Terrain, Ensmallened and Tinified

 This is one of Printable Scenery's 3-piece 28mm terrain pieces that I've joined together digitally, solidified, and rescaled to a 6mm size. It's ended up about an inch long, and printed on my Ender 3 in eSun black PLA+.

This was an experimental piece to see if pieces like this for 6mm wargaming would be worth printing by FDM, and overall I'd say it's a definite success. There's some detail missing in the shutters, but the roof tile and brick textures show up well.

Print times are an issue though. This was printed at 0.1mm, and it took quite a while — printing a whole wargames table of houses would take me a week or two at least.

For that reason, and with the side effect of giving me better detail resolution, I'd be better off filling up the build plate of my Mars Pro and printing six or nine at a time. I'd have to hollow it out to save on resin, but that would be no big deal.

6mm Napoleonic Brits (3d printed)

 

I've printed some of Henry Turner's 6-15mm Napoleonic British sculpts at 6mm on my Mars Pro, and made some 40mm two-rank sabot bases for them on my Ender 3. I like his proportions for 6mm, but I find them just a tad too chunky and dwarfish for 15mm.

At the moment only the front rank strips are glued in place; they'll be painted along with the base, while the rear rank strips will be painted separately and then be glued in place. The battalion colours will also be painted separately, and then be glued in place — the colour bearers' hands can be drilled out to accept a pin, and the colours themselves will be made of paper.

There have been a few casualties amongst the muskets and bayonets when I removed the printing supports, but never mind.

These five bases would make a full medium-sized battalion for Black Powder in 6mm. The left and right bases are half-and-half line troops, with the woolen puff epaulettes, and flank troops with the swallows-nest epaulettes. The difference is visible if you look really closely, but in this scale I think differentiating them in this way is largely pointless. Nevertheless, I've got them, so I might as well use them.

I've photographed them here with some Heroics & Ros 6mm Spaniards, on 3mm MDF bases, for comparison. They are more detailed than the H&R metals, but how much of that extra detail will be visible on the wargames table is yet to be seen. I guess it will depend a lot on the quality of one's eyesight, and mine is pretty crap these days.

Couple of days later...

This is the first test base, painted and flocked. The 3d printed sabot base seems to have worked as planned; the ranks aren't perched up on little mounds as they would be if they were glued straight to a flat surface.

The figures are just block-painted over a black primer, and then sploshed with Army Painter Dark Tone which does successfully delineate a bit of the detail present in the prints — detail that will be only minimally visible at tabletop distances. It's not a painting standard that will reward close scrutiny, but they'll look okay en masse on the table.

These two strips suffered even more than most when I took the supports off, but hopefully the flags will distract from the missing bayonets.

There are a pair of colours still to go on this base; I'm waiting on some toner for my printer for those. Normally I'll print them to get some precision in the outlines, mount them on their pins, and then give the paper a bit of flowing contour and finish by painting in some shadow and highlights.

6mm Napoleonic Experiment

 

Just out of curiosity, I decided to try printing some 6mm Napoleonics, just to see what the possibilities are. These particular ones are scaled down from some 15mm sculpts I found on Thingiverse.

They're shown here (on the left) in their 1805 stovepipe shakos beside some Heroics & Ros Waterloo British infantry of 1815.

They printed just fine, though they're extremely delicate — almost certainly too delicate for the sort of handling wargaming figures get. However, seeing them next to their metal equivalents shows me that I can afford to make them much more squat and dwarfish, and thus a lot stronger.

Napoleonics in 6mm are very much an "en masse" spectacle, so the look of a whole battalion is much more important than an individual figure. I could get away with quite a lot in terms of figure design and still end up with something that looks quite okay in the ranks.

3d Printing – SLA vs. FDM

These 3d printed vehicles are all 1/285 scale, so the largest of them is only about 25mm (an inch) long. I thought these tiny little models would do best to compare the merits of FDM and SLA printing.

All of the SLA prints were done by Shapeways, and all in their "Smooth Fine Detail Plastic" material, which is the lower of the two detail options they offer in resin printing.

The two FDM prints were done by me on my Ender 3 with a 0.4mm nozzle at 0.08mm layer height in PLA.

1. Vickers Medium Mk.III — SLA
2. Burford Kegresse — SLA
3. Carden-Loyd MG carrier — SLA
4. Vickers Medium Mk.II — FDM
5. Vickers Medium Mk.II — FDM. Printed with no gun barrel, and a brass pin added later.
6. Vickers Medium Mk.II** — SLA

SLA uses a UV laser to selectively cure a photopolymer, layer by layer, within a wax support medium, so requires no additional supports and is capable of rendering very fine surface detail. The sloping panels are cleaner owing to its finer layer discrimination. Shapeways used to have information on the exact layer heights on their website, but they no longer do now that they've "improved" their site design again.

