Little Vehicles for Little Dudes

Hi, I finished up another round of painting. This time, it's a bunch of vehicles.

So first up, we've got a couple of technicals -- civilian pick-up trucks with heavy weapons installed. No spinning rims, no thumping base, no under-body neon, just a guarantee that no one will cut you off:



I'm not super-happy with these. The models are by Peter Pig and they're great, but gluing on the wheels was a bit of a pain. The real problem is that I picked fairly light body colors and when I brushed on the "dip", it made them look really dirty/muddy. Maybe it'll be ok on the table when viewed from a distance, but I should've found a lighter shade of dip for these. Ah well, at least the Insurgents have some mobile firepower now.

Too bad we've also bulked out the US forces with a pair of Humvees:


Again, these are 15mm models by Peter Pig. The turrets are interchangeable and they sell the turrets separately. So in this shot I've got one .50 cal. machine gun turret and a TOW launcher turret and I've got another turret of each type so I can mix and match as I see fit. I also have two leftover HMG turrets so I might get another pair of TOW hummers in the future and have a nice set.

 The US also get one of my favorite vehicles:


The LAV-25 is, in my personal opinion, one of the sexiest military vehicles out there. Fast troop transport capability, good firepower, amphibious, comes in numerous variants, what's not to love? So now I've got one. This one is by QRF minis and I hope to get some more in the future. A pretty easy model to put together and paint, the only issue is that the gun barrel broke off and I had to putty it back on. Oh well. It's nice to have on hand.

Finally, the first of my WWIII models:


Soviet T-80 tanks, the pride and joy of the Red Army and still in use today. These were also from QRF and were kind of a bitch to assemble. There were a ton of extra "bits" and no instructions on where they'd go (Internet research didn't help). Those two drums on the back of the tanks were very poorly designed and took a lot of work to get stuck on there. Still, they painted up pretty well and it's a good start.

So that's all the vehicles. I was planning to move on to some 28mm fantasy figures I picked up at HAVOC, but I need to order/build/paint a building for an Afghanistan Force on Force game I'm running at the end of June. The building should be a pretty fast job, but I want to make sure it's done before committing to other stuff.

later Tom

Boom! Headshot!

Hey,

Another batch of painting finished (I'm really making progress).



So here we have some Insurgent Heavy Weapon Teams and a brace of snipers. All of these minis are 15mm Peter Pig products. So there's 8 snipers, 3 mortars with two crew and 3 recoiless rifles with three crew. I had a left-over crew guy so I painted him up as a spare leader.

This particular round put me smack up against the "hot dogs vs. hot dog buns" problem. The mortar and recoiless rifles come six to a pack and buying enough crew figures to properly man all of them would've been exorbitant. So now I've got some spare heavy weapons. Luckily, I'll probably roll them into the WarPac forces when I get around to painting them later this year.

I also had a great bit of customer service. When I ordered the figures from Brookhurst Hobbies, the packs containing the crew figures were mis-labled so I got the wrong two packs of Insurgents with LMGs. It was an honest mistake and not the store's fault at all, but they told me to keep the packs and rush shipped me the correct figures. So that was good of them -- I don't really need the extra 16 dudes, but maybe I can trade them away or some other project will come up.

Next up -- Vehicles...lots of vehicles.

later
Tom

One shot, one kill...we're gonna need a lot of shots...

Hi,

So I finished painting up another batch of little dudes.

So here's what we've got:



It's another pack of minis from Rebel Minis. Again, not the most detailed in the world, but I really needed to get a bunch of foot soldiers and you can get a big pack of them for cheap. In the front, I also picked up Rebel Minis's US Sniper teams. The only thing the US foot troops really need now are crew-served weapons, but those don't come up much in most of my scenarios. I'd rather find a couple more Forward Observer types.

So now I'm painting up a few Insurgent snipers and crew-served weapons. After that, I've got a few vehicles to put together (Hummers and Technicals) and then I'll be pretty well squared away for most of the US/Insurgent scenarios I've got to hand.

later
Tom