A Few Bumps... and Counters

Yes, it seems that I've hit a few bumps in the road.  I was checking the statis of my Russian infantry order for Barbarossa earlier this week, when I realized that four packs of figs are missing from the order.  They were there when I was putting the order together.  Somehow, I must have deleted them, before placing it.  I must have check through it a half dozen times, and just can't get over making the error.  So I'm still five-plus weeks from getting all of those trays of infantry stands off of my painting table. A total bummer.

Painting progress on vehicles was moving along smoothly, until yesterday morning, when I ran out of my "Russian" green.  Would have finished up the last of 44 T35s, BT-7s and T-60s.  Turned out that my back-up bottle was a mostly used bottle.

No problem, off to the hobby shop, right?  Yeah, so now we are back to the shop not being able to get restocks of paint in.  This started before covid, and is still going on.  So off to the big city to Hobby Lobby.  Same deal.  Not in stock.  Been this way with them as well, as I tried to pick up an extra bottle a couple of times int he last two months. No dice.

Yeah, I know, internet, plus a week or two and $6.95 shipping will yield a bottle of paint.  I miss the good old days, when things were sold at stores.

Soooo, I cleared the miniature painting "fallout" that had collected on the game table from all of the painting, and started setting up terrain for a game.  Figured I'd play a game today.  Then got the text from work, that the test I was notified about on Thursday, is now due on Monday.  I was already scheduled out of the office friday, so now I have to go in today and build the test fixture.  No game.

Oh well, all is not lost.  I made use of the time yesterday and completed counter sheets for the Soviets for the Barbarossa campaign.  I had finished the Germans earlier in the week.  The Germans are done for the initial setup, and Soviets for the set-up and first few turns, minus the militia formations.  Here are some pics:

The counters just identify the units; they don't have any combat stats on them.  And the unit numbers are completely arbitrary, there are no historical unit numbers.  They are just for the Barbarossa bathtub campaign.  I've deviated from the original "Barbarossa 25" TO&Es, using several different Soviet Tank brigade TO&Es, and some different German formations as well.  

Also, the cavalry formations are missing, as I don't have figs for battalion sized cav formations, and don't want to paint a bazillion horses.  Not sure if they will be omitted, represented by smaller formations (maybe Cavalry Squadrons), or repalced with motorized infantry or something.

The counters will be used on the Europa map for strategic movement and to decide who fights where.  Generally, there are counters for all division, brigade, and battalion sized formations, as well as, some company and platoon sized supporting units from the larger formations. 

I'll still need to add counters for reinforcements once the game starts, but this is the majority of the beast.  A little progress amongst the bumps.

Hopefully see you again next weekend.

Great Weekends, Tiring Weekdays

The last couple of weekends have been very productive.  I finished painting 62 stands of 6mm Soviet infantry; assembled and primed 103 6mm Soviet, German, and French vehicles; got paint on about 70 of those vehicles, and got 2x 15mm and 6x 6mm Cold War jets to the decal stage two weekends back.

I added in maybe 18 "straggler" vehicles, later stuff that won't be seen in Barbarossa, just odds and ends that still needed paint, and this past weekend saw me complete 57x 6mm Russian vehicles and 4x German.  Not as dynamic as the weekend before, but not bad productivity, even if most were just solid greens or grays with some mud and dust.

6mm WWII Soviet infantry, 6mm CF-100, F-86s, and Hunters, 

a 15mm Hunter and Venom...

... and 6mm WWII German and Soviet vehicles, 

in various stages of paint at the time of the photos.

I could have, and probably should have played a game this past weekend, but I'm still hyped up on how fast the Barbarossa progress has gone, and just wanted to keep it going as long as the mojo flows.

I've got the second round of Soviet infantry ordered and in route, as well as some reinforcement for the Soviets, more "BT" series and other light tanks mostly, so those will hit the painting table soon.  Probably could have lived without the extra tanks, but decided to round out some extra units, just in case my battles get bigger than originally anticipated.