DLP is another process that uses a photosensitive resin, but in a different manner: it employs a LCD screen to expose each layer in one go. It has the advantage that the amount of build-plate coverage has no effect on its print speed, but the disadvantage that its horizontal resolution is dictated by the resolution of the LCD exposure screen it uses. The finer screens now available, and antialiasing technologies, have improved this substantially in just a few years, but it is still likely that pixelation effects might be seen on curved surfaces. Nevertheless, like SLA it is generally capable of much finer layer heights than FDM printing. DLP printing uses printed support structures in much the same way as FDM.

The two FDM examples I've shown here, for all the limitations of that medium, are really not too bad as wargaming models. Both of these have been printed at 0.08mm layer height; my machine will go as low as 0.04mm, but with only a slight improvement in visual quality, and at the cost of doubling the print time. The surface detail is much lower than SLA (or DLP) is capable of, though this could be improved by printing with a smaller nozzle — 0.2mm or 0.25mm — though this once again increases print times substantially.

I'm unlikely to do any more 1/285 scale printing myself, as my eyesight has grown too poor to easily distinguish the different models on the wargames table without a lot of leaning and peering. However, as you can see, it's certainly a viable prospect to print usable 6mm wargames vehicles, even on a cheap entry-level printer.

Tiny Terrain

I'm continually impressed by the level of detail my Ender 3 will give me with its stock 0.4mm nozzle.

This is one of the Ulvheim Ruins pieces I got from Thingiverse (didn't record the url, sorry) shrunk down to 20% for use with 6mm games.

The vehicle is my 1:285 model of the 1930s British Burford-Kegresse machine-gun carrier that I had printed in resin by Shapeways, and the 28mm figure is, as usual, Sergeant Measureby, for scale.

Cold War Project — Rapier

Heroics & Ros BM30 Rapier

I've given my BAOR lads some more potent AA capability with the Rapier missile launcher.

The sprue(s) come with sufficient bits to make three launch teams, of which this is one. There's a bit of assembly involved, and it pays to make sure you know which bits go where before you start gluing things together.

This team is a bit more compact than it would be in real life, because I wanted to keep everything on the one base. The launcher and targeting radar would normally be quite a bit further apart.

There's a tripod arrangement at the front of this base that I think is the aiming and control post, but I'm not completely sure. There's a sort of blobby thing attached to it which, now that I look at it closely, might be meant to be a man hunched over it. If so, he's a lot smaller than any of the other figures. Maybe the BAOR employed 12-year-olds for the job?

Note: I've had it confirmed that the blob is indeed meant to be the operator. So that settles that.

Conqueror

Heroics & Ros 1/300 BM53 Conqueror Heavy Tank

Here's my Heavy Troop, all painted up and ready for the table.

I've painted these guys in their peacetime Deep Bronze Green, because I want to be able to distinguish them from the Centurions and Comets at a glance. If the balloon had gone up while they were in service, and assuming there was time, they'd almost certainly have been repainted in the drab green and black disruptive pattern common to British vehicles of the time.

I've replaced the cast soft metal barrels with steel wire, as I posted here.

H&R Conqueror - rebarreling

Heroics & Ros 1/300 BM53 Conqueror Heavy Tank

When I got my Centurions, I also got a troop of Conquerors to fend off those pesky IS-III from about ten miles away.

The Conqueror has a very long gun barrel, which is very vulnerable to damage from ham-fisted wargamers, as you can see in the top model. So, I'm replacing the soft metal moulded guns with new ones made from 1mm steel rod — I believe it's welding wire. It's very sturdy indeed, and should survive anything that won't completely destroy the whole model.

The diameter of the gun on the original vehicle tapers subtly from the mantlet to the muzzle, but that's not something I feel a burning desire to replicate in this scale. It would be quite difficult, for no real perceptible benefit.

The bore extractor is made from paper, soaked in liquid superglue and wrapped around the wire several times. The superglue penetrates the fibres of the paper, and you end up with a hard, plastic-like mass that can be sanded smooth to remove the seam where the last wrapping is cut off. It would be a lot easier to use a short piece of brass or copper or even plastic tube with a 1mm bore, but I have none.

The Conqueror's gun doesn't have a muzzle brake, which simplifies matters quite considerably.

Next Day

I remembered some useful stuff from my brief essays into stained glass — the bore evacuator on this one is made from some self-adhesive copper foil, cut to width and wrapped several times around the barrel.

