Weekend Achievements

 There was a round - two rounds - of Tactical Combat at the club yesterday, but I got away from work 20 minutes later than expected and arrived as they were cleaning up, rather than being able to catch the last turns as I'd hoped.

On the other hand, I did get a good look at the new layout.

Feels empty. Probably just the walls.

Plenty of new books, which I get to organize. Also
about ten smallish folding tables, which will enable
pickup-game nights in future.

A card catalog turns out handy to hold minis.

The deeper drawers get the command bases.

One of the new-old things is a 1st Ed. WFRP set with all maps and handouts.

Some of the WWI stuff from the day. Both 1914 and 1918.

Lovely houses for the Belgian village in which both games were set.

What did I accomplish on my own account? Superglued together this Warlord Games partisan 75mm, getting a bit on myself and the desk in the process.

And a Paperboys 60mm mortar team to go with the glider.
My upcoming interview subject was a mortar ammo carrier.

Step by step, the longest march...

Friday achievements

 Basecoated - mostly - the Ansaldo L6/40 I picked up last year at Recon.

I'll do a second coat, partly to neaten but also because I suspect the model wasn't undercoated from its original 3D print. I found this:

Between the track wheels you can see some flash I'll have to cut away somehow. (My files are at my old branch, donated to help with their 3D printer.)

The grey color is Citadel's The Fang. Space Wolf greys are really a shade of blue, but I color-matched online to find something vaguely Feldgrau, The Fang came up, and I had a bottle.

Why Feldgrau? I intend to make this part of my Very British Civil War collection. It's not quite in period, as the story has only gone as far as the New Year of 1939, but a) this tank was designed for export, and b) it started production in 1939 even though it's tagged 1940 by the Italian nomenclature. So I imagine that Mussolini's government sent the British Fascists a few early test samples. Since I think they'd most likely go to Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF), I'm using a dark scheme. I intend to shade with black shade, highlight with the next lightest Citadel color (Russ Grey), use some silver metal for the wheel edges, tracks and gun, and find a lightning decal for markings. An online suggestion was to use White Scars space marine decals, though those are more than lightning marks and will have to be cut away. So this is the project I'll try and finish in the next week or so.

I've mentioned an upcoming talk with a US glider infantry veteran. Entirely coincidentally, I found a book of paper airplanes in the library's donation pile last week, and in it was a CG-4 model:

A fair likeness, around 1/80 as it's 7" long and the actual vehicle was 48'. I'll have to pick up some Paperboys airborne troops to go with. Not sure how to color it; felt-tip markers may work. What I'd really like is something similar for the DFS-230, as there's an interesting solo scenario for Eben Emael in Featherstone's Complete Wargaming. I've found several paper models, but all are 3D rather than 2.5.

It flies, too, though overbalanced in the nose. But that might be realistic - the videos I'm finding of it online show pretty steep landing approaches.

1:30 in the morning here, and I've got work. But at least I got a post done, for once. See you again soon.

Jutland in Miniature...

 ... in more ways than one.

I finished The Sleepwalkers and am now waiting on a copy of The Gardeners of Salonika, the latter chosen because Serbia is a huge part of the former. Looking forward to reading it.

Today's achievement, minor though it is, is basing my half-strength Jutland battleship squadrons. This was necessary since time left in a car in Florida has warped several of the bases and models. The warping is unfortunately retained on the new bases, but mostly not too obvious:

I'm not positive about using plastic glue on paper-and-card bases. The glue doesn't stay stuck, or maybe that's because of the flexible bases "popping" away too easily. Maybe sticky-tack would work? I do like the ease of labeling. Clear labels go on nicely. I had to replace a couple misspelled German names, but I learned a little history by looking up a few of the more curious ones, like Prinzregent Luitpold, who turns out to be the guy who imprisoned Mad King Ludwig.

A mini Grand Review.

I've slightly modified the Junior General rules to account for
differing battlecruisers. The German ones have the same hitpoints
as a battleship, but less firepower; the British ones have the same
firepower as a battleship, but fewer hit points.

In other news, I had twenty 54mm Apollo astronauts 3d printed. Depending on when I use them, I have between four and sixteen days to prep them for painting (three different space-program-related events coming up). This will require undercoating, basing, possibly basecoating, and finding enough paint and brushes. The figures are black, and all I have at present for basecoating is Wraithbone spray, a sort of creamy-white. I'll experiment on Monday. In the past, I've used grey undercoat and a heavy drybrush of white to start.

Other crafts/activities that can be used sometime in the next month include the usual coloring sheets, cut-and-stick activities, make-your-own astronaut helmets, "stomp rockets" and Kerbal Space Program, which I've managed to make work on a presentation laptop at work. Project it onto a screen and I can either recreate an actual mission (surprisingly difficult even with an autopilot add-on), or have the kids instruct me how to build a rocket. ("Oh, it crashed. What do we need to add? Yes, a parachute sounds like a good idea.")

I also have something more specifically military - a 99-year-old (!) WWII veteran who rode a glider across the Rhine and also fought at the Bulge. I'm working up an interview and presentation that we plan to have both live and streaming to several other branches next month. So I'm idly messing with paper paratroopers and trying to talk downtown into getting a temporary movie license so I can drop in the Pegasus Bridge scene from The Longest Day.

