Thursday, April 12, 2007

A box of tin from America has arrived! Hurrah!

Oh for joy! at last my RSM order has battled its’ way through shoals of Easter mail to land on my doorstep.

So excited was I at this advent that I plucked out, cleaned and primed the dozen galloping horses that will be the mounts for the Kurfurstin Dragoon regiment. Keeping in mind that I have now painted four of this regiment, scrounged up an officer and trumpeter, as well as this additional dozen I am on my way to having about a squadron and a half of troopers – a very satisfactory stare of affairs I think. I like the fact that this sort of regiment size (say 36-38 figures) will give my horse regiments some sort of battlefield parity with my Infantry. Thus they won’t be withering away too quickly under the impact of a battalion volley.

I ought to have the horses painted to completion by tonight, I hope and then be ready to make a start on the troopers.

I am contemplating doing a skirmish line of a squadrons’ worth of dismounted Dragoons. I was going to use some of the RSM dismounted dragoons, but they are not quite to my taste and I am wondering whether to use some Austrian infantry and Grenadiers in the advancing pose and do some small amount of modification to their leg-ware to indicate boots rather than gaiters. I will be putting a few horses on two bases to represent the horses they dismounted troops leave behind – I’ll probably have to sculpt saddlery onto them.

Equal cause for excitement was the discovery of some sample Ottoman Turks who I thought might make good “early Croats”. I think that, after examining them closely, that they will make fine wild men from the fringes. I’m thinking here especially of plate ‘A’ in the Osprey on Austria’s Frontier Troops (1740-1796) and some early images of some few Serbian troops of the earliest part of the era.

5 comments:

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said...

That's exciting news Greg! Please share a photo or two of your new dragoon horses when they're all finished.

Best Regards,

Stokes

marinergrim said...

There's not much to beat receivin a long awaited parcel of toys is thre? Unless of course it is an UNEXPECTED parcel of toys!!

Snickering Corpses said...

That's great news. It seems RSM95 recruits are deploying all over the place. Some pictures of the unpainted figures would not be remiss either. Stokes and Jeff made me post some of my newly received Musketeers and Grenadiers after all.

Bluebear Jeff said...

Could you possibly post a picture of a Dismounted Dragoon figure? I've toyed with the idea of getting some and would like to see what they look like.

Or, if you don't want to post it, you could email it to me at bluebear@uniserve.com


-- Jeff

Bloggerator said...

Hi Jeff,

I've a mini photo shoot on this evening; I'll get it done then and posted tomorrow morning my time. I have a painted one that can be photographed. I think there are actually two variants of the one figure - one Austrian and one Prussian. Pretty much the same base figure, though.

Basically though the figure is in the standing firing pose. I'm a little iffy about it because the particular sculpt looks a little "neckless" to me and the musket thins out dramatically from about halfway along the barrel.

Snickeringcorpses - I find that unpainted metal does not photograph well, sadly. It's painted - or at least undercoated - here at the Duchy!

Regards,

Greg