Support Elements

A blessedly quiet Saturday evening with the young master out of the house and the mrs. engrossed in a new book allows me to catch up on my blogging. This is a bunch of figures I had finished about 3-4 months ago but with moving the office and going under the knife, I never had time to photograph. These are the support elements of my WWII German platoon.

These are all on-table assets and include a FAO team (minus their Kubelwagen of course), two sustained-fire MG teams, a Panzerschreck element, a sniper element and a 20mm flak gun.

Here is the FAO team, from SHQ Miniatures. The minis were fine, with good sculpting. Essentially they are an officer and a 2-man radio team. I find the use of anything over 50mm mortars as tabletop assets pointless in skirmish games, so these guys can call down fire from the company or battalion 81mm mortars or 75mm guns.

Here is my sniper element. Sniper and spotter come from Elhiem Miniatures. Lovely figs indeed, but I did not do the sniper's face mask much justice. Still, with a proper amount of cover, these guys can provide good forward intel or do harm to the enemy's C&C structure.

My Panzerknacker team is up next. Although panzerfausts were ubiquitous towards the end of the war, Panzerschreck elements provided most of the platoon-level anti-tank fire power for a good portion of it. These are again Elhiem miniatures.

A tripod-mounted MG-42 team. I have two of these beauties, again from Elhiem Miniatures. They come with gunner, loader and observer. I should paint a couple of Pegasus Models Waffen SS as ammo carriers, but it can wait for a bit.

Here is my final support element; a single-barreled 20mm Flak cannon. This comes from SHQ Miniatures and it was quite difficult to put together. The instructions and attachment points were rather vague (or non existent even), so the gun may not be 100% historically accurate. I don't think I'd get another one of these, not with the excellent Zvezda gun out there. It comes also with the ammo trailer, however this has not gotten painted yet.


In my last visit to IKEA, the mrs. found the perfect boxes for me to store my miniatures. I don't remember the exact name, but they are quite large, not expensive (around 5 euros each), fit an awful lot of miniatures, come with a hinged lid, and are stackable. What's not to like?

That's all from not-unbearably hot (for once) Athens. Have a great Saturday night y'all.

Paper Terrain

A few posts back I mentioned the paper models I got for the mrs and her arts class. She never got around giving them to the kids (one can only hope for next year), but I did find myself with several useful bits of terrain.

With the summer forcing me to take things slow at work (seriously, who wants to get their teeth done with this heat?) I have a bit more modeling time in my hands so I tried some of them. I first did them in relatively thin card and they proved very easy to build and quite durable. Dave, the guy who has designed most of the stuff I got, also said you can glue them to Bristol board and create extra-durable buildings. Now, I have no idea what Bristol board is, but I've worked quite a bit with foamcore and I like it. So I resized the Coach House model for 15-18mm figures, printed it on paper, glued it on foamcore and this is the result.It looks pretty good, especially if you consider that the whole thing from start to finish took a bit under an hour (not counting the time it took for the glue to set). The real kicker is that a lot of these paper models come with a variety of layers. Meaning you can have the same building but with a different finish, different doors or windows, weathering and so on. This particular building come in brick, stone and whitewash with beams. So buying a few buildings can help you build a small city or village real quick.
I'll be the first to admit that most scratch-built terrain may look better, but this is a fast and cheap way to get things done. I have 6 or 7 buildings in my stash and with these I can build my small 15mm fantasy village in under a week.
So look into paper terrain. It might help you out with your projects. Have a pleasant evening from hot yet pleasant Athens...