A Necessary Evil

 The annual Pendraken painting competition is on and I've decided the throw my hat in the ring. I've been held up by a dead video card (and its very hard to find a replacement for an 11 year old video card) but finally solved that yesterday. The other issue is that due to the Pendraken forums antique code (and apparently the "new" version is a step up on the old, which truelyterrifies me as to what it used to be like) the pictures have to be hosted somewhere else on the net. This leaves my blog since I don't do social media.

My choice for this year are twofold. First up is a singkle stand, my 15th century Ottoman artillery, which I think are a bit different from the standard Ottoman bombards. The Ottomans would have captured a fair bit of western kit and would have had no problems using it.

My other entry is my Knights of St John army.

Now I get to step back in time and upload these onto the forum using something remarkably similar to old style HTML.

DBA storage

 After the last post I did a bit more thinking about storage and transport solutions. This revolved around a few things like size, metal trays, shape etc. I'd point out at this point thats its quite challenging (with my skills) to make a wooden box thats square and with a door etc that works. So I went back to the style I've developed over the years. Clever plans levelled by lazyness. The tray footprint I came up with was 18cm by 19cm. 18cm wide is a no brainer as its 3 base widths wide. The depth was a bit more challenging and requires a bit of thought. a depth of 18cm is 6 foot stands with no space or 4 cavalry stands with 2cm spare. Extend to 19cm and its 6 foot stands with 1cm spare or 4 cavalry stands now with space for a foot stand as well.

It fits the Ottomans. Theres enough space for an optional stand of Serbian knights if I ever do one.

The knights of St John are a bit easier as theres not as many cavalry stands.

There are several pluses. I have a stockpile of 3mm MDF in my office at work which has been pre-cut to provide shelving for a set of shelves. Fortunately its probably spare as I have not seen it used in 10 years. The second one is that it took me 5 minutes to cut the wood up for 2 trays on the sawbench and another 5 to glue them together.

Sunday night

Since the weekend has been miserable here with the tail end of a tropical cyclone sweaping over the country, I've been inside for a couple of days. while I've mostly been reading theres still been a bit of modeling done.

The HS-129's finally got their trip across the painting bench. Not overly common but thats never stopped a wargamer modeling them (or anything else uncommon). The model is just the standard version but I had to do one of the ones with a PAK-40, which must have been an "interesting" experience firing it from an underpowered aircraft (its the lead one but not overly visible set against a black background)

 I also finished the base for my second P47 unit. 

This completes my current needs for WW2 air support. It feels odd, given that my selected period is 1944-45 that I have as many stands for the germans as I do for everyone else.

 I've also been looking at my DBA armies in terms of how I'm going to store them. Its an interesting mental exercise as you have to think in trems of how they will store, how you transport them (car, backpack etc), where they will be packed together or individually. I've started out by lining them up and also calculating how many linear cm each army takes up. After that its a bit of a juggling act with depths and heights etc. I've come up with a couple of options, including one while typing this.

My current plan is to come up with a standard size which makes life far eaiser cutting the bits out prior to assembly.

mumble weekly update

Another haphazardly timed update. Theres been a few trays across the painting table but little has stuck for more than a couple of days. The one that has stooped is been the slow moving 3mm Spearhead replacement air support project. Just looking at the bench I'm really not sure why I have so many helicopters....

I based up some of the larger Russian toys, and my god they are huge. Heres a Mi-6 Hook next to a couple of Hind D's. The Mi-26 Halo is larger.

I've done a bit of work on some of the bases. The RAF got a bit of a tart up first. Western Europe back roads are simple to make look interesting.

I also did some of the German and Russian eastern front bases, but its very hard to make the eastern europe steppe look interesting (and no I'm not doing snow....yet). Maybe some dead targets might improve things.

As something a bit different I've painted up The Saab Drakens for my future Danes.

Looking like something out of the Thunderbirds, I'm still not sure how the designers managed to convince the Swedish money men to give them the cash to make them.