Après-Salute 2015: HMS Defender

   

While everyone else went home after Salute, some hardy souls went to see D36 HMS Defender, a Type 45 destroyer that was moored at Greenwich, and open to the public.  On the trip on the Dockland Light railway we passed another warship docked at Heron Quay, which after a bit of Googling was probably a visiting German ship.  Anyway, we arrived at Greenwich and after a bit of a panic trying to find exactly where to go to get in we made it in plenty of time.  What can I say?  We're wimpy old civilians.

As you can tell from the shots she was moored a little way off from the embankment, and we were ferried across to her in one of London's river taxis.

The ship has panels that can be dropped flat, and here's the Phalanx CIWS, looking deadly and shiny in the late afternoon sun.  The interior of the ship was what I'd call a pale Dove grey, I was expecting cream (my research has been into US Navy warships whose interiors are described as such), and as I said to one of the crew; RN ships are painted fifty shades of grey.  It made him laugh.

A close-up of the rear for anyone trying to make a model of this.

And a close-up of the business end of the 20 mm rotary cannon.  See the shells.

Given I've written a novel set aboard a ship I was interested in the interior fixtures and fittings, so took these two reference shots for research.  What I will comment on is the bare necessities of creature comforts.  The crew have to work around walls festooned with equipments, and I can only imagine that in rough seas one would have to take due care an caution to move through the ship without injury.

A shot of the hanger bay ceiling.  Isn't that just inspirational for anyone who want to make a model?

Well that's it.  I had a lovely trip around HMS Defender, her crew were not only polite, which was to be expected, but warm and welcoming.  I have to admit the crew all looked incredibly young to me, and were very nice young men and women to talk to.  I can only wish them well, and if I were in charge we would've have built the twelve ships that were planned.

Edit: The other ship we saw on our way in on the Docklands Light Railway was the Méndez Núñez.
  

Salute 2015: Excel Centre

Wings of War with airships, very nice looking game by Aerodrome UK Wing.

Another year, another Salute.  How time flies by.  What doesn't change are the aspirational nature of the games on show.  Everything is bigger, brighter etc than anything you'll see on a club night or would normally be able to put on at home.  Unless your name is John Treadaway of course, and then this is all routine.  For the less blessed wargaming souls of this world, like myself, I have to play within my means.  So it's always good to see the games at Salute.

I, unlike many others, arrived late; at my own leisure so to speak.  I'm old enough, and can remember that my feet hurt from walking around Salute, and standing around in queues only makes this worse.  So I left home at 10.15 and arrived at 11.45, and was so able to walk straight in.  I hear that the queues were a lot less this year, primarily down to having a hall to stand in that had been allocated by Excel who have learnt that a horde of unwashed hairy wargamers lowers the tone of the place (not exactly what John Treadaway said to me, but that seemed to be the gist of it.)  What with the Sherlocked convention going on at Excel alongside the Marathon registration and other stuff, the place was heaving.

Mechworld Development's Group awesome looking Blood & Steel game.

I'd heard that some German wargamers were coming over with a Battlestar Galactica game called Blood & Steel, and that they were giving away a six page free set of rules based on Full Thrust at the show.  The game was, as you can see, rather stunning.

Yep that's a destroyed Battlestar in the centre of the table.

More Cylon Basestars than you could shake a big stick at.  A slick looking game, and the crew were very easy to talk to, which given the crowds around their table was nice.

Fl/Lt. Robert N.G. Barlow DFC Lancaster on the Dambusters 617 Squadron raid; all the crew of the real AJ-E died in a crash.

The Peterborough Wargames Club were running their Dambusters Challenge with a 1/72nd scale Lancaster on a fiendish looking remote controlled arm.  The game was simple, but effective and was heaving with people, and lots of people wanting to have a go.

Coming up to the dam with flak all around the Lancaster.  If the player was successful a part of the dam could be removed and replaced to show the damage, and flooding.  Slickly run game that looked like a well oiled machine.

