Keep On Truckin'

This light truck is an old 28mm GZG resin one (now sold by Daemonscape). Originally this was painted twenty odd years ago but whilst I liked the camo scheme, I never liked the rather flat end result so intended one day to repaint it.

However given the success of the 'black dip' I thought I'd try that on the model first which worked very well, adding depth and detail previously hidden. After the dip had dried I matt varnished it then gave the truck a light dust weathering and am pleased with the end result.

I have a pile of old painted and unpainted 28mm GZG resin that may well get dug out soon and given some dip treatment...

ONESS Panzer Grenadiers

Following on from the AmRep A.I. I painted earlier this month I've now painted up twenty German ONESS Panzer Grenadiers to playtest Iron Dog 2136AD with.

The miniatures are Pig Iron Heavy Infantry and whilst I initially purchased them with a view to using them as regular AmRep grunts I felt they had a "European" feel to them so decided to go with the Organisation of North European Sovereign States (ONESS) from the Iron Cow background and Germans specifically from the choice of ONESS nations.

The miniatures are really very nicely sculpted and highly recommended, they required minimal clean up before painting. I picked up Platoon Pack 1 and still have the heavy weapons teams to paint which come as pairs moving and firing. The command pack is superb with an officer, medic, sniper, comms trooper and a wonderful robot servant for the officer! I may well pick up the Infantry Booster pack to flesh out my squads as it contains some different poses and separate heads to allow more variation. I certainly intend to pick up some of the Kolony Militia to use as Neo-Soviets.

Painting was relatively straight forward though the moral of the story is always paint a test piece before you start an entire unit! :-(

I had a relatively simple (largely green) scheme in mind painting the combat fatigues in Vallejo's U.S.A. Uniform (70922) which I thought looked a bit garish but rolled with it painting up the body armour, faces etc. thinking the models would tone down. Having left them for a couple of hours on Friday evening I re-appraised them and then placed them next to some WW2 models - yuk! They looked awful! I'm not sure which "U.S. Uniform" this green is supposed to be but it is nearer Goblin Green than any olive green!! 

I resigned myself to respraying the models and starting from scratch again but decided to see what the officer would look like it I just re-undercoated the fatigues and dry brushed them Reflective Green (70890) - it looked good so I stayed up to 1am on Saturday morning repainting the other 18 troopers (fortunately the robot was ok in its Catachan Green armour!).

I finally finished basing them last night and despite the repaint am really pleased with them and am looking forward to getting some more Pig Iron to paint in the future.

AmRep A.I. Infantry

Taking a break from gluing my fingers to white metal biplanes I finally finished the outstanding Victory Force SAYTR robots. As stated I had decided that the models would be earmarked for battlefield use, namely a set of 15/28mm SF rules which I am (intermittently) working on, using the Iron Cow background and based on the ColdWar: 1983 system which will be called Iron Dog: 2136AD.

The American Republic is a military-industrial dictatorship which controls most of the eastern seaboard of continental America. However due to the fall out from the Second Secessionist War and the ecological disaster that has turned the old Central US into a huge dustbowl, the Republic's population is restricted by the need to match limited food resources. From a military viewpoint this means that the AmRep military has to look at more automated systems than the other world powers and this has resulted in the introduction of robotic infantry - the A.I.'s - onto the 22nd century battlefield.

Whilst I like the Terminator style of Copplestone and em-4 and had intended to use them for the A.I., I was immediately taken with the Victory Force SAYTR's when I saw them on TMP and sent off an order to the States.

My initial reaction upon opening the order when it arrived as less favourable as the models are very flat and had a lot of excess metal from the moulding process that needed careful removal. However this wasn't as bad a job as I initially thought and the very flatness of the designs allowed for a fair degree of variation to be built into the models as they can be quite easily be bent at the knees and elbows and their light weight means one leg can be snipped from the base and adjusted to suggest movement.

I decided on fire teams of four and a platoon of three fire teams and one command team. The command team is slightly less animated and I converted one model into a radio operator with a spare plastic piece from a space marine sprue and a wire aerial.

Overall I'm very pleased with these and how they turned out, I decided on a one colour green scheme with some small national and rank markings (do robots have a rank structure?). I just need to find some suitable human grunts to support them - umm... that Pig Iron range looks really nice...