Friday, November 27, 2015

Travels

No wargaming progress recently as I've just come back from a week in Hong Kong. I was there for work, so the trip involved a few more visits to power stations and cement factories than would normally be expected.

Lamma L9: 335MW Combined Cycle Gas Turbine

Green Island Cement

Hong Kong International Terminals

It wasn't all about the infrastructure, however.

View from Victoria Peak

Roast Goose

Panda!

With the trip out of the way, normal transmission should resume once we're all settled back in.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Quick ValleyCon Army Update

Just a quick update today. Over the last couple of weeks, life has limited the amount of work I've done on my ValleyCon army, but I did knock off four more armoured cars and the two portees. I haven't painted the crew yet, in particular I need to decide whether I'm happy using the gunner that comes with the armoured car kits, or try something else to make them not look so identical.

I had planned to have the 37mm gun removable from the portees, as I think having the dismounted option will be important. Alas, unlike the 6pdr portee, the 37mm portee kit has the gun carriage moulded as part of the truck. Battlefront don't do a British 37mm pack, but the gun is the same as the Polish wz36 so I have picked up a pack of those to use instead.




I'm not going to make much progress over the next couple of weeks either, but I think I'm pretty much on track to have them all finished before Christmas. Quite looking forward to the prospect of something different - painting the same camouflage on so many vehicles is starting to wear a bit thin...


Sunday, November 01, 2015

ValleyCon Army Progress

When I last posted two weeks ago, my ValleyCon army looked like this:


One lonely completed team, lots of blank bases and a stack of work to do. Since then, I've painted the Motor Platoon, including transport.








Not 100% happy with the canvas tilts on the trucks, I might revisit them later. It's a bit sad that it probably took more time to paint the trucks than they'll ever spend on the table, but it was good practice for the caunter colours before I do the rest of the armoured cars.

I've painted the full motor platoon with three ATRs, even though I'm only using two of them in the list. Previous experience says that if I don't paint them now then I probably never will, and even if I did get around to it in the future then they won't look the same. Just thinking about that, I should go back and paint three more Rifle teams before too long, to leave open the option of using them as a Rifle Platoon in some other list in future.

So, this is where I'm up to as of the end of the weekend - gradually filling in the blanks.


Some good news is that the 37mm portees and the rest of the armoured cars arrived during the week. I had a pack of the Italian Campaign artillery crew on order from the Battlefront webstore, to replace the BEF crew in the 18/25pdr boxed set, along with a few other special order items, but they've only shipped half the order so I guess the crews aren't available. Luckily, eBay has come to the rescue and there's now a pack of the artillery crew winging its way to me from Minnesota, so that's everything that I need now accounted for.

Next step: get some more armoured cars painted up.