Size Comparisons for 28mm African Minitures

As promised in my last post, here are some size comparison photos to help you when purchasing figures.  Photos were shot against a 1 inch (25mm) grid.  Bases are 3mm thick.

Copplestone, Brigade Games, Copplestone, Brigade Games

For the German troops, the Copplestone and Brigade figures are a very close match in size and style, and can be mixed without issue.

Brigade Games, Copplestone, Brigade Games, Copplestone

However, the same cannot be said for their British figures.  The Brigade British are approximately the same size as their Germans (maybe just slightly smaller), but the Copplestone British have grown in size compared to their Germans.  The Indian trooper isn't too bad, but the British officer  is quite large, with a helmet that dwarfs the Brigade counterpart. 

Brigade Games, Copplestone, Brigade Games, Copplestone

This photo better illustrates the size creep between Copplestone's Africa and Back of Beyond Ranges.  It's a pity too, as the Copplestone figures are well sculpted.

Foundry, Warlord, Brigade Games, Copplestone, Copplestone, Old Glory

And here is a parting photo of all the manufactures currently in my collection.  The Foundry, Brigade Games, and Copplestone Darkest Africa lines are all mid sized and work together very well.  The Warlord figures run on the smaller size, while Copplestone Back of Beyond and Old Glory tend to be a bit larger. If you are going to be starting Africa gaming from scratch, I would suggest you focus on Brigade Games, Foundry, and select Copplestone African figures.

Final Troops Completed for East Africa

Well, the last of the figures (at least until I decide to buy more) have come off the table for the German East Africa project.

These are Sikh Infantry from Brigade Games:

As is usual with their figures, these are both nicely sculpted and cast. 

The figures have been painted as the 30th Punjab Regiment, as depicted in Osprey's "Armies in East Africa 1914-1918".

I also finished up some command figures from Copplestone Castings:

The two on the left will be my army commander and his assistant, while the two on the right will command my 129th Baluchis.  These are rather large figures and appear over sized next to the Brigade figures.  I'll put together another post showing how everything in my collection matches up.

Neu-Moschi German Boma: Raise the Flag of the Deutsches Kolonialreich

Though the boma is still under construction, I thought it was time to at least get the flag of the German Colonial Empire ready for display. I wanted a flag that would look realistic, so I opted to start with a photograph rather than a drawing of the flag.  I managed to find a god source image through Google image search, then started modifications for my needs. The flag was first scaled down to something appropriate for 28mm figures (though left at a high resolution), and then I started the clean up process; removing holes in the flag, and smoothing out some of the fold lines. Finally, a reverse image was merged into the original flag image to allow the flag to be folded over and viewed from both sides. In case anyone else has a use for it, I've uploaded the high res version into Flickr (link under the image).

Flicker

 To display my flag, I decided to custom build a flagpole that will sit at the entrance to the boma.  First off, I printed out the flag, carefully cut it out, and wrapped it around some thin wire I had obtained from the jewelry making section of the local craft shop.  The flag was glued together using a standard glue stick, shaped, then the white edges were treated with paint to hide them.

The flagpole itself was made from a hollow plastic rod from the local train store.  It has a bit of give to it, which should help to prevent snapping if it catches on something.  This was glued onto a wooden base to help with stability.  The hardware detailing on the flagpole was made from a small safety pin and a straight pin  with a spherical cap.

To make the loop at the top of the pole, I snipped off the circular spring of the safety pin, making sure to leave bit of the wire protruding off the ends. Small holes were drilled into the rod to fit them, and the spring was secured with superglue.The straight pin was inserted into the hole at the end of the rod and also superglued into place.

To secure the flag's cords at the base of the pole, I used the head of the safety pin, filing down the catch in the middle and squeezing the outer cover flatter. Another hole was drilled into the pole for this, and the assembly was superglued in place. While working on this, I discovered the pole wasn't as secure in the base as I hoped, so additional side supports were built out of wood and glued on.  "Bolts" for these supports were created from small drops of wood glue.

The flag was removed for the painting of the flagpole and texturing of the base, then reattached (after treating the wire with drab paint to remove the shine) with the wires sealed into place with more superglue.  Once the weather improved is will be sealed with matte spray varnish and will be ready for the parade ground.

