ACW2 Engagement

Defender; protect the town from evil doers, Attackers, Rob the Bank.

 So, here's the town, all nice and peaceful, a few civilians wandering about in the early morning light, going about their business. Photo to the right  shows the brown bank building behind the black and red truck. In the lower corner is an ever vigilant truck with 50 cal machine gun helping "keep the peace". Across the street from the bank in the white building is Madam's House of Comfort for Wayward Soldiers of the Revolution.  Scattered about town were various defending nationalist units on R&R.

 The bank robbers occupied the house next to the bank and sent in 20 thugs to "aquire funding for the cause".  A teller came running out of the bank screaming it was being robbed. Not clear on who was who , the nationalist troops did not open fire immediately, until 1 squad exited the back of the bank and the other came out the front.  The front came under fire from the truck mounted machine gun but they kept on running down the street. In the back, part of the robbers unit was gunned down from an Armored car, a daring do officer wielded his 2 machine pistols and blazed away, at least one of the heavy machine guns on the armored car fired at the bank, cutting down a teller...ooops.

 The police had placed a machine gun in the upstairs building seen here in the lower right of the right side picture. It opened fire on the robbers tracked truck, scoring multiple hits in its engine, setting it on fire. The remaining robbers figure to beat feet and sprinted down the road, encumbered by bags of looted cash. One of them was picked off by a well placed rifle shot, the shooter casually added another notch to the stock of his rifle.  In the mean time the front door robbers sprinted down the street past the cat house, where the alerted (by all the gun fire) nationalist forces that had been attempting to raise the moral of the local girls, rushed to the windows and opened fire on the fleeing robbers.

Here, just when the front door gang thought they were in the clear, the rest of the cathouse brigade of liberation came out the back of the building and opened fire with sub machine guns, with deadly results, all of the remaining robbers were cut down. The transport of the robbers followed down the street and over the bodies of the fallen, though they claimed that they had tried to grab the hands of the wounded to pull them into the truck...

The remaining survivors of the escape out the back group came under some terribly inaccurate rifle fire from a police unit but suffered no effects other than to hasten their efforts to get away, which they did with a considerable amount of cash.

Cat Grenade

New Style Explosion

I have done many of the standard Smoke columns for explosions. Recently I saw one done on the Lead Adventure Forums by Hammers that I really liked. Copying it has proven a bit tricky but I'm giving it a shot.

Basic materials, old aluminium disks, bamboo skewers, styrafoam, coarse chopped foilage from woodland scenics and assorted glues and hot glue gun. I tried out some spray addhesive along the way.... it was not to successful. So, Styrafoam chunk was hot glued to the disk as in the right picture.

Next, pieces of skewers were hot glued and stuck into the foam pieces. Spray on adhesives was sprayed all over it... very messy process, the the whole thing was put in a large container of the crumbled foliage. Next I used fingers to press foliage onto the rods and base area. More spray adhesive, then more pressing.... not very efficient. Coverage was hap hazard.

Next step was to take it outside, and spray on diluted pva glue and let it dry. I soaked parts of it to help the foliage stay on. When dried I sprayed it heavily with flat black spray paint, from all angles. Then fogged it with white from about a foot away. Took the black back in very close and spot shot here and there for the picture on the left. Things I learned to make it faster and easier. Cut, mount, and spray tack, or spread glue and coat the Styrofoam first. Then Cut the skewers into the lengths you want. Coat them with glue or hot glue and then press on the foliage. Let both dry.  Hot glue the skewers into the foam base. Spray with black and white to color it. You can easily go back and fill in any small spots that do not have enough. I think I will put traces of brown paint on the outer most bits of smoke, along with bits of grass color, not much, just a touch here and there to add some visual "depth" to the look of the piece.

Basing Problem

So, working towards my permanent bases for my Fantasy Rules! armies I hit a snag. Flocking the bases with the woodland scenics flock on prepared metal bases works fine, except... I then used a 1 inch brush to put diluted PVA glue onto the dried flock to help keep it from rubbing off on the edges.Picture on the left shows how I used the brush to pat on the diluted white glue.

After soaking the base, I set them on wax paper to dry, the waxy surface making the white glue not glue it to the surface that I set it on to dry in the first place. One of the bases that I did not get good coverage on is pictured on the right. The lighter area is the surface I want, the dark areas, the glued areas. SO, with some double work I reapplied white glue to the darker areas to get the grass to the final look I want before I add battlefield bits, rocks, grass tufts etc.

I am thinking that the reinforced glue / grass underneath with keep the metal base from showing if there is excessive wear on the edges. Then again, with the remaining base work ahead of me, I will add the diluted white glue to a narrow edge around the base instead of so thoroughly over the entire base, so as to reduce the amount of "touch up" to the base grass surface.

Lucked out on a road trip down to San Jose and scored a stack of these doll house miniature furniture packs for  $2.19 from D&J Hobby shop.They work great with 28mm figures.
They are soft plastic so easy to cut and reassemble into other types of furniture. Here's a site that has a ton of conversions done with them:

http://www.wannainelpaso.com/smallerscale/bashing_bpf.shtml

Garden Bushes

Found an old cactus that I kept tossing around as an idea for I didnt know what, till I thought to cut the top off and then cut off rows of the "thorns" . Next I applied contact cement to the upper half of each row of thorn tops, and used scenic foilage small clumpings to press onto the glued tops, let them dry. A piece of light plastic for the base. I chose to hot glue the lines of bushes down after painting some brown on the still showing thorns material.  Attaching the lines to the base, I chose to hot glue them for quick setting as the cut pieces were not very straight and tended to have a curve near the old top of the cactus.

