New Beginnings

Hello,
as you might know I recently moved to a new place. That was the main reason why I haven't done a lot of hobby stuff lately, but now that we are settled in to our new home I have to sort out my hobby room!

(Well, I have to share it with the wife's sewing machine and knitting supplies, but that's a small price to pay, isn't it?)

I thought that would be a good opportunity to show some of my collection, although very little of it is actually finished.

Let's start with some 6mm Cold War Commander armies, i.e. Syrians, British Army of the Rhine and IDF:

Next, most of my Bolt Action armies: 8th Army, Early War Soviets, Hungarians and Late War Germans

 As you can see there is a lot to do, I need to paint/repair a lot of the 8th Army vehicles, and the Soviets should get some reinforcements soon since we are going to have a big Bolt Action battle again at the start of December. In the background you can just make out a GAZ AA, Komsomolet and some Black Tree Design infantry.
Well, and the Hungarians and Germans are not even half painted... One day I will finish the 44M TAS and Rohamloeveg in the fictitious ambush camo pattern I want.

I also plan to venture into 1/35th territory:

I love IDF armor, and the Meng Production figures are awesome! I hope I won't get too annoyed by the tracks with multiple pieces per link...

I also decided to expand my 6mm Germans for Blitzkrieg Commander:

I guess a fine drill and some steel wire are in demand to fix these barrels... Anyway, I am planning to paint those units and some infantry as part of a P500 on the German Tabletopwelt forum. This is a nifty little event they have every year in which you pledge to paint a full army with each 500 points block being finished in 6 weeks. It's a great way to get feedback and motivation, and I think this kind of "pressure" is very good to get me doing something. And since one of those Jagdtigers is already worth 280 points, I also decided to double the points per block to 1000. More about this project soon, it starts on November 1st!

Review - Heer46 Russian B-4 Howitzer

Time flies when you have a real job to do - my apologies for the long gap between posts...

Anyway, today I have a look at Heer46's massive B-4 howitzer.

The 203mm howiter M1931 B-4, nicknamed Stalin's sledgehammer, represents the heaviest artillery used by the Red Army in significant numbers.It entered service in 1933 and was used as division and corps artillery until the 1950s. During this time the "Bolshevik" factory produced over 800 of these guns. It was mounted on wheeled or tracked carriages, both without their own engine. Overall weight was close to 20 tons with an overall length of 9.3 m. 15 men were needed to achieve a nominal rate of fire of 1 round per minute. Every shell contained 100 kg of high explosives and had a range of 18 km.

The Heer46 kit comes in just 7 parts and assembly is pretty straight forward. No additional work beside a good scrub with soap water  was needed and everything can be put together easily with superglue.

The only major issue I have with the kit is that it can only be build in transport position. It is not possible to elevate the barrel and the tail is just one piece.

There is also no crew available, so I've built mine out of Warlord Games's Soviet Infantry (Winter) box.

Here are some pictures of the partially painted version (together with partially painted crew of 5):

And last but not least, a size comparison with the T-26:

Taken together, the B-4 is a nice model and a good addition to every Soviet army. It is definitely exotic and an eye-catcher, and I can't remember how many times I was asked if that is a 40K gun ;)
Anyway, an option to build it in firing position would be great.
The prize is 23.5€ (~ 26 US-$ or £20), which is okay considering that it comes from a small company and is the only way I know to get this particular gun.

Next time (and hopefully not again a full 4 weeks in the future) I will have a look at some infantry sets I recently received from Black Tree Designs.

Review - Baker Company T26 "A" & "B"

Today I take a closer look at the T26 "A" and T26 "B" from Baker Company. As far as I can tell they are not in production at the moment, I got them as part of the hapless Winter War Kickstarter (still waiting for most of my stuff after just 3 years...).

