Danish Battlegroup

OK - back to 20mm, and back to the Danes for the last time for a while I think.

When finishing the Centurions I thought it might be nice to take a couple of photos of all the Danish armour finished thus far.  So without further ado - here we go:

Front Row Left to Right: 3 x S-Model M113 forming a Danish Mechanised Platoon, and a S-Model conversion to a M150 TOW Carrier

Back Row Left to Right: 2 x Airfix and 1 x Britannia Centurion forming a Tank Platoon, 2 x Warmaster M41 Walker Bulldog tanks to field as individual light recon tanks.

I've built an Italeri M106 to add some mortar support to my force, and will also be adding a couple of Unimog trucks, which can play a couple of roles.  One day I'd like to add a platoon of Leopard 1A4s as well - maybe when PSC does the Leopard 1 in 20mm.

Anyway - it's likely you'll see West Germans next...

Thanks

Richard

LandZeeland Danish Armour - Completed M41 Walker Bulldogs

OK - so the first vehicular element of my Danish Battlegroup is complete - and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

Here's the first one:

And the second one:

And now some shots of them together:

That's it for my M41s.

Keep an eye out this week as there will be numerous updates as I've prepared a scenario, which I'll put up here, and then played it twice over the weekend.  So there will be a couple of AARs as well.

Have fun everyone

Richard

LandZeeland Danish Armour - W-I-P - Part 4

Moving onwards...

I ended up mixing some paint to try and match the Tamiya Luftwaffe Light Green and then began dry-brushing it onto the M41s.

Once that was done I started to paint the stowage and other bits and bobs on the vehicles:

And then gave them a wash

I added the tracks in the last two pics to try and get a sense of how the tanks are looking.  I'm pretty happy thus far - but have a few more things to do before they can count as finished.

Thanks

Richard

LandZeeland Danish Armour - W-I-P - Part 3

So today (and probably later this week) I'm focusing in on my two Danish M41s.  Before I go any further I should probably show you how these Warmaster M41s started out

This photo is from The Flying Mule Webstore in the States.

In the photo yesterday the M41s had all their decals removed, the searchlights added and their cam nets attached.  I then gave them a black undercoat and after 24 hours I added some blue tack to cover what would become the black stripes in the cam scheme.

Looking at pics, and from what I've read, Danish vehicles have a similar cam scheme to British vehicles, however their green colour is quite a bit brighter than the British green.  I wandered out to my garage and looked through all my Tamiya green spray cans and the one that was the most close to what I was after was the Tamiya AS-23 Luftwaffe Light Green.  I gave each vehicle a coat:

And then when dry, removed the blue tack

They looked pretty bright!  But I hoped that it would be toned down once I'd done all the next few steps - with the next step being a black pin was using Vallejo black wash.

Obviously I changed the lighting somehow here, as the green looks even brighter!  Anyway - we see the next few steps in the next post - coming soon

Thanks

Richard

Warmaster BM-30 Smerch and SA-6 Gainful

Recently I was able to pick up a couple of the new Warmaster 1/72 diecast models so I thought I'd do a quick post to show them off.

First up the BM-30 Smerch, otherwise known as the 9A52-2 Smerch.  Here's a link to its entry on Wikipedia.  Whilst it's actually a little bit late for me and I really should be looking to field the BM-27 - but I haven't been impressed with the BM-27s I've seen online and I've not seen any BM-27s (in the flesh so to speak) in Australia - so I picked up the available BM-30 instead.

Here's what it looks like:

And here's what I'd like it to look like:

I'm not sure when or if I'll re-paint it - as it's not likely to make it to a table top anytime soon.  This is likley to remain an off-table asset - hence my not being to bothered about it not being a BM-27!  I actually don't mind the paint scheme - I just think they went a little overboard with the tyre weathering - especially when you consider they label it "Victory Parade Moscow 2011".  I verymuch doubt the Russians would allow a Multple Rocket Launcher with such muddy tires to take part in a Victory Day parade!

So onto the SA-6 Gainful or 2K12 "Kub".  Here's alink to its entry on Wikipedia and on the Air Power Australia website.  (I've recently added the excellent Air Power Australia link to my useful websites section).

I've been after one of these for a while.  Again I'm not sure how useful it really is by itself - as a battery would have four missile TELs and they would be linked to a couple of radar TEL.  Anyway - here it is:

And here's what I'd like it to look like:

This one is labeled Libya 1987 - and it looks like it's been painted in a late WW2 German 3 tone camouflage pattern...  I'm not sure but it looks like it's going to be very painful to re-paint - the missle erector doesn't move - and the missiles don't come off - so I think I may have to try and take the whole thing apart to take it from 1945 to 1986!

But still - I'm very happy to have both of these in the collection.  I feel like I need one more SAM system - a SA-9 Gaskin - before I can call my Soviet SAM set complete.

That's all for now

Richard

Warmaster 2K22 Tunguska

The final vehicle in this series of photo's is a Warmaster 2S6 or 2K22 Tunguska.  I've wanted to add a Tunguska to my forces for a while now and there are several options.  I think one was made for Battlefield Evolution - but it was overscaled.  Fabri recently came out with a diecast model, which looked impressive (one of my mates as a couple) but at the time I was leaning towards a kit.  Military Wheels (MW) does the only 1/72 Tunguska kit that I'm aware of.  It has made it onto my ebay watch list several times, but I've never gone ahead and bid on one.  Andy has an in depth review of the kit here on his excellent blog and it doies seem a bit of a cow to make.

So - when I saw that Warmaster were doing one, I went into immediate hunt and locate mode.  Shortly thereafter I found some at the large hobby shop in the city and snapped it up.

Like the BTR-80s shown last week, the Tunguska comes in a multi-colour cam pattern which doesn't really match the rest of my Soviet forces.  It looks like this:

Note - the turret is facing the rear in this photo (not mine).

So a re-paint was called for - and this is the result:

Very nice and impressive model.  It was forgotten in my mass weathering event - but I think I'm happy for this to look a little newer and cleaner - at least for the time being...

For a sense of scale I took this photo to show the Tunguska up against it's predecessor, the ZSU-23-4 Shilka.  This one is from S&S Models:

As you can is - it's massively bigger.  I can see it being a targetted pretty quickly in any wargame!

The next couple of posts will focus more on miniatures...

That's all for now

Richard

Warmaster BTR-80 Platoon

So next up for my Soviet Naval Infantry is some BTR-80s.  I'm not 100% sure when the SNI moved on to BTR-80s, but they are a readily available diecast model that I can also use for BTR mounted motor rifle troops so using them for my SNI is fine by me.

The Warmaster BTR-80 is cammed up and looks like this:

At bit jazzy for me and it doesn't match the rest of my stuff - so of course it got a re-paint.  They ended up looking like this:

Pretty basic, I know, but it's the look I was after.

I also gave the Liberation Miniatures BTR-60PBs I had finished eariler a bit of weathering so now they look like this:

I imagine you are not supposed to mix them, but where necessary I might end up with the Infantry Platoon being mounted in the BTR-60s, with support weapons etc mounted in the BTR-80s.  Not sure yet...

Anyway that's it for today

Thanks

Richard