Bottom last shot shows a close up with a 28mm figure for scale. The green toppings of the bushes are clear of the ground for a diffrent look to the garden plot.

More Reinforcments Arrived

Troll and Toad did a restock... order order ..... 

More monstrous creatures, I will be ascribing Blade, spear or Pike qualities to some of these, don't want to many "small monsters" all the time!
Top left, mostly sorceresly impressed creatures, Top Right some undead, Centaur cavalry and a few more monstrous creatures. Below left are my Tharks to be for Mars VSF, at 30 of them after a year of culling the Internet, about another 30 to go. Have to make Radium rifles, pistols and the like for some of them, ditch some of the shields etc.

Basing More Fantasy Units

Figures arrive, paint, highlight and base for my Fantasy Armies: to the left is a shot of,  demonics left and right with bad guy guardsmen in between. Base grass and bits to add, as well as the back edge gets unit label.

Here are some of my Druid's Army units, animated trees and wild wood folk. Picture below, on the right is a Dryad unit, on the left of the shot are giant Wasps.. nasty things.

Thought is was time to add some Dragonic units so here they are, left and right are melee units with a caster group in the center that will act similar to a war machine for range effect, but siege engines are sooo dull to look at!

Kneemo's Lost Armor Found

Those rascally tanks and aircraft turned up!

Left side picture is the arieal attack squadron. They will be mounting twin machine guns or some such to fight other aircraft or strafe the ground targets. On the right side picture we see the 2 light walker tanks, in front of those are the Black Smoke mechanicals that spew poison gas all about with impunity to themselves. In the back are some other mechanicals that are in the "concept" stage of what to convert them to. For the bent legs of the walkers, a hair dryer blowing on them for about 1 minute, then over bend slightly to correct, while they cool will straighten them.

Kaptain Kneemo's Expeditionary Forces Assembled

So with the flight to Venus coming closer it was time to set the scenic terrain pieces aside and assemble the massed forces I have been assembling to serve Kaptain Kneemo. Not located in the supply depot for this shot was the 4 Mechanical Attack Flyers and 2 Light walker tanks, that are hiding somewhere in plain sight I'm sure.

Top left  has an overview of the entire force minus the 4 flyers. Up front will be 2 more flyers converted from mechanical dragon flys, thinking they will be bombers of some sort. Tank is to get a snorkel pipe and cylinder tanks of as yet undetermined type. Robot attack dog as a personal body guard for Kneemo. Mechanical Infantry on the right, from front to back; Submersibles Mechanicals 10, standard mechanical  infantry 20, melee infantry mechanicals 20.

Top Right shows the shipboard troops available so far, 30 Sailors and 30 Marines, though I plan to double these numbers with a new order. Total forces available should hit 170 Infantry, 4 flyers, 4 vehicles. May come up with some sort of hover power sleds or some other sort of scout/troop carrier.

Wire Barrier

Here's something closer to what I have in mind for the completed Wire Barrier:

New Wire Emplacements

Time to start the Serious Wire Emplacements:

Dry wall nails painted brown for the wire support posts. Tips cut off and ends blunted, hot glued to a thin plastic base with some texture smeared on it. There base gets grassed next, any clumps of small brush etc needs to go on before the wire gets put on as after the wire is on it will be really difficult to reach in there.

This shot shows where the main coil of wire is to be. In the pictures I looked at for the basic inspiration, there was a double row of coils.... but I'm not that dedicated... heh. Working on Criss Crossing and up and down angles of wire to the poles, generally to go up and over the coil so that a person has to pick there way through the strands to get to the coil to get to the strands. Should take infantry about 3 turns to clear through it, 4 to cut through and leave a wide gap for others to follow on, well that's the basic idea. Hope to assemble about 4 feet of this wire works in the end.

Alternate Tree Making Sites and Other Useful Sites

Thought I would take a moment and link some alternate tree making sites, mainly for "bottle brush" pine trees, but I digress:

http://paulsmodelrailroad.blogspot.com/2010/08/trees.html

http://www.fsmtrees.com/tutorial1.htm

http://www.all-model-railroading.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?p=108983

http://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics.com/show/video/MakeATree

http://dampfpanzerwagon.blogspot.com/2010/08/old-school-model-trees.html


Oh and here is the answer to your furniture needs:

http://thequartersource.com/miniatures/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3_63

Heres a site to show you how to mix and match parts of the plastic furniture in a zillion different ways to make nearly every conceivable type of household dust catcher:

http://www.wannainelpaso.com/smallerscale/bashing_bpf.shtml   scroll down, its a very long article.

There are several stores that carry them, anyone can post a comment with a link to any US or UK stores, please do.

Here is a site that has a list of Barrels and Crates made by nearly 30 different manufacturers, should give you a brief description of what they carry so you can follow up to their site and be pre armed with the product ID number or key words to search and locate them faster.

http://www.fysh.org/~katie/wargames/data/barrels.html

How to do Static Grass and Make a static Grass applicator for a few dollars:

http://racooke.com/HOWTO%27S.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAEmcqc-yIc   Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsz3uRlwVY   Part 2

Finished Concertina Wire piece

Finally got one mounted up on its base. Thinking of filing down some small nails to put in and paint up as the type of metal rods they put in the rolls of wire if they had the time to. The rods kept the wire from being blown out of position or dragged away easily.