Otherwise, I need to paint some of the aircraft and need to order a few buildings to paint, and 6mm barbrossa will be done.

At some point, I will be picking up a large order of 15mm resin Russian Tanks from Gaming Models, will need to paint a half dozen Russian planes and add a few buildings to wrap up the 15mm side of Barbarossa.

Over these last couple of weekends, the weekdays have been in tremendous contrast to the weekends, with the weekdays filled with work and life stuff, and by the time I'm done with the "have to" things, I'm burnt out.  Can hardly keep my eyes open, let alone paint a miniature.  So nothing "hobby" is getting done during the week.  Even my forum and bog reading time is way down.

On a side note, I've been blowing through a lot of old paints, mostly colors for weathering that I've been using for decades.  I used up or found dried out, about 15 bottles in the past two weeks.  It saddens me to see my supply of Polly S, Polly Scale, ModelMaster, and old Pactra Military colors go away.  And my weathering has gotten outright crude in some instances, as I work through new paints, colors, mixes, and brushes to find my way again.  At least my painting table is gaining a little space.

That's it for now.  Until next time, be safe and stay well.

Four Months in: "The Plan"

As readers may know, I keep a list of miniatures gaming projects noting the status of projects with a list of steps and check boxes for each.  I find that this process helps me stay motivated and organize the many projects on the list (currently numbering about 240).

Last September, I posted about a plan to help me complete projects and play more games. I chose ten of the thirty-some periods/genres/settings in which I want to game. Those "periods" are:

1/3788 scale Star Trek

6mm 1950s Cold War

6mm WWII East Front Barbarossa

15mm East Front Barbarossa

15mm france 1940

15mm Cold War 1958

15mm Cold War 1970s

15mm Soviet-Afghan War

20mm Vietnam

28mm Post Apocalypse

The plan actually went into effect during the first weekend of last November, and after four months, has gone pretty well, with the recent 15mm African buildings project being my only straying from the plan (though made it possible to set up today's game).  Some of the periods have seen little attention, while others have progressed tremendously.  The following is a brief summary of the four months of progress.

One of the more neglected projects,  1/3788 scale Trar Trek, the only progress has been to pick up three USS Reliant models to use as New Light Cruisers with Star Fleet Battles rules.

6mm 1950s Cold War has a seen a bit more progress, including the completion of Russian and British support and engineering vehicles, 15 feet of railroad tracks, painted aircraft, and 24 buildings.

The campaign rules are finished for 6mm WWII East Front Barbarossa.  I've purchased most of the missing vehicles, and have the Russian infantry in process. 

For 15mm East Front Barbarossa, progress is more limited, but includes having the campaign rules completed, picking up some 1/144 aircraft for the Soviets, and having ordered a bunch of 15mm Soviet vehicles.

I expect that 15mm 1940 France would have been the WWII project to advance the most, but all I've managed to do is fumble around with campaign structure ideas, not settling on anything yet.

15mm Cold War 1958 has seen notable work, having painted a batch of vehicles, including JS-IIIs, Conquerors, and other assorted vehicles.  I also completed a company of  British Cold War infantry, purchased some aircraft, and have a painted Venom awaiting decals.

The 15mm Soviet Afghan War has mostly seen research and design work for various field fortifications, a Hill system, roads, walls, gardens, and wells.  I completed a couple of small field fortifications, and roughed out some ideas for a small campaign.

My 20mm Vietnam rules rules got some tweaking, and a new company of PAVN await basing on my paint table.

Lastly,  for 28mm Post Apocalypse, I flocked a few figure bases that had been sitting around since the middle of 2021.

Plus there was the "off list" completion of the Afican houses for 15mm Imagi-Africa.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the progress.  The plan seems to be more or less working, with three of the periods on the list of ten being very near "complete".  I can now play games with 15mm Cold War 1958 forces and 6mm Barbarossa figs, which I could not last November.  And 15mm Barbarossa is almost to that state.  I'm guessing that by the end of the year, only three of the periods will still be on the plan list.  

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.