Plastic Fantastic..?

Zvezda's Great Northern War Swedish infantry.
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I'm hugely tempted to buy some Zvezda plastic figures! Stokes Schwartz's excellent accounts of their use on the Stollen blog, plus recent postings on Sir William's blog have tipped my hand somewhat. Economically it makes sense. For instance, two boxes of the above set of figures gets:-

18 Hat company, marching.
12 ditto, loading.
24 ditto advancing (two poses)
12 firing
6 pikemen (convertible to standard bearers)
2 standard bearers
2 drummers
4 officers
6 grenadiers.

86 figures in total for $14.58 + shipping & handling.

Since I form regiments into 24 figures, that makes three whole units for the table, plus a few left over for use as skirmishers, vignettes, conversions, etc. True, the uniforms are of the Great Northern War, hence somewhat dated by the time of the War on the Eisenwasser, but hey, it's my imagination! In matters of scale, the figures are somewhat smaller than the metal ones I have, but since the different types will be in discrete units it won't be a factor.

Three regiments would complete the bulk of the infantry for my armies, leaving three cavalry regiments (Rumtopft's Dragoons for the Grand Duchy of Hetzenberg, the Tuhellenbach Hussars and the Seinfeld Kurassiers for the Margravate of Dunkeldorf-Pfühl) and an artillery battery apiece. As has been pointed out elsewhere, kürassiers can be modified to SYW standard from Zvezda's 1812 Saxon Kürassiers by using head swaps from excess infantry figures. The hussars, dragoons and everything else can be made up from metal figures.

Am I tempted? You bet!

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Work is progressing on the copyedits for the Chronicles. Due to work and other commitments publishing date has been postponed for a couple weeks later than I expected. They should be out in time for Xmas, so watch this space!

DPC update and a useful ink.

This weekend I got an email with some excellent news from Richard Masse at Dayton Painting Consortium. Some of you may know of the sad demise of the London War Room, which had an excellent range of 25-28mm Spanish for the SYW. DPC has acquired the molds for these and are already producing figures. It's early days, but the range is shown on DPC's newly-refurbished website. It includes grenadiers, fusiliers, and dragoons, along with useful miners for siege work. An interesting group for amphibious operations includes oarsmen, steersman, seated officers and fusiliers - something I'm taking note of for future scenarios involving the Hetzenberg riverine flotilla.

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As a member of the Too Fat Lardies wargames rules group pointed out, there's a dearth of 17th-19th century buildings suitable for middle Europe. He went on to provide this link to a German site, Pretzschendorfer Weihnachtsberg which has a useful range of free to download printable buildings. The scale appears to be in the 10mm-15mm range, but with a bit of computer printer or copier adjustment it can be altered upwards.

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On a personal note my status over here has been formally confirmed. I am now officially a resident alien! Must go now as I have to inform the mother ship and polish my ray gun...

Dayton Painting Consortium

Does anyone know what's happening to DPC? I checked their website with a view to buying a few figures and found it's not functioning. The only page showing is for their Colonial 20mm range.

Busy busy busy...

I'm going to be busy for a few weeks! The publication of The Hetzenberg Chronicles, Volume One is coming up. Also, a new publisher has expressed interested in the manuscript for a novel I submitted, so there's that to take care of too. Tomorrow I'm off to the annual Archon sci-fi convention near St. Louis. There'll be lots of fellow nerds plus a dash of real science this weekend - Marvelous! If that wasn't enough, Cindy and I are in the early stages of creating the screenplay for a movie. Even with all this going on, I hope to buy some more figures for Hetzenberg and write the early stages of the third volume of the Chronicles. Busy busy busy! Watch this space...