Very Tiny Wars

Now that I'm happily toiling away with 3mm, these little gems will take on a new life. They are by Battlefield Terrain Concepts, which morphed into a couple of different companies (Campaign Architecture, among others) and then went belly-up. I recall that they were in a very odd scale; 1/450 or 1/500, I believe. So, I've dusted them off and mounted them on steel bases and begun the process of texturing and painting them. They seem to fit with 1/600 well enough to not look horribly out of place. So, here are the finds: a boarding house or small hotel

A manor house

Another hotel or inn

A small church

A small village inn

A well-to-do farmhouse

And a mill

They are mostly German half-timbered buildings, except for the thatch-roofed mill and the stone manor house, both of which look distinctly British. The stone church could be anywhere in Northern Europe. These will all easily serve as any time period from Napoleonic to modern. 

Here's the church beside a 1/600 scale church from Picoarmor:

As you can see, there is a definite size discrepancy, but it's not horrendous, so I can easily live with it. All in all, I'm extremely pleased with Mrs. History PhD's find!!

First, I finished off the Japanese light cruiser Tatsuta,

Recently on TheMiniaturesPage.com, when I mentioned having completed Yubari and Tenryu, someone said I'd soon have the entire line-up for the Battle of Savo Island. While I'm not specifically trying to do that, it seems as good a target to work toward as any, hence doing Yunagi. As you can see from my photos, I've run out of appropriate-sized ship bases, so an order went off to Bay Area Yards on Thursday. I really cannot recommend their bases highly enough!

And now the East Germans. In any WarPac division, regardless of nationality, there was always a radio/radar intercept and direction finding company as part of the reconnaissance battalion. The company's platoons would break down into sections and roam along the division's frontline, attempting to intercept and decode NATO radio transmissions. 

The vehicles used varied quite a bit, not only by decade, but also by unit. Each section was normally two vehicles; an intercept vehicle loaded with radios etc. and a data processing vehicle full of computers and intelligence analysts. In 1981 (my scenario date), one commonly seen combination was a UAZ-452 for the intercept:

In 1981, these beasts would've been a rarity, especially in LANDJUT, where the toughest opposition would have been West German Leopard 1A4s (the few Leopard 2s produced by then would have been held considerably further south). The very small number of T-80Bs available were mostly with Central Group of Forces (CGF) in Czechoslovakia or in the western military districts just inside the Soviet Union. A precious few T-80s were in Group of Soviet Forces Germany (GSFG), facing the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) specifically to oppose the Chieftain tanks.

No matter which front you look at, T-80s were supplied at the rate of just one company per armored division. Therefore, my addition of a company for a LANDJUT campaign is entirely fanciful and purely a "what if", but they're just too cool not to have a few. So, here they are:

Like all O8 minis of second and third generation Soviet MBTs (T-64, T-72, T-80), these don't give a good impression of the squat, ground-hugging appearance of the real thing, but otherwise, it's quite a good looking model.

A productive weekend! Lots of half-finished projects polished off. And that's with Mrs. History PhD's "honey do" list thrown into the bargain! 

Thank heaven for Mrs. History PhD (and Teddy)!

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of fiddling with other things, I'm back to 3mm Cold War and it's Soviet tanks. We're back in the USSR ("You don't know lucky you are"). Despite my misery (mild food poisoning, not brought on by my wife's Thai cooking!), I've managed to finish the battalion command stand that I was lacking for a T-64A battalion which I had been working on earlier in the week (before I was cruelly struck down):

I had planned on using a BRDM-2:

as the second vehicle on the battalion command stand, given that each Soviet armored battalion had a section of them as a recon unit. However, wheeled vehicles mixed in with my tanks just rankles, regardless of the authenticity. So I swapped for a BRM:

which fulfilled the same role. I know, I know! But it's MY Soviet Army!

More after my recuperation!

A small shipment from Shapeways arrived Saturday, which included some 1/600 West German DKW Mungas:

That's with light grey primer, so that you can see them. They look like 1970s US Post Office delivery jeeps. They'll be nice for tarting up command stands. 

Also included in the Shapeways box were some 1/2400 WWII French Naval vessels and I've finished two of them. The Marne class aviso Somme, which unlike her two sisters, had only one funnel (the others having two):

and the aviso Tahure, the name ship of its class:

That will do it for this weekend. Hope you had a good Labor Day holiday. For my UK readers, I believe this was also September Bank Holiday. I guess the rest of the world just lost out.