The copper foil gives a much cleaner surface than the glue-soaked paper, and it's also much easier to handle. It's very thin, so it needs to be wrapped in more layers to get the required thickness, but you don't have to worry about smoothing off the end-seam as long as it's located on the underside of the barrel where nobody will ever see it.

The copper foil is intended to be wrapped around the edge of pieces of glass, which would then be thickly soldered together to create the complete stained glass object. It's an alternative to the traditional lead channel seen on windows, and is often used for three-dimensional objects like lampshades.

Centurion Mk.1

When I ordered a bunch of the new Centurion sculpts recently from Heroics & Ros, they very kindly included some examples of their new re-sculpt of the Centurion Mk.1 of 1945, soon to be released.

This first Centurion, with the coaxial 20mm Polsten cannon, never saw action, but it might have if WWII had lasted just a few weeks longer. I've painted one troop in the green and black disruptive camouflage used by the British in the ETO, and with the white star of the Allied forces, as it might have appeared in action in Germany in the closing days of the war. Or as it might have appeared if the Western Allies and the Soviets had come to blows, as they very nearly did.

Heroics & Ros B26 Centurion 1

This is a beautiful little model, and a real improvement on the old sculpt of the same vehicle. That one was perfectly adequate as a wargaming model, but the new one is really diorama quality.

Centurion Mk.V

 This is one of the Heroics & Ros 1/300 scale Centurion Mk.V models I just got. For size reference, the hull of this model is about an inch long.

I've painted this one in an overall green scheme, without any disruptive camo pattern, because I wanted to bring out as much detail as I could. Camouflage patterns, surprise surprise, tend to obscure detail a bit.

One detail that the paintwork has brought out is the moulding seam along the barrel, which I clearly missed. Bugger.

The presence of the bore evacuator indicates that this must be a Centurion 5/2 with the 105mm gun. If need be it would be a pretty simple matter to convert it to a 5/1 with the 20 pounder just by filing the bore evacuator off, or probably more easily by replacing the barrel entirely with a bit of wire.

Heroics & Ros Centurions (and Conqueror)

I ordered some of Heroics & Ros' new sculpts of the Centurion MBT, not because I have any immediate wargaming use for them, but simply because I have a fondness for the Centurion.

I got a few Conquerors too, just in case. You never know.

They very kindly included some of their very latest, the Centurion Mk.I, not yet released. I've shown it here next to one of the old sculpts of that model, and the improvement is clear. The old model was perfectly serviceable as a wargaming model, but the new one is just exquisite, well up to the standard required for diorama building. As are the other two models already available, the Mk.V and Mk.XIII.

I haven't done anything with these models except photograph them. They appear here as they arrived straight from their bags. As with most models, there is a little cleanup of mould seams needed, but it is minimal.

The Conqueror is one model that I'd probably replace the gun on. It's very long, and would be very likely to get bent out of shape under the ministrations of normal wargamer sausage-fingers It would be safer in steel I think, or even brass. Fortunately it doesn't have a muzzle-brake, which simplifies matters, and the fume extractor is easily added with a sleeve of lead foil.

Cold War Project — Blowpipe

Heroics & Ros 1/300 1980s British infantry — Blowpipe teams

These guys are equipped with the Blowpipe, a semi-disposable man-portable anti-aircraft rocket system. The reusable aiming system clips on to a disposable launch tube.

Reports from the Falklands did not cast the Blowpipe in a good light. At the time they were only reporting a 10% hit rate, even against slow-moving aeroplanes and helicopters, and later analysis indicated that the hit rate might have been as low as 2%. One senior British officer described using Blowpipe as "shooting grouse with a drain pipe".

Hopefully my guys will do a little bit better than that on the wargaming table.

The H&R Blowpipe infantry sprue just comes with five launcher figures. The loader/observer has been added from the general infantry pack.

Painting note: this time I tried building up the DPM camouflage from a brown base, splotching the green and sand over the top. It seems to have worked well enough, though the overall effect is slightly darker than going from a green base. I thought the brown would make a better base colour, as it's a more useful shadow colour than bright grass green.

Cold War Project — 81mm Mortar

Heroics & Ros 1/300 1980s British infantry — dismounted 81mm mortar

Here's another addition to my BAOR force, some dismounted 81mm mortar teams. They'd normally be dashing about the place in a FV432, and the mortar can be fired from the vehicle, but it could also be dismounted and emplaced in a sneaky hidden position and be a bit less obvious than a honking great tracked vehicle.

