Kategorie: Miniature Companies

In our Club we are going to start an Mid War FoW Campaign very soon. In order to have some valid thread to russian Tanks I painted one Platoon of Hungarian Assault Pioneers, called Utász in hungarian. I was a little bit unlucky with the decision of converting some models, since Battlefront did a platoon with modeled pioneers, too.

However now I have my very own version, which is pretty much similar to the version of Battlefront. I decided to show the Pioneers by adding german mines, barbed wire and some craters. I modeled the mines with grey stuff and made a tiny mold of it. There are two versions of the mines, a bare mine and one in a wooden carriage box. I used the box to convert the pioneer truck.

Painting was this time a little bit quicker but more precise than I did with the first infantry platoon. Currently I think the amount of work should be chosen carefully. There are a lot of 15mm based miniature painters, who are very specialised and paint an incredible quality. Chevalier de la Terre had an excellent Blogpost on inspiring FoW painters: http://cracdeschevaliers.blogspot.com/2011/04/sources-of-inspiration.html, but I must admit, that personally I paint FoW miniatures less intensive, since there are too many other miniatures to have a detailed painter eye on it e.g. 28mm.

This week I managed to finish the hungarian Recce troops. Some time ago I mentioned the paper masking airbrushing technic I used to spray the camo scheme. I am very happy with the finished troops. The tanks looks somewhat simple, but I would like to mention some special things in order to let you know how much work these tiny armoured vehicles were.

First of all every turret was fixed with rare earth magnets to the chassis. Then I added some commanders and one soldier talking to the platoon leader while standing on the rear of the tank. I added at least one piece of stowage to each vehicle. Then I added two typical round aerials which can be seen on many photos showing the Toldi troops. I used wire in a strength which prevents future damage.

After that I constructed my own Decals. My first attempt with white decal paper was not that precise, so I decided to let them printed out by a service which is able to print white colour, too. To do this we had to provide a pdf with two pages, one with all color information, one with the white information (in black). The Service called Druckeronkel (german page) did an excellent job to reasonable prices. I designed the correct version of the hungarian Balkenkreuz, since I did the same mistake like Battlefront´s author Wayne, who mentioned it in his excellent painting article. Unfortunately I did it wrong with my first batch of hungarian decals.

Now with the correct version I added registration plates, hungarian coat of arms, hungarian armed forces coat of arms, a double cross insignia for the Cabas, an Eagle insignia for the hatches of the Toldis and some other details. My employee, who is in trainig of a graphical job, did the printig version of the insignia. It takes ages to produce a printable version since you need vector construction skills, knowledge on colors in print (although RGB without profiles was needed) and you should be able to save PDFs. I took us three approaches to get the file right for print. So if you consider to produce your own decals don´t blame me that you did not know that that is hard work.

For making the fire and smoke markers I used exactly the technic introduced by Elladan in his excellent Fire and Smoke article. Since I read it some years ago I wanted to test that. Strange but true it took me really a long time to get into a pet shop, a artist´s shop, get red ink, a good yellow paint and magnets for the bases. But now it worked excellent, thank you very much Elladan for sharing your work with us!

The fire and smoke markers will be very important for our upcoming Tactica 2011 gaming table depicting Eastern Front 1943, since many hungarian and sowjet vehicles were destroyed during that time.

Currently I am working at my Mid War Ostfront hungarian company. At the very beginning of our campaign I will just be able to field a hungarian Tank company as painting an whole infantry company simply takes a lot of time. However my first games will see 7 38t tanks, 3 Panzer IV, 3 Panzer III, 3 Stuka, 2 Nimrod, an motorised infantry platton, and a 10,5 cm artillery battery. The force consists of elements which actually were present during the attacks against the Uryv Bridgehead in 1942 the Sovjets established on the hungarian controlled banks of the river Don. Battlefront did write two good articles on the operation of the Hungarian 1st Armoured Division: Karotyak Bridgehead and The Battles For Uryv. Both give an interesting Overview. Online Ressources for this two Battles are rare, please drop a note if you have more Links for this topic to provide.

All units I have chosen so far were used in the Uryv Bridgehead. Obviously there were a lot of Pak 36 guns which could not provide an anti tank capacity against the T-34 and KV1 tanks which were brought in the battle by the 30th tank regiment. Since I had some really bad experiences with that kind of anti tank gun, even with the Stielgranate, I do not want to paint this gun type for my Hungarians so far.

My first army composition feels good against infantry with 10 tanks, 2 armored vehicles with high Rof, a good artillery and aircrafts. However I think my club mates will make the same decision: Let´s start with a tank company – it is less to paint. Therefore I have to think about the threat of some KV1 or T-34. The only tank which is valuable against T-34 are those 3 Panzer IV. That is not that much. The only weapon against the KV1 are my Stukas. Usually I do not like airforce choices since the performance usually is very variable. Sometimes they rock, usually they don´t especially when there are anti aircraft guns available.

A nice inspiration is an hungarian motorised infantry company painted by flak36.88 in the Battlefront forums. (Login needed).

To be continued