically scales everything; forces, map, and timeline at 1/25.

I tend to overeach with respect to scope in my gaming projects, and Operation Barbarossa is kind of really big in scope, so I'm trying to avoid going too big with this.

I spent time over the last week outlining the campaign booklet and making changes to accommodate my tactical table top rules.  I will probably use "Lacquered Coffins" to handle most of the air to air combat, though may give a table top conversion of Mustangs and Messerschmitts (half original scale with 6mm models) a try for some smaller encounters.

I 'm considering adding in a few extra units, as I'd like to get some use out of the T-35s and a few other miniatures that I have.  These additions will be minimal, so I don't think they will throuw the game out of balance.

Games will probably be played mostly in 6mm with some smaller battles in 15mm (should small enough battles actually occur).  I also expect that the campaign will be played in a fairly small window of time; months, as opposed to years as most of my other campaigns are played.

Converting the Command Decision style order of battles back to 1 to 1, and checking that I have all of the appropriate miniatures still needs to be finished up.  I may yet have to order a few figs, but there shouldn't be much needed at this point.  

All things considered, the project is progressing pretty smoothly at this point, and the campaign will still likely start late summer or early fall as things stand at the moment. 

I do have some reservations about the "bathtub campaign" concept, and have considered that the battles or campaign in entirety may not feel "right" to me.  Should that happen, then I will move to using "Europa: Fire in the East" as the strategic component of the game, and anticipating that down the road, I will want to revisit at least portions of the campaign in greater scope, I am making some accommodations now to transfer my bathtub version tools directly to a more expansive version of the campaign.

We'll just have see how it goes.

More Progress on 15mm African Buildings

This last week has yielded decent progress on my new 15mm African buldings for my imagi-nation campaign.  I've gotten all of the basic paint on the buldings, and got the two ruined building more or less finished with the exception of a little flock.  

The roofs are in progress with the basic structure roughed out for about half of the buildings.  They will be skinned with textured sheet simulating various types of metal roofing and then painted.  

Here are a few pics of the progress:

I should be able to wrap these up by Saturday and with any luck, get a game on the table Sunday.

Progress on 15mm African Buildings

As usual, I didn't get as far as I had hoped over the weekend, but I did get the walls assembled for the new African houses, plus a couple of ruined buildings.  I decided to make them modular, so that I can use the buildings in different arrangements, or as the original "compounds".  Here are pics of the current status:

Constructon is from blue insulation foamboard, split into 3/16" thick stock, mounted on .06" thick styrene sheet, glued with Liquitex artist's Matte Medium, and pinned until dry.  

I first coated the bottom edge of the split stock with a coat of mat medium, that way I can glue the walls to the bae with super glue, which makes construction much faster, than it might oterwise be.

I hope to get them painted and detailed during weeknights, and then assemble roofs over next weekend.  I'll post more pics next week.