Castaway Arts Mahdists

 I painted up a dozen Castaway Arts Mahdists last night and this morning using the same techniques as with the Perry ones in my previous post.

These are some of the earliest figures in the range, and I have come to really appreciate how well-researched they are. If anything they were easier to paint than the Perrys -  although that may be because I now have the style of painting worked out... certainly they were easier to stick together!

Perry Mahdists

The Mahdi wants you!

I have just assembled and painted my first batch of 20 Perry Miniatures Mahdists. From start to finish they probably took about 3 and a half hours to do over a few days using speed-painting techniques.

These are pretty nice miniatures that assemble quite easily. A little careful positioning and most of the joins where the plastic arms meet the plastic shoulders, especially if you let a little of the glue squidge out to act as filler.

Opening the box it's apparrent that they have tried to do quite a lot with the miniatures. They are trying to give you the option of early and later Beja, Kordofani and Nile Arabs and even the early Ansar. In my opinion they have tried to cover a few too many bases with the one set. However, you can do worse than build them up as as your Kordofani Rebels or Nile Arabs. Perhaps as early Beja, although to my eye, some of them will be a little too well-dressed as the latter.

That being said, they suit my purposes admirably and will be please to field a horde of 2-300 of them. They respond well to my speed painting. This involves being undercoated with a can of the Army Painter Skeleton Bone coloured rattle-can paint. I then damp-brush highlight this up to some thing approaching white, not being at all careful with the brush. Then I wash the flesh areas with a mix of heavily watered yellow-brown that I call "Arab Skin". Spearchafts and rifles get a thinnish coat of yellow ochre. When all that's dry, everything (and I mean everything) gets a wash of gryphonne sepia. Then the metal bits get a coat of black, then blades get a quick wipe with boltgun metal.

Persnickety details get done, mostly in brown and brass. Then with a fairly dry brush, I go over the lot and brighten up some of the whites.

Gloss varnish and the job's a good 'un.

Egyptians

 Today (instead of actually having a game - rolls eyes!) I thought I might take the time to see how much table (or floor) space a TSaTF battalion might take up.

This is four units, each of 20 figures. Artillery outside the square with a few skirmishers out to screen the crews.

The ruler is scaled in centimetres.

The bases of pack animals gives an idea of the effect I want to acheive.

Now I just need to fix the basing up!

Additionally, I've re-read my Snook and gleaned the following figures for the Khartoum
Garrison:

As of the 22nd of November, Gordon had the following troops in the garrison:

1421 Egyptian Regulars
2316 Sudanese regulars
1906 Bashi Buzuks
2330 Sha'iq'a Irregulars
692 Armed Citizens
Additionally, there were 12 guns on the lines, another 11 in the steamers as
well as 2 Krupp 20-pounders. Gordon states in his journals he had 2-3 "French
Mitrailleuses".

To that date also, Gordon notes the garrison has suffered 1800-1900 fatal
casualties. 800 of those are from the Sudanese troops. At the start of the seige
then, the garrison of Khartoum is in the region of about 10,500 men.

Note that most of the Egyptians are either at Fort Omdurman or on the steamers.

As to breaking them down for wargaming purposes, I've chosen a scale of 40:1 and
distributed the remaining 1,100 casualties roughly proportionately, thus:

40 Egyptian Regulars
80 Sudanese regulars
60 Bashi Buzuks
60 Sha'iq'a Irregulars
20 Armed Citizens

I need to check a little firther to see what proportion of the Bashi Buzuks may
have been mounted, if only to see how far their mounts might be used to eke out
the food supply...

This gives us a total of 260 figures which, if you multiply it back out, comes
to 10,400. So not too bad an approximation of the garrison.

At the same ratio, we'd need to find a maximum of 1200 Mahdists (equating to
50,000 of the Mahdi's army) at their peak strength. This number might be
expected to reduce as fort garrisons are detatched.

Any thoughts or comments?

Plans, plans, plans

It's been more or less decided. We are heading off for the Soodan.

I am am member of a loose group of gamers and megalomaniacs who get together twice a year at CanCon and now WinterCon to put on a massive wargame of one sort or another.

We did a large 55 Days game at WinterCon this year and will follow up with it's big brother at CanCon over the Australia Day long weekend.

Next year's CanCon will be set in the Sudan and it looks (not to put too fine a point on it) MASSIVE.

