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

BMD's and BTRD

Well I didn't quite realise it at the time my my last post was my 150th post - so I'm quite chuffed with managing to make it this far!

Enough self-congratulation - on with the show.

Next up are a couple of ACE Models BMD-1s.  As I said in the last post, the under-carriage on these were a bit of a nightmare, a real lesson in pain-in-the-neckery - basically because they allow you to have the wheels up or down.  Once I had decided what to do with them and which hatches to leave open - it was all relatively straight forward. 

I added some standard Liberation Miniatures Russian Tank crew as the drivers, and did some head swaps on some more tank crew to create VDV vehicle commanders.  I'm happy with the end result - (it would of helped if I had put one of the turrets on properly!) so here they are:

At the same time I quickly worked up an old MMS BTRD and added a GRAN or ACE ZU-23 to give my VDV some more AAA.  Here it is:

And here it is with the Gaz-66 AAA from last week:

Finally here is a group shot of my most recent VDV armour:

Thanks

Richard

ACE Models 2S9 Nona

Next up on the list is the ACE Models 2S9 Nona self-propelled 120mm mortar - which comes in a box like this:

You can find some general info on this AFV here and here

For an ACE kit, this one was pretty straight forward - it probably helped that I had just built 2 ACE BMD-1s (whose general fit and wheels had stressed me no end) so I had overcome all those issues before building this kit.

The biggest decision was whether to have the undercarriage raised or lowered.  Raised is for parachute landings and perhaps for firing from a position where you want to lower the the vertical view/exposure of the vehicle.  Lowered means locking the wheels in position for standard movement.  If I had 2 Nona's I'd do one of each (maybe some day) but I decided to filed this one with the wheels lowered so it fit better in with all my other BMD's and BTRD's.

I opened one hatch (one of the real benefits of the ACE kits is you can have pretty much any hatch opened or closed) and added a Liberation crew member.

So here it is:

Finally - here's a youtube clip showing various 2S9 Nona's in action



Thanks

Richard

S&S Models - Soviet Trucks

It's been too long...

I've finally been able to finish off a few models - most of which is part of my Task 2 entry in the 2013 Group Build on The Guild  I'll be putting it all up over the next few days - but thought I would start off today with a bunch of Soviet soft skins.

First up is an S&S Ural 375.  I got this to act as a supply truck for my 2S1 artillery battery shown here and here - and hopefully soon shown all together... Anyway - this was a great, simple (and huge) kit/truck - which goes together very nicely (resin and metal) and fulfills the purpose I wanted - an excellent representation of a much used Soviet truck - without having to deal with axles etc like a plastic kit.  For some reason I find the underside of truck kits very stressful!

So - here it is:

Next is 3 Gaz 66 trucks - again all from S&S.  Two of these will primarily act as the tows (portees) for my VDV's 120mm mortars while the final one will act as the portee for one of my VDV ZU-23.  Again this is a straight forward resin and metal kit.  There is an excellent review of it on Andy's blog Cold War Gamer

Here they are:

This next one is my fav.  I added a false floor to raise the gun a little - the ZU-23 in this case is a GRAN kit.

Finally - here's a look at all the soft skins together

Sorry if the pics are a little dark...

Anyway - more tomorrow

Richard

Book Review: The Red Effect by Harvey Black

Well last week an order arrived from Amazon, and included in it was reading “The Red Effect” by Harvey Black – which I had discovered from the Cold War Message Board of TMP.


Now a week later and I’ve just finished reading it and thought I’d share my thoughts with you.

First up – buy the book. Simple as that. If you are like me and have always enjoyed Cold War fiction – then this book will float your boat.

Secondly – “The Red Effect” is meant to be book 1 of a trilogy – which I think is good news.

The book starts with the standard goings-on of Cold War soldiery – focussed mainly on BRIXMIS

Now onto more detail. I’ll start with my likes.

Harvey Black knows his stuff. He is ex British Army Intelligence and obviously served in BRIXMIS. His descriptions of things have a feel of authenticity which is excellent – almost too much at some points. You could probably drive around Berlin flowing the directions in this book, and know which camera and lens is best for taking photos of Soviet troop trains.

It has a nice reality feel to it. Later in the book when he is describing a British unit setting up I was able to look on Google Maps and pretty much see everything he was describing. I like this. Other books in this setting use fictional towns and locations (Red Storm Rising) or twist real locations so I found it difficult to follow on Google Maps (First Clash).

Another part of the reality that I was impressed with was the combat scenes. Although these only really come towards the very end of the book, again they felt authentic. Whilst I love Team Yankee, and read it probably once a year or so, I always felt that it didn’t really portray the potential awesome power of the Soviet Army in this period. Some of the actions, like the first couple of contacts, start with minimal artillery barrages, involve fairly small soviet units using poor tactics, against properly prepared, well placed US units. Bad things tend to happen to units “over there” rather than to Team Yankee. In The Red Effect, you get a feel for what it would be like under a Soviet preparatory barrage – from an infantry man’s point of view. You see the difficulties of a single British Division trying to defend 90 kilometres of front, the difficulty of infantry, not defeating but simply delaying an armoured juggernaut bearing down on them etc.

Black goes into detail on the make-up of individual units and their dispositions. This is gold for wargamers and I’ll be re-reading with a view to using the book to create scenarios.

NATO is kind of caught with its pants down – not wanting to upset the Soviets. A fairly realistic option in my view. No NATO first strike or anything like that.

I thought his approach to how the war started was “interesting”. Some books like Team Yankee and First Clash focus on the small picture and leave the strategic setting to other books like The Third World War, or ignore it altogether. Red Storm Rising uses the first quarter at least of the book to set out the rationale of the conflict, at least from the Soviet side. Black does something similar, setting up the characters and describing some historical events that up the ante. The reason for going to war though, is set out in a fairly short conversation between the Chairman/General Secretary of the USSR and the Head of the KGB. Part of the reason I read these kind of books is to see what things had to happen, in that author’s mind, to lead to World War 3. It appears not much in Black’s view – all it takes is his Leonid Brezhnev equivalent not to die – and like I said, I find that interesting.

Things I liked less – and bear in mind I like the book – so these are probably merely quibbles.

Black deals with historical events, such as the shooting down of KAL 007, but renames the flight. He renames the American President – who was an actor, the British Prime Minister is a stern woman and the Soviet leaders have names very similar to their real names. I don’t see the point. It’s fiction. Maybe it’s a legal thing (I have no idea) but I would have preferred real names and events.

There’s no real mention of REFORGER or other NATO exercises in 1984. No mention of NATO counter-battery fire or air strikes. These are really petty quibbles – as you can see I’m scraping here to find something negative.

I guess the bottom line is that I am very much looking forward to the next book. I’ve been doing a lot of WW2 gaming, painting, model making etc lately and it was really great to stumble across a Cold War Gone Hot novel and get back in the CWGH.

Having read all my other CWGH books to death it’s also interesting to be back in the position of not knowing how this will all end and wondering what direction Mr Black will take.  So well done Harvey Black - and bring on book 2!

Thanks and have fun



Richard