Bringing the battlefield to life: volume 5 - Prime Time news from downrange

The news team from Brittania miniatures. Nice little figures. The single based one I painted to look like Ross Kemp - who went to Afghanistan twice with the British Army. There are two DVDs available that I can only recommend!

The news team's van is out of Hasegawa's 1/72 "Ground Crew Set" and only got a little satellite dish added.

Bringing the battlefield to life: volume 4 - the market

A group of ladies selling or buying goods at the local market. Nothing special to be honest. The little cart comes from Forces of Valor, the market goods I got from S&S and the miniatures are from Stan Johansen.

Bringing the battlefield to life: volume 3 (finished)

The fabulous Britannia donkey cart for Afghanistan. I only replaced the donkey with an 1/76 scale tractor. Turned out quite good I'd say. I already described what I did in the WIP article so keep the long talk short on this one. :-)

Bringing the battlefield to life: Civilians, volume 3 (work in progress)

For the next base of civilian life for Ambush Alley I used Britannia's Donkey cart with driver and an 1/76 scale Oxford tractor. Interestingly the driver fits exactly on top of the tractor and with a bit of converting, the trailer was easily adopted to fit upon an agricultural machine instead of a donkey. A quick and easy paintjob later and its almost done. More of this once I have finished Task3 of this and next month's batch of miniatures for the guildwargamers competition 2010.

Bringing the battlefield to life: Civilians, volume 2

Another base of civilians for the use in Ambush Alley/Force-On-Force. Again I used Dave's brilliant range of Afghani civilians and added a packhorse, taken from his WW2 range of German Gebirgsjäger (all by Britannia Miniatures).

The idea of the base was a family of traders, moving from village to village, selling their goods. They can also be used as a bunch of people, raising suspicion of the regulars, as all of them look in different directions as if they're scanning for somebody, one talks into his cellphone and if you look close you can even see that the guy leading the horse has an Ak-47 hidden underneath his cloak. Who knows what they carry in those baskets attached to their horse........

Some work in progress for April 2010

Some progress on the infantry I need to complete until the end of April for a contest at The Guild forum.

From left to right

back row: US Army squad (M4 rifles, M249 SAW, M203, two fire teams / one squad leader)
middle row: civilians for AA/FoF (a couple, two traders, one pack-horse), three US Army soldiers with M136 launcher (AT-4), a "wounded/dependent" marker for the same game.
front row: Javelin ATGM weapons team.

US Army soldiers are a mix of Britannia and Liberation miniatures, the wounded are plastics by Forces Of Valor and the civilians are Britannia only.

Bringing the battlefield to life: Civilians - Afghani Goatherder and wife

2010 kicks off with a brand new Build over at the Guild forum and for most of my individual tasks (that's how we named the single entries we have to do every two month) I will need civilians, too. Civilians add a lot to Ambush Alley or Force-On-Force games as the bases they are mounted on do block line of sight and you also have to roll a dice to see if your units might have caused civilian casualties if you fire weapons near by. The latter might transform a harmless civilian mob into a mob of frenzied civis grabing their AKs to get revenge. On top of that they just look gorgeous as they really bring a tabletop game to life. Most cities or settlements are never completely deserted when the fighting kicks off and with these lovely Britannia Miniatures the games will look even better. The miniatures above are all out of one set: Goat herder, wife and five goats. You can find those in Dave's 20mm Afghan range of miniatures.