All aboard the Wunderwaffen!

Like any good wargamer, I'm always looking for the right tool to get one over on my opponents - the golden bullet that will catch him by surprise and give me the edge - at least for 1 game to arrest my long-time loosing streak.

I'm currently preparing for another playtest game - that was supposed to be this Saturday but will now be next Saturday - of Battlegroup: Fall of the Reich - the next book in the Battlegroup series of games.  I always find preparing lists hard - as there is always more I want and can never fit in.  Getting the right balance is very hard - so I've come up with a cunning plan.

I doubt I'll be giving my secret tactic away by showing my Wunderwaffen here - I don't think Leigh or Mick regularly read this blog so I'm safe.

So here it is:

TA DA!!  My Volksgrenadier can now ride to battle in style (and comfort).  And the whole platoon can fit in the bus!

OK - sure it a British Oxford Bus - and I understand that Tipner is in or near Portsmouth - but it will do fine for a German civilain bus purloined by the German Army in late 1945.  I'll try and weather it up a little so it doesn't look quite so clean and hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be able to let you know how my wonder weapon went!

Have fun

Richard

T-80BV's

Today I'll be posting the last of the pics of the my Task 2 Group Build 2013 entry for The Guild which can be found here. 

The final portion of the Build was a platoon of 3 Altaya or "The Tank Collection" Magazine T-80BV tanks.  Here's a pic of how they originally looked a couple of years back during our first ever "Big Game".  They are the colourful ones at the front:

The T-80 was of course a serious bit of Soviet kit and would have caused NATO some real headaches.  A good summary of it can be read about on wikipedia here.  I also bought the Osprey book on the T-80 and recommend it.

I decided to repaint my tanks - firstly so they matched the rest of my force, and secondly because I believed that the Altaya paint scheme did not represent the correct period or feel for my cold war force.

The Osprey T-80 book has a nice profile picture of a T-80BV which had been taken out of storage and fought in Chechnya.  It had rough numbers painted on it's turret side, right on the ERA blocks.  This is what I decided to try and replicate.  This is how it turned out:

And together with the BRDM-2 RKh

That's all for now.

Thanks

Richard

BRDM-2 RKh

One of the first Soviet units I'd like to field is a Foward Detachment - and a vehicle crtitcal to that is the BRDM-2 RKH - a NBC recon vehicle.

A few months back I liberated a Britannia BRDM-2 from Simon and set about to make a simplified version of the RKh.  In the end I was basically unhappy with the result and hid it in a drawer until I sorted out in my head how to do it properly.

Then recently I was looking at Harvey Black's (the author of "The Red Effect") website/blog and stumbled across some pictures of his showning the BRDM-2 RKh in excellent detail.  I hope he doesn't mind if I reproduce a couple of them here:

These were the clearest photos I had seen of the back of the RKh and I decided I would try and replicate this on my Britannia BRDM-2.

So here is the result:

It's not the most accurate or greatest conversion by a long shot - but it works for me and you can't look at the model and not have a reasonable idea of what it is - if you know what I mean.  As a wargaming representation of a BRDM-2 RKh - I'm quite chuffed.  I did decide to paint the flags yellow and red to make them stand out a little more - for the effect of making it stand out from other BRDM-2s that may be on the table top.

So anyway - there you have it

Have fun

Richard