Sunday, November 29, 2020

The March Toward 3mm War Continues

I managed to get a little hobby time in during Thanksgiving break. I wanted to clean off my bench, at least in terms of figures strewn across the table, so I went back and forth between 15mm fantasy and 1/600 stuff. Its probably been a year now, but I bought a whole mess of 1/600 AFV and infantry from Just Jack. He was running an pretty cool ImagiNation campaign with his son, but it didn't seem to last long. He sold them plus a bunch of WWII minis of the same scale. I've been slowly swapping out the stands to fit in with mine. However, in the spirit of "I want to play a game before I die," I left a bunch on their original stands and flocked some of the ones that still need flocking.

A side track to the side track of my original Gambusia campaign is that the nation of Aquor-Ornur is planning to attack an ally of Lavonia, Symbalia. If you read that original post, they have a tiny army but is funded by and large by the USA. Well, two things, first it got transplanted to the world of Bovatopia and second, its army and airforce grew a lot.

MBTs
They now have three armored battalions. Their front line tanks are the M48A5 sporting a 105mm gun. In the other two battalions are M47 and Sherman Fireflies. 

M48A5 with Sherman Fireflies behind them


APCs
Their main APCs are M1A3 halftracks. I am in the process of painting up some M113s but have not finished them. 


Artillery and Fire Support
The main artillery is some sort of 150 or 155mm field howitzers. I am not sure what they are. They don't seem to be US 155mm howitzers. But I'm not going to be picky. Most rules are not overly finnicky on the type of gun, more on the caliber and type of ammo. 

Just Jack's campaign was over a period time: same nations, different time periods in terms of hardware. So, in addition to the halftracks and the Fireflies, there are a lot of US tank destroyers of WWII vintage. Most of them are M18 Hellcats and a few M10 Wolverines. For some reason, I never liked the Hellcat, but I've got them so, I plan to use them. You can also see in the picture below a towed Bofors 40mm AA gun and a few random trucks.



Attack Helicopters
These weren't a part of Just Jack's collection. I went back and forth between just how advanced A-O's air support would be. I finally on more high tech to offset the low tech ground units. These are actually Chinese Z-10 attack helicopters, but all of these modern attack helicopter look pretty much the same, particularly at 1/600 scale. So, they are supposed to be the Agusta A129 Mangusta. I have had back luck trying to attach the clear rotors that are provided with the models, so I plan to cut out some clear plastic disks and use those.



Source: Aldo Bidini - commons file, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69240249

Infantry
I didn't take any photos of infantry other than the one below. It seems to be a combo heavy weapons-ATGM team. Maybe the machine gunners are supposed to be part of the ATGM team? I have not figured out what the infantry have for LAWs, but I do like these for infantry ATGMs. It might be a Javelin or Dragon, but I'm going to use it as an Israeli Spike MR or LR. Again, at that scale, it can be anything you want it to be.


Source: Natan Flayer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5306990

Bonus!
I bought a set of these off of Shapeways. I don't remember who the vendor was. They are the Russian VPK-39273 Volk-3 6x6 APC armed with a 120mm rifled mortar, the 2B17 Nona-K. They are incorporated into the mighty Bovatopian army as much needed artillery support.


Source: Armyrecognition.com January 2014