1st Armored Division: Royal Guard Cuirassiers

Whereas I have been putting up posts of buildings and such for my Gambusian campaign, I have not posted any new pictures of the combatants involved in quite awhile. I am going to try to post more pictures of the various microarmor I have painted up and are awaiting battle. I will post them as units when possible.

First up is Southern Chalupastan's 1st Royal Guard Cuirassiers battalion. There isn't a 2nd Royal Guard Cuirassiers, however, its good to number your battalions. They belong to the 1st Armored division. The 1st Armored Division is Chalupastan’s elite fighting unit. The most modern weapons and equipment are given to this division. Recruits are picked from only the most loyal Chalupastani subjects. As a way to maintain a high espree des corps, some of the battalions formally go by older cavalry regiment names.

The1st Royal Guard Cuirassiers is armed with the Brazilian EE-T2 Osorio tank. A brief history for a tank with a brief history can be found here: Wikipedia. Sadly, no one ever bought it, not even the Brazilian Army. Even though it never went much beyond the prototype stage, it lives on in the arsenals of Southern Chalupastan. The real reason is because Scotia Grendel sells them, and I thought, "these are cool." I bought a bunch without knowing that there isn't a whole lot of stats that can be gleaned out there concerning them particularly relating to their armor. But, they are different, and different is good. The back story is that Southern Chalupastan has always had a good relationship with Brazil, and have purchased a number of arms from them. They needed a MBT upgrade from their M-48s. The Osorio seems to have a good punch with its French GIAT G1 120-mm smoothbore gun and more modern composite armor than the older tanks. When it comes time to use them, I will have to make up their armor stats.

The 1st Royal Guard Cuirassiers lined up for inspection

For all my AFVs, those with radio antennae and/or tank commanders are considered HQ tanks. Here are some close ups of the HQ Osorios:

"Look Bob, there's something on the road! Shoot it!"

"Its quiet out there...too quiet."

15mm Sci-Fi Small Dwelling

I slapped together a small dwelling for my sci-fi adventures in Yogurt Town.

I used the container from a Kraft Foods Lunchable. It is made from styrene, so plastic modelling glue works well on it. One lunchable will give about three separate containers once you cut them out. The door was cast from Durham's Water Putty and featured in a  previous post. The air conditioning unit, or whatever it is on the roof is a juice bottle lid. I made the poorly-squared window by cutting out the frame from sheet styrene and then inserting a piece of plastic embroidery mesh for the bars of the window. I couldn't decide what to paint the dwelling, so I just did it in grey. I have not decided on whether or not to base it. One thing about the lunchable container is that its walls are very thin. It is easy to move around on the gaming table, and anything you glue on it may pop off if the walls are flexed. So before I started on the outside, I filled the container with Durham's Water Putty. It took a few days because I did it in layers. To reduce the amount of putty I needed, I waded up some aluminum foil into a ball and stuck it in before filling it up with the putty. When dried, the walls no longer flexed and it is heavy enough to stay put on the gaming table.

Interesting Introspection

Danjou's Hand, over at his blog Tabletop Diversions has a good, introspective post on what I often ponder, especially in light of where I am at in life: link
 Its worth checking out.

Border Crossing Part 3: Gate House Completed

Sorry for the really bad photos, but I was in a rush:

The guard house and sandbags are all out of polymer clay. Keeping with Gambusian architecture, the roof looks like a lot like an acorn. But wait! Its not! I couldn't find a small enough acorn cap that was intact, so I made it out of polymer clay.

Don't be fooled by any tutorial that tells you sandbags are easy to make. I never glued my figures together so much as I have making those sandbags.  I swear, I will never do sandbags again! Compared to the those on the watchtower made by C-in-C, they are way over scale. But I couldn't seem to make them any smaller using polymer clay. 

The gate is made out of various pieces of styrene plastic. I made it so it will raise and lower.

Now I am one step closer to fighting battles between Northern and Southern Chalupistan.

Quick Update

Again, no pictures (booo!!!). July disappeared pretty fast, and August looks to be the same. Last week, I was visiting family in Chicagoland. I got rid of....I mean sent my Aunt-in-Law and her granddaughter back home to China via United Airlines. My main purpose of the trip was to go through all of my stuff that is still at my mother's house.

I sold off my collection of sci-fi books, and brought back a lot of board games. I did manage to play a game of Avalon Hill's Richthofen's War with my daughter and two nephews. It was a little too complex for my daughter and younger nephew, but it managed to be a fun game. It was an all-German free-for-all. My older nephew and I took rather mediocre planes, whereas my daughter and younger nephew got Fokker D-7s, which is the best plane in the game. Guess who one?

I also found a few old rule books. One of was GDW's System 7 Napoleonics. For two years, I went to Illinois State University, which was in Normal, Illinois. Normal was also home of Games Design Workshop. Back in the day, you could go to their office and buy their rules. I also bought the counters that went with them, but it seems like I lost them long ago. I also found Air Power by Lou Zocchi. As I recall, I tried it a few times and then ended up concatenating it with Fletcher Pratt's Naval rules to improve the air part of my naval games. 

Finally, I started to go through my father's things, namely his woodworking tools. My mother told me to take whatever I wanted, but when I stood there in his workshop, I felt like I didn't want to disturb anything; I didn't want to remove anything. Except for the extra dust, it looked like it was ready to be used at any moment. Mortality really hit home when I saw that there were some projects still left at various stages of completion. Our creations are our legacy, but time is too short to complete all the things we want to do.