The Prussian 13th Brigade

Let me now explain a little better my task. I am supposed to recruit a "brigade" of 10 units to be used with Black Powder 2nd ed rules. Here is the breakdown I got from Jack (the Ministry of War)

After a while and a couple of emails with Jack I realized that actually the brigade has been split across three players. Each of us will have the 3 Line and 6 landwehr battalions, then I will have an artillery battery of 4 guns while the other two will have a squadron of Landwehr cavalry each...
This means that the whole brigade would field

24 x 9 = 648 infantry !
2 x 12 = 24 cavalry
4 guns and 16 crew
plus staff....

which makes approximately a scale 1:10 since the brigade fielded at the start of the campaign about 6500 men.

In practice i will command a regiment not a brigade but wisely the organizers created balanced forces so that i can have in my unit both line and landwehr ...

I immediately went to my favorite Waterloo source

centjours.mont-saint-jean

where you can find beautiful tables for each regiment present in the hundred days campaign

to see the look of my regiments.

The 10th is a standard prussian line infantry regiment with 2 musqueteers and one fusiliers battalions. It has yellow facings and a nice red/orange flag...

see here the uniforms of the 10th

The Neumark Landwehr has red piping and facings and the Silesian has yellow ones. So a very good mix. It took me a while to understand all what i need (I initially thought about doing two neumark regiments because several order of battle I consulted assigned to this brigade 2nd and 3rd Neumark Regiments) and in the end was very happy to have more variation.

see here the uniforms of the 2nd Neumark Landwehr

see here the uniforms of the 3rd Silesian Landwehr (where you see it enlisted in the 15th brigade)

Finally i had the 21st foot battery with six 6 pdr and 2 7 inch howitzers.

The whole brigade was under command of General Albrecht Georg Ernst Karl von Hake
but actually mine is commanded by major von Braunschweig commander of 2nd Neumark Landwehr. Find here some notes on his life (in German).

Back again

After a long time in which I only posted on facebook I reopen my blog. The reason is that I have been accepted as member of a glorious project and I want to document my steps towards the completion of my tasks ...

In case you are curious the project is nothing less than Waterloo replayed
the largest ever wargame battle with more than 100 players and 22000 miniatures.

I got the info about this project from the newsletter of Perry bros this summer during my holidays ... I immediately wrote to enlist but ... 

Sold out! 

I was not discouraged so I wrote again asking to lbe put in a waiting list in case someone would drop.. 

Land Monday I scanned my hobby email (gargaslittlewars@gmail.com) and I realized that some 10 days earlier I received an email  from one of the organizers Donald Adamson writing me the probably there were some possibility.... 10 days !!!!

I did not even noticed that he called me Danielle (perhaps they were thinking of enlisting a cute girl) ... I immediately wrote Donald saying I accept (took some risk since I did not even consulted my chief of staff :-)

After some very long hours in which I tried to work (not so succesfully) I got an answer from Donald ...

I was in ! I was enrolled as one of the three commanders of the 13th Prussian Brigade (Prussian ? ... ok in the end still a blue jacket !)

Rubicon's T34/76

I am amazed by the quality of the new Rubicon models. Here is a look of the T34/76 i recently built... very nice tank and very easy to build.

Getting two Sherman's at the cost of one !

I recently purchased the fantastic plastic M4A3 Sherman from Rubicon Models
The model is great and easy to assemble and I was super excited by the perspective of getting both the 75 and 76 mm turrets. Unfortunately during the assembling I got a bad surprise ! A few items that were needed by both turrets were only present in a single copy... They are not many but still this made the construction of two turrets a little bit tricky.




First of all I left unglued the base of the turret so that it can be attached to both versions (it stays well in place without glue. Maybe in the future I will magnetize it.









Then I magnetized the 75 and 105mm gun so that I can interchange them easily.

I also magnetized the Cullin hedgecutter so that it can be removed

The last part I needed to adjust was the cupola hatch for one of the two turrets (just one was present. To this end I used "minimold" a nice transparent plastic that softens when warmed and that creates easily a mold that can be used to replicate items with green stuff. The result is excellent and very easy to obtain....

The only think I fear is that I glued the two parts of the hatch in a wrong way since the periscope is looking backward... too late ! The next sherman will be correct!

After painting and weathering the tank I am very happy about the overall result !

My 1/48 collection

I decided to make all my german vehicles in 1/48. They are better in scale wrt to 28mm infantry. The big pity is that the ranges are quite limited and in practice the only army that is possible to make is
the german one that has a decent range. Here is a sa set of samples of y german army.






In total I have