Ideas being kicked around are a three-days' long campaign involving:

The River Column
The Desert Column
The Seige of Khartoum

or

All three!

At the moment, all's to play for but my money's on the "all three" option.

So the preliminary work involves looking at the historical orbats and then juggling figure numbers to get appropriate unit sizes - if you want bit briish Units, you need 4-8 times as many Mahdists and we are wanting 200 or more British and a similar number of Egyptians in Khartoum! 1500 or more Mahdists might do it. Even with some Gilderesque tricks, that's still a formidable number of troops. Oddly though, if enough of us pitch in, our existing collections will take us most of the way there (especially for the British) and well, there are always the Perry Mahdists in plastic...

Then there is the planning. How are we going to put on the game? What sort of game will it be? For myself, I'd like to see a co-operative game with the players all on the one side (which one :^)) with the Mahdists either run by the Umpire or (another Gilder touch) some species of reaction table. Then there are the rules - probably home-baked and based on the 55 Days ruleset we've written. And the terrain...

Where's MS Project when you need it?

Huzzah for the Hussars

Hussars

Wot I did this week gone by.

Horses and riders by Conoisseur - almost mandatory when one rides forth into the Sudan. Bases by Litko.

With regard to my painting, this was mostly acrylic with ink washes on a white undercoat. Paints for the most part GW and Vallejo. The khaki was, I think, Lifecolour. There's a little lining in here and there (helmets, edges of belts and so on) in a very dark brown. this looks better than black on this sort of palette of colours to my eye.

Next I'll be working on some more Egyptian Infantry and then we'll get stuck into those 21st Lancers.

Egyptian Troops

Fellah Infanty in campaign dress

 Not much to report this week, just the seven figures in the pictures. They are Castaway Arts from the "Colonial Egyptian" range.

Egyptian Infanty in field uniform

Excellent figures these, very nice anatomy and meticulously researched. All I could hope for would be a little more variety in the posing of the campaign dress infantry and perhaps a few head variants for the more regularly-dressed chaps to reflect the variety that seems to have been in use in the field. Still, that ought not be beyond the skills of the average modeller with a dab of greenstuff.

The figures themselves are beautifully easy to paint. I just spray them with Rrmy Painter Bleached Bone, ink-wash then then dry-brush up to pure white. Jobs done!

Now, Gerry, how about some gunners?

Heckenfeur

Or:

The disorganised ramblings of a tired mind.

A few nice toys bumped their way into random corners of the garden this week, courtesy of Australia Posts' parcel delivery service. I think I am on first name trems with most of their drivers.

Among them were sufficient Castaway Arts Egyptian Infantry to flesh out a fourth TSaTF unit - I'm intending to use them as skirmishers who'll pop in and out of the square at need. lovely clean castings as ever and sterling service as usual from Mr Webb.

Also on the pile are some lovely Willie 21st Lancers. These castings are rather better than some I have had from Tradition Scandinavia in the past, so I'm hopeful for the rest of their part in my Colonial plans! So, 16 of those, but I will build the unit up to 24 or so castings. The idea is to build a "dioramic" unit which when laid out will represent the 21st's charge at Omdurman. I'm wanting to get a lot of movement into the unit through careful figure selection - the horses will play a big part here - I'll be using either Spencer Smith "Classic" range horses with a few extras bought in from the Tradition range. Expect the odd  Ansar to share the bases with them! That's the plan. Let us hope the execution is up to it!

What else? I bought a pair of Le Creusot Long Toms fm the TVAG website. Part of the Richard Houston range of guns, I snapped them up the moment I saw them and have an eye on their 4.7", 3" and Pom-Poms. It's a bit crude in places  - especially around the wheels, but nopthing that can't be overlooked. I'm thinking of getting a bunch of the Willie Boers and with a little arm-bending, produce something like this:

Again, that's the plan - the proof will as ever be in the execution.

All of this leads me by circituous means to the following observations:

Got many grand plans that have led you into a severe case of overreach recently? I'm looking especially hard at YOU, Imagi-nations! Here's the life-cycle - The blog is announced with a fanfare on the OSW site or on TMP. It has a span of a few weeks or months or a year as one company of the 16-regiment, Charge!-styled army is painted, photographed, named (with many a ponderous pun) and abandoned as it all suddenly seems too hard. The bubble bursts and the blog disappears.

