The Canadian infantry arrive

      My Canadian infantry have been a real labour of love, and at times, hate, but now they are done and I have managed a couple of games with them, I'm really enjoying the end result. These guys were a real slog at times but I have done exactly what I wanted to do with this army, additions will now be small and quick to do, so I should be able to play whatever I want.

    I've built/painted the equivalent of 4, 10 man squads, each with an nco with smg, at least one more smg, a lmg and loader, and the left overs with rifles. Then to make sure I have something for every job, I have; a piat team, light and medium mortars, mmg, sniper and 5 man engineer squad who I see as a cheeky little extra unit in games where I need them. Then lastly I have my HQ units, my lt and adjacent, a forward artillery officer and adjacent, a captain for bigger games and an adjacent for my medic*.

* This was my infantry done until an order arrived from North Star and ruined it all . . . But the order includes a guy who looks like a better medic than the one Warlord supplies.

 HQ units

 Piat, sniper and light mortar.

 Medium mortar, mmg and flamer.

The engineers, 4 rifles and nco with smg for good measure.

 The NCOs.

The brave, unwashed masses.

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Dinosaur or Monster?

      It's been a while since my blog was graced with a dinosaur, but now that's about to change. This is the Megalosaur from Antediluvian Miniatures*, one of the two victorian Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Now that I have said all that it's time for an omission; I'm not planning on using as a dinosaur, this thing just looked too generic monster for my liking. I can see this thing living in dark caves scaring the peasantry until a Knight came along to do his thing. Ok so I might have gotten a little carried away there.

* I'm really glad I only had to write that name and not pronounce it.

     I'm not going to take credit for this find though, I had one of those emails during the week from another guy at the club (Antmaster) who had obviously stumbled across this company himself, and I sold from the moment I saw it.

      Now I have the photos up online I'm not sure about the base, I think that may be re-done in the future, but I think this thing will look amazing as part of a Dragon's Rampant army as a men-at-arms equivalent in the future.

       I bought a few more bits as part of the same order that will be painted as part of my dinosaur project, but I haven't even started on them yet so they will have to be a topic for another day.

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Viking Trader's Knarr

      In a break from all the writing about Bolt Action I have done recently, I have decided to throw in something completely different, so here is the Viking Knarr I bought at Salute 2013, finally finished. The model is by Warbases and like the ash wastes vehicles I did a few weeks back, it is more of a scratch build aid than a kit in it's own right. I have to say, once I got my head around what I needed to do to make it look right, it was a really good project to pass some time, plus it put me into a really good place to get on with my next big, non-army project.

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Canadian deployment begins

     I am going to try and present the bulk of my WW2 Canadian army over the course of 3 posts, this one will be the odds and sods of my armour, next will be all my infantry and last will be my tank wars platoon. I will then try and have some non-bolt action bits lined up as the last months of this blog have been fairly Bolt Action solid and I am in danger of losing the 'random meanderings' part of my title.

Left to right; Daimler armoured car, universal carrier, Cromwell tank, 

quad tractor and a 6 pounder gun in the front row.

The Cromwell is the tank I become unstuck on. As far as I can work out, the Canadian 4th division tank companies were based around Shermans, so they had no Cromwell companies, but as the British spread equipment to each of the commonwealth countries, they must have had one or two at some point. . .

The universal carrier, the only model on this post that wasn't bought for a specific army list, I just really liked the look of the kit. Even though I don't have an actual use for it at the moment, I am absurdly pleased with how this one came out.

   

Daimler armoured car, quad tractor and 6 pounder anti-tank gun.

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Canadian 1st Parachute Battalion

       In an effort to balance out the heavy Axis lean my current Bolt Action gaming group has developed, I had been planning an Allied army since just after I started playing regularly, but with tournament practise and a complete lack of funds, it was an idea that didn't gain much traction. This post isn't going to be about that Allied army project, that will come in the next couple of weeks, this is about a side project of it that I got a little bit carried away with.