Cold War Project — BAOR Infantry

Here's a selection of Heroics & Ros' new 1980s British infantry, three rifle sections of them. I have enough squaddies painted now for a full-strength company, but there's still plenty of command and support weapons to paint and base.

The large bases are the rifle groups, and have five figures on them The smaller ones are the gun groups, and have three figures — they have a small red bead glued at the rear of the base to let me know at a glance what they are, since my eyes aren't up to distinguishing a 6mm figure's weapon load at tabletop distances any more.

The little 5mm d6 on the middle rifle group base is used to count casualties. My friend Steve got a bunch of them from China for next to nothing. He likes to have the die showing the number of casualties taken, while I prefer to have it showing the base's remaining strength — I don't suppose it matters all that much, but it would probably be a good idea to both be using the same system to avoid confusion.

I like the new H&R infantry sculpts a lot, but alas, my painting doesn't show the detail to best advantage, and it's not helped by my representation of DPM camouflage cloth which tends to befuddle the eye further — surprise, surprise.

Cold War Project — CVR(T)

FV107 Scimitar (30mm RARDEN autocannon)

CVR(T) stands for Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked). It's one of the multi-role, multi-function chassis series so beloved by modern militaries because of the way they streamline the logistics train.

FV101 Scorpion (76mm gun)

Scorpions in NZ service got quite a colourful camo scheme

The Scorpion was bought by the New Zealand army (in pretty small numbers — just a couple of dozen) in 1982.

They replaced our M41 Walker Bulldogs, and have since themselves been replaced by wheeled LAVs.

FV103 Spartan APC

These are the last of the vehicles I have so far for my 1980s BAOR force, so now it's on to the infantry en masse. They're a lot fiddlier to paint and base than the vehicles.

Cold War Project — Spartan w. Milan

FV120 Spartan MCT — Heroics & Ros, 1/300 scale

From Wikipedia:

"FV103 Spartan is a tracked armoured personnel carrier of the British Army. It was developed as the APC variant of the Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) family. The vehicle can carry up to seven personnel, including three crew members. Armed with a single machine gun, it is almost indistinguishable from the FV102 Striker in external appearance. Rather than a general personnel carrier for infantry, the Spartan has been used for moving specialist teams, such as anti-aircraft missile teams. An anti-tank variant of the Spartan has been produced, named FV120 Spartan MCT; this is armed with MILAN anti-tank missiles."

These will also be standing in for FV432 Milan carriers, which I don't have any of (as yet).

Infant Centurions

Centurion Mk.1 — Heroics & Ros, 1/300

I bought these some while ago, for no particular reason except that I like the Centurion.

This is the first production version of the tank, which appeared at the very end of WWII, though it never saw action, and I'm not sure that any even made it over to Germany before the surrender. The Centurion Mark 1 mounted the 17 pounder and a coaxial 20mm Polsten autocannon. It was soon upgraded to the new 20 pounder main gun, and the Polsten replaced with a BESA machine-gun, as the 20mm turned out to be largely pointless.

I'm not sure how old this sculpt from Heroics & Ros is, but they've recently released two new ones of the Centurions Mark V and XIII which, from the photographs I've seen, look as good as models from any manufacturer. I've ordered some, though like these Mark 1s, I have no immediate use for them on the wargames table. I just like Centurions.

Cold War Project — Land Rovers

Here are some light transports for my BAOR force — a bunch of Land Rovers. ½-tonne on the left, ¾-tonne on the right. How much I'll actually use them on the battlefield I don't know, but I guess they'll come in handy for whizzing observer teams and the like about. I'd think Land Rovers might be a bit vulnerable to be operating up the sharp end, but then my teensy-tiny lead men are VERY VERY BRAVE.

As ever, the models are all 1/300 scale, from Heroics & Ros.

Cold War Project — Air Power

Jaguar

These two aircraft complete my air support assets.

Both are 1/300 models from Heroics & Ros. On the left, the Jaguar, and on the right the Tornado.

Regrettably, the Tornado has its wings swept back as it would be in its interceptor role, rather than forward as they would be for ground attack, but never mind.

Note: I'm told by somebody who has actually seen them that Tornados did operate with wings swept back in ground attack. So, that's all right then.

Tornado

Cold War Project — Lynx

Heroics & Ros 1/300 Lynx helicopter

The Gazelle gives me an air recon asset, while this helicopter, the Lynx, provides some ground attack capability in addition.

This model was more involved than the Gazelle, as I had to carve off the moulded-on tail rotor blades so that I could replace them with a clear plastic disc, and I had to tear off the rocket pods and remount them on brass pins because I got them the wrong way around the first time.