Built to the same scale as Dropzone Commander 10 mm approximately 1/160th scale Avenger class starship.

Hawk Wargames had this rather impressive model, which is now complete.  I saw it last year in its unfinished state, which was pretty epic then.  Totally awesome sauce display, with a big static table showing off their range of miniatures.  The big news is that there is going to be a space game to go with Dropzone Commander, provisional title Dropfleet Commander, which is due out later this year.  The unique selling point being that it will simulate orbital battles around a planet, rather than being a deep space game.

To save you the bother of counting, this ship carries one hundred dropships.

A labour of love, every hanger had a fully painted dropship loaded up with an AFV.

A close up of said dropships from the game in their hanger bays waiting to be dropped.  Oooheey.  The attention to detail borders on obsessive, other than I know that if you want something to look this good then paying attention to the small details is the only way to achieve a good looking end result. So kudos to the crew who made this; BTW the construction uses custom cast parts, which is why everything looks so good.

Illuminated engines.  Not seen from here a colour internal layout diagram of the ship.

Hawk Games are clearly looking at the Star Wars Imperial star destroyers for their inspiration.  For those who are wondering there were miniatures of the ships in a much smaller scale for their future space combat game.  The game sounds interesting in that it deal with planetary invasions with about a dozen ships per side if I've understood things correctly.  The model of the UCMS Avenger represents a frigate, one of the smaller ships in the game.

Big Rich caught capturing the hearts and minds of a new generation.

TooFat Lardies were presenting their Fighting Season game this year, which is based on the Chain of Command rules modified to play modern asymmetrical wargames, and I imagine they will also be adaptable to retro-converting Charlie Don't Surf too, with the caveat that Fighting Season is Section level game, whereas Charlie Don't Surf is a Company level action.

This photo doesn't do justice to the terrain of this game, which was lovely.

Spartan Games were demoing their new Halo space game with big spaceships with the largest running at 10 inches or 250 mm for those who prefer metric.

Spartan Games were all about their new Halo line, and telling us about the new 15 mm ground combat game that will be accompanying the fleet action sets.  For Halo fans this is a big, big thing, even if Halo is no longer at the height of its popularity I can't image the fans not wanting to get this for all the lovely toys.

The fact that there is a space and ground combat game is again I think interesting, and of course this means that Spartan Games will in someways be going up against Hawk Games new Dropfleet Commander will bring some diversity and new blood into spaceship gaming.

Hercules doing a quick touch and go drop.

Wargames' Illustrated game Cold War Gone Hot caught my eye for the the sheer scale of over the top action, which included what I assume was a Hercules doing a drop and go deployment of an artillery team while the Russians stormed across a damaged bridge.  What I'd call the Warhammer 40K version of the Cold War.

It all looked rather impressive, even if lacking in verisimilitude i.e: broke my sense of disbelief.  Still very pretty and gorgeous to look at.

Star Wars ATATs begin their assault.

The next game I caught up with was the rather more convincing reenactment of the Battle of Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.  I think the Beasts of War may have run this, but I can't confirm the details, because the game is not listed in the brochure.

I also missed seeing the Millennium Falcon, because of the crowd of people around this impressive table.  It just didn't feel it was right to barge in, and disrupt the people playing the game who were clearly having a lot of fun.

Arcworlde.

Arcworlde had this rather stunning fantasy pirate game complete with zombie whale for bonus points.  I don't know much about them other than they ran a KickStarter (it seems everyone does nowadays), and can add nothing more than wow it looked stunning.

This photo doesn't do any justice for how many of these large there ships were, and how big the table was.

However stunning Arcworlde were, the bonkers over the top Essex Gamesters display with 1/56th scale ships using 28mm figures Fort George American War of Independence game blew them out of the water.  Not a lot moving when I saw it, maybe more of a static display, but crazily impressive modelling.  I should have tried to get some more pictures, but there were a row of frigates all in a line down one side of the table.  Needless to say it won the best game of the show award.

