Sunday 31 March 2013

Plastic Soldier Company 15mm T34s

As I mentioned in my last post, I was rather inspired to take the plunge into 15mm WW2 Eastern Front  when someone turned up the the club with some PSC Russians. I have gamed the Eastern Front in 6mm for a very long time indeed, but this scale seemed ideal to run the Skirmish Campaigns 'Red Guards at Kursk' campaign, and the things I bought were with one eye towards the forces required for that. The great joy of plastic tanks in this scale is that you don't put your back out lifting the boxes up.

The PSC 15mm T34s are the 1943 version with hexagonal 76mm turret and 'flanged' (not sure what else to call them) wheels. They include both 76mm and 85mm turrets, just like the good old Airfix 1/76th scale  kit.

Two boxes of T34s make up into ten models, enough for a whole company.

They come five to a box, which is very handy for making up a company of ten at 1:1 scale. They also include crew figures, although I only chose to put these in a few turrets. They come with loose stowage boxes, lengths of track and and external fuel tanks, so these can be assembled in various permutations.

T34/76 with commander.
These were very easy to assemble with virtually no flash, although they take much longer than metal models in the same scale. After I had done all ten I had got it down to around twenty minutes each. The only thing to watch our for are the tracks which go together in one, and only one, way. Best to dry fit them before gluing. The moulded on detail is a little light in places, but the wash and drybrushing picked it out well enough. I  assembled both sets of turrets and made up a storage box t hold the 'spares'.

T34/85, same hull as above. The gun barrel is a bit thick but looks OK on the tabletop.

These have all been painted in my usual way: undercoat black, mist with white then a  heavy drybrush of Vallejo Russian Green. I inkwashed some of them but it didn't make much difference to the final result. A heavy application of mud around the running gear then a light drybrush of 'dust' and picked out the details.





Saturday 30 March 2013

Been away for a while....


Once again I have dismally failed to keep the blog up to date, so time to try again. I have been a bit jaded and uninspired with wargaming for a while, just the same old same old, and most of my energy has gone into WW2 Airsoft which I have found to be inspiring and entertaining albeit hideously expensive (shh, don't tell my wife!). In recent months some of my enthusiasm for wargaming has returned, and I also re-discovered blogging through Twitter.

So, here we go again. I think I need to keep it fairly short and to the point. I have managed to overcome my lethargy and do a few wargaming things over the last year:

  • 'Ten Rounds Rapid'. The next WD Display Team (north) participation game. A 15mm WW1 game covering  the BEF in 1914, to be run in 2013, deliberately a year early for the centenary  avoid what will undoubtedly be a saturated market in 2014.
  •  2mm Cold War. I've always been interested in the Cold War, having lived through it, yet the mind numbing tedium of trying to identify thirteen different kinds of T-64 has always rather put me off. After the success of my 2mm WSS project (which again, I'd put off for decades in larger scales for smilar reasons), 2mm seemed to offer the solution for my Cold War conundrum as well.
  •  Command and Colours Empires. We seem to play a lot of CnC these days, and as I had grown weary of using Rifle & Kepi for  large scale late nineteenth century warfare, I had a go at doing a CnC variant for the wars of 1859, 1864, 1866 and 1870.
  •  15mm WW2 Russians. I swore I would never do the Eastern Front in 15mm as I have vast armies in 6mm, however never say never. Someone turned up at the club wth some Plastic Soldier Company WW2 Soviets, and I was converted. One or two slight shopping accidents later and I seemed to have quite a few 15mm Russians.
  •  Big boys toys. I have been doing a lot of WW2 Airsoft/re-enactment and my collections of  uniforms and associated toys continues to grow. I may manage a few pictures and reports occasionally.

I also seem to have taken up Fell Running as an alternative to road running. Well, there are plenty of big hills nearby and the weather has been bad enough to make it challenging...

So, plenty of stuff to talk about in a bit more detail, and maybe this time I'll stir myself to do it. People seem to like pictures in blogs, so here are a couple of tasters of my PSC Russians.

T34s, lovely little models which go together really easily. I particularly like the included crew figures.


PSC Russian infantry. A veritable horde!