Cold War goes hot, but only in a small way

Like many people who grew up in the 1960s, I have an abiding interest in the Cold War, yet somehow it is something I never got around to wargaming outside of board and computer games. I think I found all the techno-babble about the minor differences of thirteen models of T-64 a little offputting. I had a similar block with Marlboroughs exploits as I really couldn't face painting all the wierd and wonderful 'uniforms' of the period. In the latter case, 2mm figures came to the rescue as minor uniform differences really don't show  up in that scale.The success of my 2mm WSS project prompted me to rethink the Cold war, as in 2mm, all those minor technical differences would vanish.


So, a couple of shopping accidents with Irregular later, I had rather a lot of lead to paint.... I pitched the stuff at the 1970s and very early 80s as I felt that was proper cold war, when people went to war with SLRs and Chieftans and there weren't any namby pamby Abrams/Challenger super tanks to even the odds or abominations like the L85A1.

The toys are organised for Tim Gows 'Nato Brigade Commander' so essentially company sized bases, but with an eye to higher level games so there are enough higher level assets to do division/corps sized actions using Megablitz or similar.

Tank Battalion (T64) with attached BMP company. I  used a rough ratio of one model per five vehicles.

BTR mounted motor rifle battalion with attached T62 company.

BM21s, SAM, SP artillery battery and armoured engineers. The latter are converted T55s into a recovery vehicle and bridgelayer. You need to do a lot of conversions on the Irregular models to cover all the required vehicles.

More conversions. BRDM-1s (converted from Sdkfz 222s!) and Shilkas converted from Hummels.

British balanced battlegroup. Two Chieftan squadrons, two mech infantry companies in FV432, battlegroup HQ, infantry mortar battery and a troop of Scimitars from the close recce squadron. The Scimitars are converted from Warriors, that particular job is hard on your fingers.

A squadron of Chieftans compared to a penny. These models are tiny!

I wonder in retrospect if I should have gone with the more modern 3mm stuff as the ranges are more complete, but  have always tried to support Irregular as a local firm, and it is a done deal now. Future plans include expansion to cover the West Germans, and I'll maybe do a unit by unit feature like Tim has done for his 6mm stuff.

Eagle eyed readers may also notice the appearance of a 'downloads' page. I am moving a lot of the content off my web page, and it will mainly feature rules and things of historical interest. The actual files are PDFs shared via google docs, so please let me know if I've got the sharing options wrong... it will take me a while to convert everything I want to publish into PDFs, so bear with me.