Tiger Shark one of two sister submarines that were accompanying Stingray.

As always the South London Warlords were putting on impressive game to their own.  Stingray, where anything can happen in the next half hour.  Cue drums for battle-stations.  Given that Gerry Anderson's shows were a significant marker of my childhood, the stories depicting the World Aquanaut Security Patrol facing underwater terror were something exciting I looked forward to watching each week.

Terror fish trying to outmanoeuvre Tiger Shark.

I took great glee in seeing this game, and the memories of Troy Tempest, Phones, Marina and Atlanta, and my favourite creepy villain Surface Agent X20 all came back to me.  I believe that the rules for this game will be available, though if you're like me than perhaps playing it in 1/300th scale will be a bit more manageable.

Awesome paint job on Great Titan's Terrrorfish.

As you can imagine this table was surrounded by people watching the game being played, and just in case it wasn't obvious, the show had a real buzz this year.  People were out enjoying themselves and having a good time.

The final game I took a picture of, which I'm featuring last, because it leads into my follow-up blog post, is this rather magnificent model of a Soviet Union Krivak class frigate.  This game was put on by a group calling themselves MDK, and the game was titled Operation Broadsword – The Cold War Went Wet.  A contingent of Royal Marine Commandos and SBS mounting a raid on the ship, all done in 28 mm.

Apposite because after going around the show I went off with friends to see HMS Defender, which you can read about in Après-Salute.
  

CAS-C4P & CAS-3-Mod 1 Conversions

I have been beavering away in the background between writing working on converting more of Dream Pod 9 models into representations of combat armour from my novels, as one does when one is slightly obsessed with the world one has created.  The model on the left I'm currently calling the Cyclops, which may change, because the brevity code word for UAVs operating over an area is CYCLOPs (go figure how a brevity word is longer than UAV, but I don't make the rules about how the military names things – I just try and mimic them to make plausible future names for my weapon systems).  The model on the right is the Army APE combat armour; in homage to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Showing the models from the rear, to show all the jiggery-pokery going on with these two conversion.  These models are really still a work in progress shots.  My plan is to now is to apply some  Milliput to tidy up the joints, and blend some parts together; in particular the antenna array on the rear of the left model (I've super-glued guitar wire onto the castings, because they're quite soft, and otherwise bend easily).

A larger close-up shot of the model, which represents an Army Green Beret Special Forces combat armour suit, which appears in my second novel for one of the major supporting characters.  It's mix and match of parts from the Hunter and Jaguar gears.  From the glossary in my novel:

CAS-3-Mod 1    Combat Armour System Dash (Mark) 3 Dash Model 1 is the Army’s latest upgrade to their drive suit, which is supplied to Special Forces troops.  It’s slightly heavier than a CASE-2X, and slower, but has the ability to be outfitted with a large array of heavy weapon systems according to its mission profile.

I'm going to add a round rocket launcher to the right should, the medium sized one I had looked wrong to me; I wanted more smaller rockets rather than five larger one.  So I've sent off for a small order of parts and stuff, and I will have to wait until they arrive to finish the model.  My original plan was to use Dream Pod 9s rotary rotary laser cannon (a quirky idea of combining mechanical and electronic systems to provide what might be better described as a pulse laser) for the basis of a M134 Gatling gun, but it was way too large.  My one complaint with the Heavy Gear models is that the weapons are disproportionally large, but that's my taste for things to be made to a scale and my desire for plausible hard SF models coming out.

So I ended up scratch-building the mini-gun that it's carrying in its right hand.  I used a BattleTech part, I think from a Mad Dog, but the barrels weren't up to snuff, so I replaced them with stainless steel micro-bore tubing.  A bit of a fag to cut and assemble, but it really looks the part.

In the left hand the model shoulders an automatic grenade launcher/auto-mortar – I'm still pondering the actual details and nomenclature.  I'll get back to this later, once I've done a bit more research.