I fear my own version of overreach. I call it Grand Designs gone wrong. I fear I may be rather prone to this megalomaniacal  tendency. Too may "big" projects on the go at the same time = too little appreciable progress on any one of them. Stagnation, frustration... you get where I am going here.

My other observation. why is it that we feel so constrained by "historicity" in some periods, and so little by it in others? Do we feel constrained by it at all? I certainly have no compunction whatsoever with regard to my Duchy of Alzheim (ahem, Bavarian) and Imperial (ahem, Austrian) armies, yet I do with my FIW armies. I feel free to mingle units from different battles and even different campaigns in my colonial forces, yet might feel the need to be rather more rigid were I ever to get into Napoleonics. Maybe it's what we have fed back to us by the hobby-at-large. Maybe it's what we feel the need to do to be taken seriously by other gamers? Maybe it's just that Grant and Gilder "allowed" us to take things more lightly in these periods - certainly I've been happy to take my queue from them.

I think an interesting discussion might be had on the topic.

What do you think?

PS Glen Moray Takes Shape

Who was that horseman riding by..?

PS Glen Moray's decks taking shape with a lamination of balsa over the foamcore basis structure.

I've scribed the planking in with a black biro and started assembling the desk-houses. Ii'm debating whether to add some decorative pillars to support the upper deck. What I'm really doing is putting off trying to build the paddle-wheel houses.

I like how the funnel turned out. I'll eventually guy it up as was done with the real thing.

Ker-chunka-chunka-chunka

Heading for the Heart of Darkness?

 I dunno, what do you reckon?

Ker-chunka-chunka-chunka

I'm thinking, PS Foamcore, PS Conrad. PS Glen Moray. Something like that. Next up, balsa-cladding the decks and plank scribing.

From the Zareba...

As though on a Field Day, the Highlanders march into the Zareba

I stop, my glass half-raised to my lips.

Pipes?

Surely not.

The improbably green sward

It is! Oh, they've come! Hurrah for the Highlanders and Hurrah! for the Glen Moray!

Going Forth Slowly

Evening is drawing down.

The screw gun and it's crew are ready, at last. It may be just in time; in truth it's all we have for now.

Just beyond the range of our fire the enemy flit, black shadows in the dusky gloom. Would that more of the Highlanders were ready, but there was just not the time. Still if we hold out tonight, there may be hope for the morning.

We must hold to our courage and the Glen Moray.

LATER: Hist..! Hark..! Is that the sound of pipes?

LATER YET STILL: ...and the sound of a steamer?

Going forth again - Into the Sudan

Outside the rain beats down, drops snaking unhurried down the pane. It has been a long and wet winter this time around.

I shudder at the sudden chill and reach for the tumbler of Glen Moray and water beside me. It warms me a little, the rich, oily aroma seems everywhere.

Can I do this again? I look to Snook for inspiration, but all I see is him cocking one at Gladstone over 130 years' distance in time and an infinity in understanding.

Featherstone then, and Barthorp. Connoisseur, Willie and a touch of Stadden where I can for the horseflesh. Yes. The old boys will do it. The old gang.

I am stirred a little. There are those old Connoisseur Highlanders in a box somewhere. I think I know where.

Like the waves, I advance a little more with each attempt.

I can do it.

Bergonzoli's Caravan III

The Winnebago of 1941

Note the nifty Centauro Logo on the door.

She is-a my home away from home!

All done at last. This was a very happy project that went ahead with no real problems and painted without a hitch. Even the experiment with "chipping" went reasonably well.

Ahh, General Bergonzoli, your caravan will always have a special place in my heart.

Bergonzoli's Caravan II

Not on the Russian Front

All bits built, undercoated and test fitted together. Painting next. I've been painting my Italian vehicles with a mix of Vallejo Ochre with a dash of green thrown in as a base coat. This gets followed up with a sepia wash, another heavy over brush of the base colour then a couple of dry-brushed layers of highlighting. on top of this goes a very light dry-brush of dark green to represent the original colour of the vehicle revealed when the sandy coat starts to wear off.

Conversion's a good 'un!

Bergonzoli's Caravan

I approve of this conversion.

Well, here we all are then. Going on with my minor obsession with the North African Campaign at the moment, I went a bit mad on eBay and bought (at outrageous prices) both "Monty's Caravan" in it's original Matchbox box and the insanely pricey Italeri 90mm dual purpose gun on the Lancia 3RO Chassis.

The raw materials.