       The Allied army I have gone for is the Canada and this left me with a few issues in terms of joining in some of the narrative themed games we have been discussing. While the Canadians were very much at the front of the Allied push and were every bit as important as the other big nations involved, they don't seem to be at the forefront of the public's imagination, so finding out what engagements they were involved in just seems a little bit more of a struggle than for the British or Americans.So when the guys in the gaming group mentioned they would like to do Operation Market Garden at some point in the future I was fairly sure I would be stuck on the German side as it was a British mission. Then my research came up  trumps. The Canadians did have a parachute army, the 1st Parachute Battalion, and they fought as part of the British 6th Airbourne Division, although my research doesn't seem to think they were in the part that did the Operation itself, that's close enough for me to blag it.

       My current Canadian Parachute members. It's only 500 points at the moment and I don't plan on adding to it in the immediate future, but it is big enough and useful enough that I can get involved in any future game, or be able to add to it quickly enough to get involved at the very least. At some point; I need to work up the bravery to do the battalion and rank badges on the arms, but other than that I am fairly pleased with them.

The Canadian Paras raid a German radar station.

 As ever; anything factually wrong will be rectified as soon as I am aware.

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Ash Waste Vehicles

       So here I am, a complete post-apocalypse, Mad Max rip-off, sell out, but I'm really enjoying the models. . . 

      These are from Ramshackle Games, and although they look a lot like they are kits, and the website will sell you them as such, don't let all that fool you! What I love about this range is it is basically just a catalogue of vehicle bits, with a category that is just packs of parts, that with a bit of work, that look good together. Having said all that negative sounding stuff, I have to say I absolutely loved the whole process, there is a lot of filing and green stuff to part parts actually stay together and fill voids, but when the point of these vehicles is that they are bolted together from scavenged parts I really don't care. 

      The only parts of the models that aren't included in the packs are the guns, which are spare plastic GW ones that otherwise live in my bits box forever.

        As I always try to build something with an eventual use in mind, these were built to play an old GW expansion to the Necromunda rules, Ash Wastes. I suppose it was basically what the old Gorka Morka players got when they kept asking for a use for their old Vehicles. So these rules allow you to mount your gang on bikes, cars and bigger transports, put guns on them and see what happens.

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Plan C. The dreaded third in the trilogy.

      This will be my last post on my attempts to become a competitive gamer, after this I can go back to being a bit more random in what I paint and what goes up on here; although there will be a lot more bolt action to come, so be warned.

      These are the units that make up the list I submitted last weekend for checking, before the tournament this Saturday;

       The shock change in this list from the last two that I used; I replaced out the Fallschirmjager with Panzergrenadiers. My army building style is far more about the fluff and getting the army looking right than it is about the optimum list (hence why my team nickname is the Unicorn) and the completely fallschirmjager theme worked to a tee in my head, but the problem with tournament comps are that somewhere along the line making a fair list has to come before letting the players take whatever they want, with this tournament using the pre-made 'theatre selectors' that Warlord Games have put in the back of each nation's army book. The reason this became a problem for me was that I wanted to move my flamethrower team into a squad instead of having them as a fragile team, and free up some points for something a bit harder hitting, but I can only do that if I swap theatres. So my fallschirmjager have been swapped, man for man, for panzergrenadiers, the stats are exactly the same, the options are exactly the same, the only difference are the models.
       I have only played the one game with this list and my luck was atrocious, but I am still pretty pleased with how it has come together. I have had enough practice with each of it's forebears to know what my weaknesses are, and what my strengths are, so hopefully it will be good enough that I can just go and enjoy myself on the day.

 My new pioneer squad, the cause of all my problems.

       This trailer has absolutely no effect on the game, and is completely unnecessary, but my fluff is all about this being a self-contained force whose job is to harass the allies as they advance into Germany, so I figured the unit needed somewhere to carry their spare ammo, supplies and anything else they might need along the way, and if all else fails, it will make a good objective marker. The model is a Corgi toy, a quick paint job later to bring it in line with the ret of my armour and I am really pleased with it.

Normal service will resume later in the week with something completely different.
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