Oh boy. Fiber Tablets. Yum Yum

 I kept meaning to get this entry up for several weeks.  Things kept stopping me.  I have started having more responsibilities around the house.  I am now a house husband.  My duties mainly involve watching the kids.  I have become very good at reading my six month old's moods.  Who says a man cannot do women things.  Let's hear it for the Masculinist movement.

 My other batch of M11/39s are now finished.  They came out very well.  I mixed up the dry brushing on the second set.  They look fine and probably appear to be a little more dusty.

I did the camo schemes in what I believe are historically accurate references.  One thing I did notice is that in all the m11/39 pictures I could find none of them had any platoon markings.  They were mostly naked.  It is also amusing that all the pictures are of abandoned or broken down tanks.  So I put recognition markers on the back of the turret but left the platoon symbols at home.  These tanks were fun to paint.

 Here are the completed vehicles for Warfare in the Age of Madness and Manoeuvre Group.  The Hemmt sat on my painting desk for far to long.  The Dew Raiders' vehicles are the Hemmt gun truck, the humvee and the FaV dune buggy thing.  The T54 tank in the background is a generic model.  The Hemmt and the FaV are QrF models.  The humvee is from Flytrap studios.  The owner is a really nice guy.  The T54 is a Peter Pig model. I was really impressed to get crew models with it.  The barrel came out of the bad completely straight and needed no re-positioning.  

The Hemtt is the heavy support and firepower of the Dew Lords.  Whenever the Dew Heralds get into a entanglement the gun truck is radioed in for help.  It carries several rifle teams with machine guns and Laws, a 240B machine gun team and a dismounted Mark 19 team.  Add a forward facing Mark 19, a .50 cal gunner and a rear facing M60.  This gun truck is heavily armed and poses quite a threat to anything but an armored vehicle.  

 All of the Mountain Dew boxes, ammo cans and MrE boxes are plasticard.  The fuel barrel is from Khurasan Miniatues.  The rusty plate steel is also plasticard.  I had to do ALOT of sanding to get this model functional.  All of the crew are Flames of War Vietnam M113 crew.  The same goes for the weapons.  The mark 19 crewman on the front is also Flames of War.  The mount and turret are all scratch built.  The Mark 19 was from the QrF FaV model.  I really like QRF's models.  Be prepared as they were very tricky to assemble.  It took some guess work and I had to look at lots of source photos.  The FaV had an assembly guide on Scale Creep Miniatures webpage.  I would not have gotten that together without it.

I am disappointed that my original idea for the Dew Lords was to have the Dew Heralds on dirt bikes and 4 wheel atvs.  The idea came from the novel 1632.  It is about an alien making a mistake on his course calculation and warping a small mining town in West Virginia to war torn Germany in the middle of the 30 years war.  I may have the name of the book wrong.  The two guys on foot are the scouts that dismount from the FaV.

 The FaV was originally supposed to be several guys on dirtbikes.  That idea died as there are not 15mm models of soldiers on dirtbikes.

 The humvee was originally imagined as two AtVs.  They dismounted as a rifle/Mg team.

 This is the more heavily armed support of the Dew Heralds.  The idea is that the FaV scouts ahead for a cache of Dew.  If they run into trouble they can radio the humvee to provide close support.  The humvee has a rifle/Mg team and a turret mounted .50 cal.  I had lots of fun putting all the Dew in the back of the humvee.  All of the stowage is from the original model.  It was originally intended to be a long range recon special forces vehicle.  The crewmen smoking a cigarette on the back is a Flames of War m113 crew member.  The 50 gunner is from Flytrap.  The first humvee I ordered was lost in the mail.  The owner sent a replacement and added a few random infantry men as an apology.

 The T54 may seem like an odd addition to a post apocalyptic North America.  I justified it by saying that World War III saw a gradual decrease of technology as the war drew into a stalemate.  Initially there was all the high tech weapons but attrition exhausted all of that.  Nations desperate for supplies started to pull older generation tanks out of moth balls.  In Iraq there is a dissident army that has a massive supply of older generation Soviet weapons.  Tons of BmPs and older tanks are sitting in a big field near the Iranian border.  I guess they are waiting for the right moment to invade Iran.  There is plenty of old Russian equipment laying around all over the world.  This particular tank was probably lost in the conflicts.  Some scavengers discovered it and got it working again.  The tank is pretty rusted out but it works.  I would probably limit the main gun ammo as that could be scarce.  Fuel is not an issue because there always seems to be fuel after the apocalypse.

 I have decided to set some painting goals for the end of the year.  My list included these WW2 Australians.  I am just about half way finished with them.

I decided to get into a 28mm game.  Infinity has always been cool and the rules are very enjoyable.  I got a little carried away and bought a little to much.  I have the Ariadna army box with the dismounted Maverick girl and a lot of Nomad models.

 This is a few things for Warfare in the age of madness.  These models will also be generic and useful for any army.
I did not take any pictures of the Greek 6mm stuff I need to paint.  I have decided to do a DbA Spartan force.  It needs 10 spear units, a psiloi and a cavalry.  The good news is that I have psiloi and a suitable cavalry unit.  I did a tally and I have 18 stands of Greek infantry and maybe 3 stands of Greek cavalry to paint.

I am also not buying anything else until I get more stuff painted.  I may consider buying 3 2pdr guns for a WW2 desert scenario.  The fun thing is that I could buy loose 47mm Italian AT guns and use British crew.  The Australians used captured Italian equipment.  They even had several m11/39s.  I am really excited about painting that because they painted giant kangroos all over them.  That was to avoid fratricide.

If anyone knows a good source for Italian tank camouflage in the desert please leave a comment.