A close-up again of my Air Force Security Forces combat armour suit, the primary function being the control of android combat teams.  It appears in the third novel I've written, and again its a major characters ride.  The model is a combination of different parts from a selection of gears: Mamba arms and legs, the torso is from a Diamondback, it has a Razor Fang Cobra head, and the rear pack is from a Kodiak with Viper antennae.

It carries a modified Heavy Gear rotary laser cannon, which I've modded up to represent a 20 mm rotary auto-cannon with a scratch-built ammo feed.  Not easily seen, but it also has a modified pack gun on the left arm to represent a Browning M2HB .50 cal.

Again from the glossary in my novel:

CAS-C4P    Combat Armour System Dash C4 (Command, Control, Communication & Computer) PetMan.  Informally called a Cyclops for the active LIDAR array that looks like an eye, the suit bristles with aerials for its primary role of controlling Human Operator Surrogates aka PetMan robots.  See HOS.

M261    The M261 GAU-5L is Global Dynamics special lightweight rotary auto-cannon designed to be carried by combat armour suits that fires a 20 x 102 mm High explosive dual purpose anti-tank (HEDP) warhead with the rate of fire limited to 500 rounds per minute.  Due to the size of the round the range of the weapon is 3 kilometres.

I shall be using Dream Pod 9s GREL infantry as stand ins for the HOS PetMan androids with pictures to come.

HOS    Stands for Human Operator Surrogate, which are semi-autonomous robots with a hybrid expert system artificial intelligence operating system aka PetMan.  This allows the operator to effectively multi-task by distributing themselves across a network and act as a force multiplier; Global Dynamics Corporation Defense Industries sales pitch calls them An Army of One.

So that's it for a while, as I need to go away and paint these now.
    

CASE-2X Dogs Conversions

Two more Dream Pod 9 conversions of Heavy Gear Jagers to make CASE-2X combat armour suits for my Highlanders 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Company.  The one on the left is a maxed out version with a heavy missile pack, and carrying a Browning .50 cal in its right hand.  The suit on the right is my new version of my heroes suit, which is stripped down for manoeuvrability.

I showed two combat armour conversions here, and I was asked to show what these looked like from the rear.

Hopefully this will clarify what I've done with these conversions to turn iconic Heavy Gears into Bad Dog universe combat armour.  Finally a group hug shot of my evolving squad.

From left to right we have three of the four combat armour suits from the Highlanders 4th Platoon Alpha Squad; organized as two fire teams of two, so I need to make up another Dog with a light missile pack and 20 mm auto-cannon.  On the right is the basic combat load on a squad leader combat armour suit.  You can see the platoon leader combat armour suit here.

I'm just finishing off work on another two combat armour suits for the characters in Strike Dog and Ghost Dog, the two sequels to Bad Dog.  I will hopefully be able to post pictures of them next week.  As always any comments or criticisms are highly welcomed, and feel free to ask questions too.
   

Circinus Federation

I've been busy over the last two weeks or so.  My partner took time off before and after the Easter weekend, which meant an interruption to my usual work routine, and for those of you who follow my writing blog know I was busy editing 36,000 words of my second novel.  Then we went away for Easter to the British national SF convention, so I've been remiss in posting things here.

So this is another round up of old pictures of wok I've done. The above picture being a Thug that has been slightly altered, but is otherwise a standard model.

Next is an Ostroc, which again is pretty vanilla with regard to the pose.

The Ostol 5D provides the indirect fire support for the pirates lance.

And finally an Ostol 6D.  I still have two more models to paint up for this lance; another Ostol 6D and an Ostscout, but what with one thing and another (shiny distractions like Ogre cybertanks, and not to forget Heavy Gear conversions) finishing this lance has become a project that time has forgot.

The paint scheme was inspired by USAF aircraft of the fifties and sixties, and was achieved by mixing metallic paints with mat white to create different panels.  Once varnished I drybrushed with silver to give a more metallic sheen, because varnishing metallics often makes them look rather dull.