The idea is to create a command vehicle for my Italians. It's mentioned in the Matchbox instructions that the caravan body originally belonged to Annibale "barba elettrica" Bergonzoli, but was captured by a flying column of 7th Armoured Division in February 1941 after Beda Fromm. From (no pun) there it went to an HQ ordanance depot in Egypt where it was demounted from it's Lancia 3R0 chassis and popped onto a Leyland Retreiver 4x6.

I intend to reverse that conversion with one of my own!

Having, as I said before, spent a huge sum on these two kits I was more than a little nervous at the prospect of fit.

Gingerly mating the chassis with the floor. Easy, easy does it...

But all's well so far.

Here's one I prepared earlier.

You may note that the van body test fitted has a spider web in the rear window. It's another I meant as a straight out-of-the-box build that got set aside "some time ago".

Mock not the mock-up.

And here we are in full mock-up mode with all the major bits test-fitted. I might change out those rear mud-flapd for fully round mud-guards from one of the Airfix RAF sets. As I build the new caravan body, I will blank off the windows which gives a better look than just the bare, undetailed interior. I suppose for the sake of consistency that I ought to do the same to the cab.
 

Rapid Fire French Light Tank Battalion

I've just been doing a bit of back-of-the-envelope RF! figuring to stick together a battalion of French Renault FT tanks mostly just because I like the HaT kits. So without further ado:

French Light Tank Battalion 1918, for Rapid Fire
Bn HQ:

1 Radio Tank*

3 Companies, with:

2 Gun Tanks and 1 MG Tank

Battalion Reserve:

5 MG Tanks **

*May replace with Gun Tank as the Radio Tanks did not seem to last very long!

** If desired, add an extra MG Tank to each Company. An earlier organisation decentralised the reserve to the company level.
This organisation represents a full strength battalion. Attrition rates were high due to mechanical and terrain issues. It was not unisual for a Battalion to lose 50% of it's strength within a day or so of going into action. In this case, replace two companies' complement with MG Tanks and delete the

Reserve Company.

Source is Zaloga's book on WW1 French tanks. The errors of interpretation remain entirely my own!
Queries criticisms or comments?

Italian Artillery

I just finished painting the crews for some of my Italian Artillery. The guns themselves are Italeri 149mm - only a dozen made it to North Africa, but...
The gunners are those which came with the kit - only a few so far, but the rest are ready to go. In the background are another half-dozen by Mirliton to man in turn with some Eritrean Ascarii a 65mm infantry gun which I bought recently.

More news as it comes to hand... Afrika Korps recce vehilcles in production...

Rose Prestige Libyan Spearman

Glorious.

Just a small nod of appreciatuion to Garrison Miniatures for keeping some lovely old figure lines going. 30mm high, beautifully proportioned and extremely well-hung.

What more could you want?

 These will be joining my Eureka Myceneans as a 24-figure-strong unit of allied skirmishers.

Painting Challenge

As has been said elsewhere, there is nothing quite like a little challenge (no pressure) among friends to get the motor running. Here is the part where I confess all. Here is the part where I show the depth of my straying.

Mirliton Italian infantry. Almost two companies' worth for Rapid Fire.

I had committed. Committed. Yes, committed. Committed to painting two regiments of Spencer Smith foot and another two of horse.

47mm ATG and crew - yet to be based, Fiat Revelli MMG and a command group. Ought that be "Gruppo"? O dio mio.

Enjoy the pictures...

Ready To Roll Italian Fiat Trucks

Oh the shame.

Italeri quick build Semovente and slow-build(!) M13/40

The shame of it all.

From the left - Airfix PzKw IV F1, Armourfast PzKw III J and an elderly Matchbox PzKw II

Hanging my head here, people.

Airfix Opels - the one on the left will be a 20mm FLAK38 carrier. Sort of a 1942 Technical. They are in Africa after all...

Quite embarrassed.

Eureka Mycenean Charioteers

Nothing more to say really, is there.

Spearmen - first file of the phalanx!

Nup.

The rest of the gang. All by Eureka.

What I did on the Long weekend

 The lads put on our "55 Days" test game at WinterCon in Canberra.

 The Hanlin Library is taken (then later lost) by the Boxers.

 The British Legation.

 Boxers attempt an assault on the wall of the British Legation.

 US Marines man the outer defenses. Civilians at the barricades.

 The crew. I'm the one drining coffee for the camera.

 The Tigermen spring into action!

Targets!

The miracle that is Photoshop.