So that's what I've been up to when I'm not posting...

On the Home Front

Experimenting with base replacement for my 3D printed Jutland collection. These are 70x20mm bases, using base paper from the Paperboys Trafalgar book, clear labels, and a little plastic glue, which seems to stick the models down just fine. Certainly looks better than the original plastic "rafts."

Finished Reed Browning's excellent history of the Austrian Succession; now working on one about the origins of WWI. Some very interesting stuff about Serbian history and its culture of martyrdom in the beginning. I look forward to reading the rest.

What else is up? Work, mostly - which is where I picked up this book. Handy things, libraries. Anyway, I have three programs coming up - two on space and one on WWII. Two are craft programs centered around space, women's history (so basically Sally Ride, since Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya are understandably persona non grata in the last couple years) and the upcoming eclipse. I've been scrambling for crafts. So far we're looking at:

• Baking-soda-and-vinegar rockets
• 3D-printed spaceships to paint (must get over to my former workplace to see if the teen tech lab can help with that)
• Paper planes
• Astronaut helmet-masks
• Pinhole cameras made from foil and card.

The other project is a prospective hybrid live-and-online interview with a 99-year-old (!) veteran who approached us. He was in the 17th Airborne Division and rode a glider across the Rhine. Pretty impressive stuff. I've always been interested in glider troops, which were a blip in history that few people remember these days, so I'm eager to educate people about them. The program is quickly burgeoning to be livestreamed to several other libraries, though the gentleman is also eager to talk to kids so we might contact schools, too.

So I'm busy and not doing much gaming at home, though I've gotten away with dropping Paperboys into some of our book displays:

Happy Ides of March to all.

New stuff

 Ordered this book after hearing about it on the VWC group:

A good and lively book; I'm just past Dettingen. The author makes the characters and maneuvers surprisingly comprehensible, even though there's a lot of people and places to track. He points out specifically that there are four important Charleses alone. But the clarity is surprising, despite sparse maps. The major battles are at least given several pages each - which you don't always see in large-scale histories. There were three or four major theatres, and with all the German and Italian city-states there is fodder for Imagi-nation campaigning. Very enjoyable - recommended.

This morning I also received a shipment from a fellow on Facebook who was selling his old TSATF supplements. Now I have:

An extra, less worn copy of the rules.

The "big battles" variant, 800 Fighting Englishmen.

Varying action decks (taking the place of playing cards for 
turn and casualty determination; and "special event" decks
for adding variant elements to scenarios (reinforcements, delays, etc).

Two dozen scenarios.

Sample scenario and map.

Unexpected: Card QRS sheets and unit cards.
No need to copy them from the book now!

A bit more reading material - variant rules, tactical tips,
a French North Africa variant, and my favorite - 
material from the Major General's club that,
to my recollection, isn't on the site!

So while I may not be gaming this weekend, rest assured I won't be idle!

The local club has also had a massive donation of minis, terrain and books, so I will really have to get over there one of these weekends to have a look (and help organize). Hope you too are enjoying yourselves. Til next time -

Errgh

I'm off sick going on four days here. Luckily not Covid, but bad enough that I'm not up to any solo gaming. A little reading, a little watching, lots of liquid and cats.

I did cut out a few new Peter Dennis patent "cross-trees."

The intent to start on a forest for the Charles S. Grant scenario. I also have lots of aquarium matting and a handful of "proper" trees, but it might look rather unsylvan in the end.

The other thing I hoped to do was repair a few WWI ships from a batch I 3D printed a few years ago.

These are some of the first things I 3D-printed at work around five years ago. I only got to run the Jutland scenario (from Junior General) once, with paper minis. These photos are from 2019:

The German High Seas Fleet (left) is drawn into a trap by
the British Grand Fleet (upper right)

BatCruRon 3 and a dozen Brit battleships.
One of BatCruRon 1 has already been lost.

Germans horribly disorganized but pounding the Brit BCs into scrap.

Anyway, I later used som models from Thingiverse to reproduce these in plastic - at half strength, so the Germans have three battle cruisers and eight battleships, the British four battlecruisers and twelve battleships. 

I even made a "travel box" for them, with measuring devices,
dice, hit-point trackers and simple QRS cards.

I left them on the flat bases leftover from the printing process, and wrote the names over whiteout. A few were snapped off by inquisitive kids, and I decided to glue them back on - only to discover that time, and possibly being left in the car, had caused many of the bases to warp.

So now I'm undecided. I could:

• Use my label maker to make proper labels and stick those under the ships (invisible unless you pick them up, at which point repositioning is tricky)
• Make paper tags (unseemly and jarring to my eyes on such small models).
• "Unwarp" the bases (How?).

Suggestions welcomed.

Lastly, while looking on Facebook for those old game photos, I found that NASA has just published a role-playing game adventure, called The Lost Universe. I'll definitely be checking that out, as I need activities to go with Earth Day, the upcoming solar eclipse, etc.

Dragging myself to bed now. Until next time.