Neu-Moschi German Boma: Front Gate

Work on the boma continues, but at a much slower pace than I hope due to other commitments.

As I mentioned in my last update on this project, my next major decision needed to be on how to build the walls for the compound. I considered scratch building them out of foamcore board, but I need to be able to break down the boma for storage and felt these would be too easily damaged.  As such, I opted to purchase a set of laser cut MDF walls from Gamecraft Miniatures. The walls themselves are rather no-frills; they have no engravings of exposed bricks, and no doors come for the gates. They are also too thin to really look appropriate for a compound wall. 

To deal with this, I first doubled up the walls (luckily you get at least two of each piece type) so they were now about 6mm thick. After gluing, the sharp edges were knocked down with a file and sections of wall were treated with Liquitex ceramic stucco texture gel. This was sanded and then painted up in layers with craft paint, moving up from tan, to sand, then white, resulting in some texture for the walls.

For the gate doors, I opted to start with 3mm thick solid pieces of basswood for each door rather than attempt to build them out of individual planks.

Each piece was scored with a utility knife to create the illusion of  individual planks, with further wear added using a small file. Support beams were individually cut from a thin sheet of basswood, and the metal hardware for the doors cut from sections of manilla folder.  The illusion of nail heads was done by applying small drops of wood glue with a toothpick.

The doors were painted German camouflage brown black, then highlighted with leather brown and earth.  The worn sections were then treated with a little gold brown and sand. Metal sections were painted charcoal grey with gunmetal  highlights.

The doors are just wedged into position, so I have the ability to put them in either an open or closed position.  I considered trying to put together actual working hinges, but though they would be too frail.  I did however paint some metal hinge mounts onto the door frames to help with the illusion.

The actual boma appeared to have gun ports built into the walls, so I decided to add two around the front gate.

I drilled two holes into the wall, starting with a small bit and working my way up to the size I wanted. The reason I started with smaller pilot holes is I found out the hard way that the larger bit wanted to wander when it started rotating, resulting in uneven heights for the openings.  These were cleaned with an x-acto blade to remove the raised material around the edges of the holes.  To give me square openings, I framed each hole with a bit of basswood. This took a bit of trial and error to figure out how to do.  I originally started with a a very thin sheet, thinking it would be easy to cut the hole out.  However, it fell apart as soon as I started cutting. I then moved on the 1/32" board and tried drilling pilot holes first.  This helped somewhat, but as you can see from the photo, I still managed to crack one of them. With careful cutting (I would remove the inside first, then cut the whole piece free) and plenty of spares, I eventually got enough to glue onto the walls with wood glue. These were then painted in the same fashion as the doors.

 As the wall sections will not be glued together or to the boma base to help with storage, I am attaching small outbuilding to each section to hold them up.  For the front gate, I am going with a sentry box sold by 4ground. Despite being a simple model, I actually found it a bit difficult to work with, as then wood is thinner than normal and I had some pieces snap during assembly. However, the final product seemed fairly sturdy in the end.  Due to the roof, the box does not sit flush against the wall, so some scrap filler needed to be added to the back. The box was them topped off with plastic sheeting to give the appearance of a metal  roof.

The other wall sections are still under construction as I am adding outbuildings to support them.  I also decided to add an additional Germanic style building to the back of the boma as existed in the real structure, so have a bit of scratch building to go before that's ready. At this pace, my goal is to have it ready for use at the start of the new year.

Star Blazers/ Space Battleship Yamato: Gamilon Ships Part 1

After working on the WWI African project for so long, I thought it was time to take a break and work on something else.  This past summer I was in Japan, where I discovered Bandai had released a new batch of models celebrating the old  Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト) series from the 1970's. As a kid it was one of may favorite cartoons (marketed in the U.S. as Star Blazers), and years ago I had purchased some miniatures and rules from starblazersonline.com.  They had sat unbuilt due to a lack of opponents, but the nostalgia drove me to dig them out this month and do some work on them.

