Quar Characters

Getting caught up on some random pieces from the MyMiniFactory Tribe. First up, we've got a farm cart pulled by a large, happy beetle. Well, he looks happy to me. I imagine him humming a little tune as he trundles along.

The cart prints empty. I made the load with some old scraps of balsa wood covered with a square of shop cloth plus a couple of 3d printed urns. I need to do this to my Medieval baggage carts. Empty wagons just look so... empty.

My Coftyran bombers also finally got some rhyfles slung over their shoulders. I'm hoping to get some bogens for my Crusader bombers in the next print shipment from Don.

This is the Home Dyna for the Tolly-Maeryn faction. She's somebody's mom who has followed her kit to the front to make sure he's eating properly and changing his socks. While she's there she's become the Company Mom, fulfilling the role of cook/medic except that she isn't armed like a regular cook is (unless you count the wooden spoon), so there's special rules if she gets caught in a blast template to show the morale effect on both sides if she is hurt.
 

She can fulfill the cook/medic role for my partisans or just  be a character in a village, selling her cakes.

Finally, we have a Tribe Membership gift, a figure of Alykinder, father of the Crusade. Don mirrored the print, so on one I cut off the hand leaning on the cane and replaced it with a Doru SMG to make him a partisan leader or gangster. Dark deeds require dark clothes. But the other one I painted in brighter colours.

Quar Houses and Terrain

Some 3d printed terrain that I got as part of the Zombiesmith MyMiniFactory Tribe Subscription. The stls do not seem to be available for sale currently.

There's a big house and a small house and a flowering bush. Don printed 6 of the bushes. Perhaps some insects live in the fat trunks, or the berries are good eating. They certainly look whimsical.

Because the lilacs are in bloom right now I painted the floral clumps in assorted purples and pinks. That will inject some whimsy into any battlefield, and the trunks are substantial enough to give cover as well.

I got two prints of the small hut, but I don't like how the other is working out, plus I dropped it after priming and it suffered some damage, so I may just bin it. I have lots of Quar houses now thanks to Sarissa.

The earthenware pitcher is another detail that Don sourced and printed for me. I added it to a base along with some flower tufts and a gravel path to make the model more grounded.

 

The roofs of the big houses were done with contrast paints.I used black ink on the chimneys to give them some metalic shine. Brown ink on the trimber framing.

Stukas and Stringbags

Now that I've got quite a few ships done, I thought it was time to add some aircraft. The aircraft in Ghukek's Wargaming 3d catalog are FREE!, which is cool. They are scaled at 1:900 to go with the 1:1800 ships. He does the smaller fighters and carrier aircraft as singles and flights of three, joined at the tails or with overlapping wings. Large bombers, scout planes etc are all singles. 

Some he modeled with tiny propellers, which are weird. I cut them off where present.

Picture from Ghukek catalog of Bristol Beaufighters. Note individual model and flight of three model

The flights of three is how the Mad Padre printed my aircraft for the 1:2400 project a couple of years back.

Dauntless SBDs (joined wing tip to tail) and F4F Hellcats (joined at the wing tips) fly over a CVE early in the project.

It was easy enough to paint them. Clip off the peg on the post, glue the flight on, brush prime and paint.

Except, due to some casual storage, my flights of aircraft have taken some damage. Flights of three reduced to two, or even one, model with shortened wings.

The SBDs (far left and far right) if you look closely are in rather poor shape.

Don printed me the single models, not the flights. So I had six of each aircraft. These were going to be a bugger to paint and how to base them? And after all that effort, how to keep them from breakage? So solutions needed to be found.

For painting I hit on the idea to superglue them to some sprue. Easy to just pop them off the plastic, right? RIGHT???!!

Painting in progress

Wrong. A lot of wings and tails snapped as I tried to gently pop them off the sprue, even after I put a bunch in the freezer for 24 hours.

Carnage!

Some I was able to repair, because the breaks were simple, clean, and I could find the errant piece.

But many airframes were a complete write off. 2 out of 5 Do17s survived. I managed to repair the damaged Ju88s, so I got all six in service. Of the Me110s and Ju87s I only saved half, 3 each. The rest were unsalvageable.

Do17s attacking HMS Cleopatra off Crete

Two flights of Ju88s make a bombing run

Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attack the Armando Diaz off North Africa

For the British I only lost one each of the Swordfish and the Beaufighters, so I made a flight of three and a flight of two for each.

The British have 4 flights of attack aircraft. The Axis have five flights. One of Me110 fighters, two of Ju88s, and one each of Do17s and Ju87s. The Axis will have to wait until I get some Italian aircraft before they get torpedo bombers.

Me110s

For the flights of three, I cut a triangle of clear plastic from a food packaging clam shell and punched a hole behind where the lead aircraft would go. Flights of two got a rectangle with a hole punched in the center.

The aircraft were then hot glued into position. I left some overlap so the plastic would protect the wings.

Ju87 Stukas!

Beaufighters attacking a convoy in the North Sea, or maybe the Mediterranean.

I think with the next round of aircraft I'll hot glue the models to a popsicle stick, or a wooden skewer. They might be easier to pop free from the hot glue. Painting the bottoms isn't really needed. You don't see them.

The bases wobble a bit on the stands, but they come free to lay flat for storage. The angles also add a bit of drama to the scene as well, and helps you imagine attacking aircraft swooping around, dodging flak, as they pounce on their target.

In Which They Served

The second batch for the Royal Navy has finished their working up and are ready to deploy to the table top.

This group includes two Fiji, or Crown Colony, Class light cruisers from Lee MColl stls printed for me by the Mad Padre. These are insanely detailed, and Mike printed them on an FDM printer. I think better results might be had with a resin printer, but separating masts and guns from supports would be tricky as well. 

So who knows? Shan't look gift ships in the gun turrets so to speak.

Also two Dido class light anti-aircraft cruisers, which were terribly useful in the crowded Mediterranean, where allied shipping was never far from German and Italian airfields. These are the more robust, gamer friendly, stls from Ghukek.

Finally, six J,K, and N class destroyers. Again from Ghukek. These will be formed into two flotillas. One of the J-series and one of the K-series. 

That is the nice thing about many RN destroyers from WW2, you can tell what class it is just from the name.

With this batch I pushed the boat out a bit further with more complicated camouflage patterns which I think turned out well, even though the destroyers don't give a lot of room to work with.

Of course I'm trying to keep this project to light forces. Heavy cruisers were only with Force H in Gibraltar. But I already have a RN battlecruiser and a couple of Italian battleships in the pipeline, because I got the stls for free. So the temptation to get a couple of Queen Elizabeth class battleships keeps singing it's siren song.  The Mediterranean did after all feature one of the very few times that opposing battleships engaged each other in the Second World War.