Saturday, December 5, 2009

Forward Detachment- Organization and Point Chart

A quick post before I'm away on business for a week.  




Not much visible progress, but I was able to assemble a bunch of road wheels, work on the engineer's halftrack, sand down some join lines and putty, and most obviously to add the decals to the commanders tanks now that I got that order from HLJ.

I thought I would put up some screen shots I took of my organization and point chart that I'm working on for my Forward Detachment.  Points are for Blitzkrieg Commander rules.  Click on the charts to enlarge.


First, the Motorcycle Battalion.  I have everything I need for this now that I have the BA-6's, and all the models are being built- the battalion as a whole is about 40% done so far.





And here is the chart for the 220th Tank Brigade.  This one is really taking shape fast.  The only things I still have to get are the Lend-Lease AA halftracks, which I will order soon.



Once I get back and into the hobby groove again, I'll continue work on the models.





Thursday, December 3, 2009

When it rains...


It pours. 

Christmas came early.  Not for the first time,  packages I had ordered weeks apart happened to arrive on the same day!  Here is a photo of the loot.




From an online hobby shop in the UK came two boxes of Zis-3 AT guns from Italeri (four guns in total),  and a box of two BA-6 armoured cars.  Very pleased with these so far.  

The guns are very well detailed and are made of a very sturdy soft plastic, considerably harder than the plastic I was used to from old Airfix  HO/OO kits in the past.  The figures themselves ("servants" as it says on the box art) are in cold weather wear and are very nice indeed.  They will make for a great looking vignette of a gun in action.


The BA-6's are actually rather cute looking models, straightforward and perfect for gaming as they are easy to put together and robust, yet with a good amount of detail.  I'll be ordering Pegasus Model kits again.  Although I somehow doubt that the BA-6 was air-portable, as this close-up of the box art on the Pegasus kit seems to suggest...




From Hobby Link Japan (much closer to home!) I ordered  four boxes of Fujimi KV-2 kits- basically just for the excellent decals, which will give me enough turret numbers to outfit my complete tank brigade.  But I have a couple of ideas on how I might make use of the actual kits themselves at a later date.  These were a steal at 380 yen each, and arrived the day after they were dispatched. Cheaper than it would have been for me to order enough decals from an overseas specialist supplier.

 ***** 

Not much time to work on them this weekend, though- I'm off to teach an intensive Business English course for a group of medical researchers and pharmacists next week at a retreat near Mount Fuji.  No opportunity for working on figures or models, and as the pace is pretty demanding, there is not a lot of free time in the evenings.  

Still, I usually end up getting in some good reading time, and I welcome a week free from commuting and cats!   Being near Fuji-san the view from the seminar room is amazing, as you can see from this photo I took the last time I taught there.





Now I just need to decide what to take with me for reading!