Ogre Miniature Variants

Remember the above from here.  It's my unfinished sculpt of the Ogre Ninja.  There are lots of reasons, some good, some pretty lame why this little beauty has not been finished.  One reason is that an official miniature is now available from SJG.  The other is the amount of work required to finish it that I could spent doing other things.

I've made a decision to finish it, but not as a Ninja, but as a Mark-2 Scout variant based on some stats from Henry Cobb's page here.  Henry has to be one of the leading lights on Ogre stats and has a lot of useful stuff on his web page.  Check it out.

Anyway to quote from here; "However if the Ninja was produced without the Missile Rack at first (until it was proven on the Mark-IV) and simply had the rest of its armament then it's load factor would be less than the Mark-V. And then you could assume that stealth was also in development until 2087 or so. The cost for this Ninja-Minus would only be 74 VPs (2 missiles in tubes, 1 MB, 2 SB, 8 AP, 5 treads per hex times 4 hexes of move) and it could have been seen as a scout replacement for the Mark-II until the stealth and rack technologies were available. Then when the Mark-IV was deployed, the Ninja was obsolete as a pure scout and so redeveloped with stealth and missile rack."

So that's what I'm going to do with this model, because it makes it unique.  Thinking about this has also made me start imagining a NAC Mark 1 variant that would stylistically be a better fit with the classic Winchell Chung designs, mostly down to the fact that I don't like the current Mark 1 & 2 models.  By that I means they are perfectly nice models, but they look more like Pan European mini-Fencers than precursors of the classic Mark 3 & 5 designs.  YMMV.

More thoughts and pictures in due course.
  

Expanding My Ogre Combine Forces

   

It's been almost a year, a long time really, since I've looked to expand my Ogre/GEV forces.  I've been having a bit of a sabbatical from my miniature wargaming this year having been working on writing three novels, which you can read about here if you should so desire?

Anyway,  The above picture shows my next stage of expansion of my forces.  Last year I was very lucky to be able to purchase some more Combine miniatures from Daniel who was going over to Austin to be the new Ogre line developer.  Hence the unpainted models waiting to be assembled in due course.

As you can see I did somehow managed to paint the first colour on the North American Combine miniatures I had squirreled away in my maturing box that were previously shown here, you will need to scroll down to the bottom of the page.  As a reminder I've had these models sitting around waiting for me to do something with them for a very long time indeed.  How long?  Twenty years, which is a bit embarrassing really, except I do have the excuse of going off to train to be a nurse and working and other stuff like that.

The obvious observation is that miniatures don't paint themselves and it takes time to get an army together.  I've been looking through my notes on the number of armour units and infantry one needs to be able to play GEV scenarios and have identified a shortfall of miniatures in a number of areas.  However, getting these as a MiB is proving problematical as they are Warehouse 23 specials, and not generally available product, which means I'm not going to be able to realistically have enough miniatures to run GEV scenarios this year at Dragonmeet.  Next year, fingers crossed this situation will have changed.
  

Robot Fire Breathing Dragon

  

All it needs is frickin laser beams coming out of its eyes and the robot apocalypse can begin.