The T26 was one of the many "improved" Vickers 6-ton which popped up all across Europe in the 1930s - in reality, most of them were blatant local copies of the original design. The T26 came in two main flavors, single turret with 37mm or 45mm gun (sometimes called "B") and twin-turret with wtwo machine guns (variant "A"). There were some attempts to build versions armed with 76mm artillery pieces, but those didn't develop past prototype stage. Hundreds of T26 were shipped to support the Republicans, and a couple were used at Khalkin Gol.
Large numbers were used during the Winter War against Finland, were the T26 proved to be already obsolete. The Finnish anti-tank rifles couldd penetrate its armor at decent ranges and the tank units were poorly coordinated with infantry which led to avoidable losses.
When the German invasion began they faced thousands of T26, who were in most places slaughtered by Panzer III and IVs, but especially by the Luftwaffe. Several hundred were lost in the first months of Operation Barbarossa.
Although basically already outdated at the start of the war, they were used until 1945 against the Japanese in Manchuria and at the Leningrad front.

The Baker Company models are not very high quality. Details are sufficient, but the material is rather brittle (this might be partly due to a couple of years in storage, too) and prone to break. Their is also quite a lot of excess material on the back of the tracks that impairs fitting. In other spots it looks like miscast surfaces were sanded down rather roughly.

The base platee for teh twin turrets was pretty contorted, but due to its thinness I could fix that with some hot water. Nevertheless, the hull for this versions has bolts on the top which need to be removed to make the base fit - I don't know why that was designed in this way...

The single turret variant suffers from the same deficiencies:

Assembled they son't look too bad, but you can see the amount of filler that was necessary:

Those are rather small vehicles:

I'm a bit torn on these ones. On one hand, they are just not nice-looking models and have their share of issues. On the other hand, I got them like really, really cheap and they do look the part once they are assembled and painted.
To me, it comes down to price, which I cannot judge because they are not available at the moment (and most likely never will be again). During the Kickstarter they were £22, which is obviously a joke when you can get a supposedly much better quality T26 for less from Warlord Games...
Yeah, so if you ever come across one of those, either pick it up really cheap or giv it a pass - there is  a lot of nicer stuff out there.

PS: We played our Barbarossa event last Saturday and it was a blast - I only have pictures from my phone but I will post them in the next days. And as soon as I can find my camera I'll write the review of the much nicer and cooler Heer46 B-4 howitzer!

PPS: I just ordered a Komsomolets armored tractor and a Zis 6 truck :D

Review - Warlord Games BA-6 Armored Car

The Broneavtomobil 6, or BA-6, was a slightly upgraded version of the BA-3 armored car. It is based on the three-axle GAZ-AAA chassis and entered service in 1936. The BA-6 featured the same turret as the BT-5 and T-26 m 1933, a conical design housing a 45mm 20-K anti-tank gun and a co-axial 7.65 mm DT machine gun. A second machine gun was mounted at the front. The design was severely under motorized with a meager 40 hp engine for a 5ton vehicle, and it lacked maneuverability off-road. Top speed (55 km/h) and operational range (200 km) were also significantly less than those of its German counterparts.

It was used in the Spanish Civil War and served in the early Soviet campaigns of WW2 against the Japanese and Finns. The BA-6 was still in used when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, but it was quickly replaced by the T-60 and T-70 tanks.

The Warlord Games kit comes as a combination of resin hull and turret and metal parts. I was slightly concerned about that because it can sometimes cause trouble during assembly. Luckily,  Warlord Games used a lot of pegs and holes and building the vehicle was quite enjoyable.

The details are very good, and both resin and metal parts are casts in good quality. As always, the exact alignment of the wheels is a bit tricky, but I have seen worse. The only issue was the axle for the two spare tires - it is too short...

Overall a kit that satisfies all expectations. My only minor criticism is the lack of any extras like stowage, crew or decals, but those are rarely included in this type of model (although I think that is what turns a good kit into a great one).

 

The Warlord Games BA-6 is 8,6 cm long, 4,8 cm high and 4,2 cm wide,  which corresponds to 4,8 m, 2,7m and 2,4m, respectively. This is reasonably close to the size of the original (length 4.65m, height 2.2m, width 2.1m).

All in all, the BA-6 is a kit from the upper third of the scale. It is easy to build, well detailed and a good representation of the original.

For the Motherland (Part 1)

Hello everybody, sadly I only have time for a very quick update.
Here are some of the miniatures for my newest project, an early war Soviet army for the Operation Barbarossa event our wargaming club is organising.

The T-26s and infantry are from Baker Company, the BA-6 is from Warlord Games.
I'm planning to turn the biplane into a mission objective for the Top Secret mission.

I hope I can put up the full reviews soon!