Happy New Year

I've been taking some pictures and I thought it would be nice to welcome in the new year with an Atlas, just because I can.  So, let me wish all my friends and readers of my blog a very happy new year, and thank you one and all for taking the time to come here and read my posts.  I really appreciate the fact that others find what I do and say of interest.
   

Xmas 2016

Let me wish all my readers a very merry bah humbug, because it's that time of the year when people eat, drink and open presents time.  I have no pithy observations about life, happiness or anything else that you all haven't read before, but here's to painting toy soldiers and playing games.  May you forever roll high.
  

Xmas Comes Early: Extra-Read All About it!

Went shopping today for the usual food stuff and found a card from the Post Office that they were holding a parcel of mine with a ransom to be paid before I could have my stuff: some 15mm figures from Clear Horizon.  I was so excited I just had to rush out to go collect them.

Now all I've got to do is find the time to start working on them, but first I must have a bath (I know I'm such a tease).  More pictures to come in due course.  Still, if you look closely you can see my progress on the plastic Ammon mount I'm making up.

Edit: Breaking News

Out of my bath and I've started assembling them.

Did I mention I was a wee bit excited by these?
  

Size Comparison Part Two

 

Back here I did a size comparison of Heavy Gear walkers with some modern tanks to 1/144th scale.  The comparison was most illuminating and it begged a question, how would a 15mm tank look with the walkers, and would I be better off making my Bad Dog project in 15mm?

I just made up a Visigoth Khan tank made by Dream Pod 9 for their Heavy Gear game.

So what we have here are a 10mm scale Abrams with a 15mm Abrams from Battlefront Miniatures next to a Dream Pod 9 Visigoth Khan to show, as my friend David Barrow said, it's way too large to be a 1/144th scale tank.  As you can see it's enormous, so large that it might make a good giant cybertank, except that the proportions aren't quite right and it would be a lot of work to convert.

The Acco snuck in front for comparison as to whether it's suitable for a manned walker if it were treated as a 1/100th scale 15mm wargame model?

This only brings home a point I always make that 15mm is a size and 1/100th is a scale, and while one may use the former to work with the latter (15mm figures with 1/100th scale kits), the figures are not to a scale.  For a start wargame figures are stylized caricatures of real people.  Don't get me wrong, they're full of character, which true scale figures are not, but what that amounts to is larger hands and head etc. that are out of proportion to real life.

TL;DR: What is good for wargaming, figures one can relate too, is not necessarily accurate to a fixed scale.

Why am I going on about this?  Simple really, my Bad Dog conversions of 12mm Heavy Gear's look to be more suitable to represent 15mm combat armour suits.  And as for the Accos, they'll manned by very short men and women pilots.

Edit: Except the cockpits are too small for 15mm, so I'm back to Bad Dog in 12mm and perhaps doing Heavy Gear is 15mm.  That's called two for the price of one–or so I keep telling myself.
  

Team Yankee

 

My friend Graham Worsfield has been talking about Team Yankee and his Chieftan tanks.  For me 15mm WW3 games are out of the question given I only have a 40 x 45 inch table.  It would be hard enough to have large games fighting over the Fulda Gap in 1/300th, let alone 15mm.

I only mention this in passing, not because I'm getting into the game, but rather taking advantage of the plastic tanks they're doing.  In particular the Abrams and T72s.  My AK47R project has been languishing unloved in a box going nowhere for a number of years, six to be precise.  This was down to me becoming dissatisfied with the basing conventions of the game, which meant every thing ground to a halt and then I saw some thing else that was shiny.

However, given some recent navel gazing, pondering on wargame scales and toy soldiers – all very deep and meaningful stuff I can assure you – I'm feeling a bit more love for my 15mm lead pile.  So this is me planning, plotting and preparing for when TooFat Lardies release Fighting Season, which I intend to use as the basis for Mogadishu inspired games.

Plastic Ogre Miniatures Success

  

As the KickStarter page says, "1,529 backers pledged $124,628 to help bring this project to life."

 

Well done.

 

As you can see from the picture you get a shed ton of miniatures, and can also buy them with the colours reversed: blue Ogres and red vehicles or green Ogres and vehicles.  I imagine for the majority of players they will be happy to use them as is and won't end up painting them.

 

Now the question is when will Steve Jackson Games bring out an edition of Ogre with miniatures inside the box?

 

You may not agree with me when I say that the future of the game lies in broadening its appeal with plastic miniatures, but my guess is that the cardboard version appeals to old grognards for nostalgia reasons: it's like the original game, but larger so that I can read the writing on the counters now that I'm old and can't read the original chits even with my glasses on.

 

As marketing strategies go that one is time limited.  The future lies in attracting new players to the game, but I could be wrong.  Only time will tell.

 

Still, very excited to see the return of Ogre miniatures.