Tsunamicon

My city just had a local convention that's primarily for the RPG/board game crowd but in an effort to try to break into this group one of the local game store put on a kill team tournament to show people what miniature gaming is like. Unfortunately the majority of the 40k players did a pub crawl the night before and were too hungover to show up AND the tournament was put in a room on the other side of the hotel from the main convention so they didn't get much exposure. There were four players including me that showed up though, but i only took pictures of one game because i was too busy getting my ass handed to me by tau in the other two.

My 200 points was 10 storm troopers with a meltagun and 5 rough riders.   

 The Orks brought 3 deffkoptas, a truck with a rocket launcher, 9 shoota boys, and another ork with a rocket launcher.

 The Orks got First turn so I deployed tight and hunkered down and actually managed to survive the first round of shooting.

 All I did for my firts turn was charge out with the rough riders. I lost one in overwatch against a deffkopta. The others successfully made their charges, my sergeant hit one of the koptas all four times but wiffed every too wound roll. The kopta then managed to flee the combat. The third kopta did not manage to survive hand to hand. 

 The Orks managed managed to kill all the rough riders but my storm troopers destroyed the truck and started to lay down the hurt with a combination of AP3 hotshot goodness and better armor than orks in hand to hand. The orks managed to pull a win by having one lone kopta turboboost to my starting corner for linebreaker

 There was also a speed painting competition. There weren't any prizes but we did get to keep the miniature we painted. First up is the one I chose, I had her done by the 20 minute mark.

 This one was done by a girl who commission paints, this is the furthest she got in the full 30 minute

 This was the only one finished in 10 minutes or under, but that's pretty easy to do when you only use like 4 colors.

My favorite part of the con was this Aliens game someone had set up in the corner, each section is for a specific scenario. The section below represents the Colonial Marines first encounter with the Aliens in the reactor.

This section is for Riply's rescue of newt or for a bug hunt by a Marine squad.

This section is for the Marines escape from the operations center through the airducts. 

 Every Marine from the movie has a figure and statlines as well as both pilots and the civilians.

 The guy putting on the games allowed us to pick which scenario to play and we picked the escape from the reactor room. After we picked this and set up we were then informed that none of the characters with a pulse rifle could use it because Gorman had ordered everyone to unload them and give all the ammo to Frost. Most of the guys with pulse rifles had a handgun they could use while Hicks has his shotgun and Apone had a flamethrower, the smartguns were also allowed to shoot.

 The whole point of the scenario was to escape with as many Marines as possible but the going was slow since most of the character could only move two squares at a time if they didn't fight and there were several points where there were to many aliens not to fight.

 Funnily enough the first casualty of the game was Hicks. An alien jumped out of a vent and incapacitated him and then in the attempt to save him a smart gun blew away the aliens standing over him and splashed their blood all over Hicks, killing him in acid burning agony. At that point a new Marine was put in so that i could continue to play and so that there will have been 9 Marines to make victory conditions easier to calculate. if 1-3 Marines get out its a loss, if 4-6 get out it's a tie, and if 7-9 escape its a victory.

Five Marines made out, one of them being Frost who had refused to issue the pulse rifle ammo back out but at least the survivors are better off on ammo now then they were in the movie.

Weekend model contest

There was an IPMS contest in my town over the weekends and i figured I would enter some of my stuff and see how it compared. I snapped photos of the armor and dioramas but i didn't take any pictures of the planes, trains, or automobiles, or boats for that matter, since none of that stuff interests me as much as TANKS. Anyway, here's the stuff in no particular order.

My three entries, a group of SNLF, my French 75mm, and a French Paratroop section

My roommates entry

 Cromwell

 The theme for the contest was a model based off a picture and I wish i had snapped a photo of the page he had used as a reference for his diorama because this guy really nailed it. I didn't stay to see who won the theme category but i really hope it was this one because no one else really put as much work into theirs.

More robotech

It's been about four months now but i finally got most of the robotech starter box finished, enough to start gaming with anyway. I've also added some 6mm british infantry to the UEDF force, I figure that if they're armed with AT weapons that are contemporary in the show than they could feasibly throw out some damage on a battle pod plus some security is needed against riots and micronized zentraedi infiltrators. Next step is to get some terrain to fight over and actually sling some paint on the things. 

Building and painting a Legionnaire for Indochina

When I first bought some of Redstar's French paratroopers for Dien Bien Phu I was completely taken by the awesome quality of the sculpts. From there i rapidly expanded my collection of troops for the conflict. Redstar put out some Viet Minh which I quickly acquired and then supplemented with figures from The Assault Group. Expanding the Viet Minh was easy because there's so many ranges with Vietcong armed with rifles and submachine guns but the French are another matter. Looking at my reference books I found that the French used everything and anything they could get their hands on which led to a huge mix of uniforms and equipment. The easiest thing to do to make some French Legionnaires or generic infantry would just be to buy somebody's line of  WWII figures and paint them up accordingly but that route is for sissies. I wanted to make some troops that were armed appropriately and had a mixture of equipment and different headgear than regular helmets.

By 1952-53 most French troops had begun receiving the M1947/52 uniform. Nobody makes figures with those specific uniforms but from eye to tabletop distance when painted as such the herringbone twill uniforms fit the bill nicely. Warlord has a box set of plastic USMC that i used as my starting point and i ordered some of the heads in slouch hats from Red Star as well as Mas-36 rifles from The assault group.

First step is always removal of mold lines and during this step i also like to make the neck hole go a little deeper. Warlord plastic heads have a rounded fitting on the head while the Red Star heads have more of a peg so by drilling a slight hole the head fits in much easier.

Assembly is fairly easy although if the rifle doesn't sit in the arm just right there tends to be a gap but that's easy enough to fix. In the photo below I just filled it in with some glue then smoothed it with a file when it was dry. For this particular figure I didn't go crazy on the amount or type of webbing like I have on others. This guy just got some US ammo pouches and a canteen straight from the box. 

Another thing I do with these figure is score the base so that there's more for the glue to cling too. Then it's just a matter of sticking him on the base and priming grey.

Below are all the paints I used as well as GW tallarn sand.

First step is to paint the uniform in Gw castellan green

Tallarn sand for webbing

Flat Brown for wood and leather

Pale flesh, gunmetal grey, and bone white for the hat

Hit the whole thing with a watered down sepia wash

drybrush the everything but the skin with khaki and then drybrush the flesh with ratskin flesh

then just base and flock accordingly