Start of the Gamilon fleet

Before working on the star of the show, I thought it best to get my feet wet by building and painting spaceships from Earth's enemies, the Gamilons ( Gamilas in the original Japanese).  The show depicted them in a variety of garish color schemes, so these were the perfect change from the various shades of khaki and tan I had been painting.

A mid-size ship type. The brass fins have been added to the ship on the left.

The ships aren't particularly huge, ranging from about 1.5cm for the small escort ships, to 5-6cm for the main battle craft.  In the original show, the artist Leiji Matsumoto (松本零士) loved to draw spaceships with all kinds of fins and antenna sticking off of them. While it may look good onscreen, it's a nightmare for miniatures. 

Casting them in white metal would have resulted in something that was quite fragile, so Musashi Enterprises instead provides etched brass pieces instead.  While I think this is the best option for the situation, they are very challenging to work with. Most of the pieces are in the 0.5cm range, and I found them difficult to remove from their frames without leaving metal burrs on the edges.  I did try filing them down, but due to their size, they had a tendency to pop out of the needle nose pliers during the process, resulting in several lost pieces (luckily I had purchased enough ships that I had spare pieces available). Your best bet is to trim them as close as you can with an X-acto blade and just live with them.  

Attaching them is also a difficult process, involving quite a bit of swearing. Many of the ships have grooves where they are supposed to fit, but they aren't always there or are too shallow to be much use.  Some of the pieces have pegs on them that are supposed to help with positioning, but I found they didn't work well and just cut them off.  As such, I would not recommend these ships for new modellers or those short on patience, but I was happy with how everything looked after assembly.

The ships are supplied with plastic flight stands, but I was concerned the pegs to mount the ships on would not be strong enough and could snap during game play. I decided to drill them out and use some stiff wire to connect the ships to the stands. Musashi also makes adapter heads for the flight stands that allow you to attach more than one small ship to each stand (it appears the rules allow multiple ships to occupy the same hex without risk of collision unless you get over a certain total tonnage).

Be prepared to do some detailing

As seen earlier, the folks at Musashi are kind enough to include a sheet with each kit detailing the fins needed for each ship and the color schemes from the show. Painting single colors results in a rather bland looking ship that hides the details, so you will need some black ink and highlight colors if you wan these ships to look decent.

The ship sculpting was fairly well done (especially on the larger ships), but you can tell these were all done by hand, as there is a bit of asymmetry in some ships. I also had some pieces that didn't fit tightly, so I needed to use super glue to fill the gaps. Casting quality varied; while no ships were horribly cast, some ships had pitting and flash indicating the molds were wearing out. It seems like they are switching over to resin with their newer ships (all my purchases were white metal), so maybe that will help. 

OK, on with the ships completed so far: 

2005 Gamilon Destroyers

 The destroyers are some of the smallest ships I purchased. I thought they would look a bit goofy if I mounted them one ship per stand (plus would take a lot of time moving them on the table), so I decided to group them in squads of four. Being so small, the sculpted detail on them is fairly minimal, so you'll need to add that detail in with your painting.

2024 Gamilon Strike Cruisers

 Though it was a bit tricky getting the fins glues on these crisuers, I think they are a rather fun design and I enjoyed painting them.  Overall the casting was fairly good, though one ship seemed to be missing part of the top of the bridge, and had some flash build up on the tail that had to be filed down.

2022 Gamilon Battle Carrier II

 The improved battle carrier is an interesting ship design; when not launching fighter and bombers, the landing deck rotates under, revealing additional weapons systems. Being a ship without fins, it was fairly easy to put together and painted up nicely.  Sadly most of my highlighting doesn't show up well in the photo.  Casting quality was good.

2007 Desslock Command Ship II

The last ship for this round of painting is the second version of Desslok's (leader of the Gamilons) command ship.  A bit goofy looking due to the SMITE pods on the nose, these pods allow the command ship to teleport other ships around the battlefield.  This was a well cast kit and fairly easy to paint.

I still have a few more Gamilon ships on the painting table, so I'll share those in a future update before I move on to the Earth ships. Despite some of the assembly frustrations, I think the miniatures capture the spirit of the show and will look nice on the table.