From BillA - Warriors with Spears (60 pts)

 I'm hitting the "boring" troop stage of my Mayan project - the ordinary warriors there to fill the ranks, mostly without fun accoutrements like feathers and jewelry. The nice thing is that units in Tribal are five figures, so I can batch paint a couple at a time without hitting the burnout sensation that trying to work through 20-30-figure regiments can trigger. 

This week, I've done two units of Warriors with Long Weapons - Tribal splits Warriors (melee combat units) into "Long" and "Short" weapons, with long weapons being spears and polearms, while short weapons are swords, clubs, axes, etc. The different weapon types gain bonuses when used with different tactics during play - long weapons being better at hindering your opponent and making it harder for them to win a round of combat, while short weapons favor straight forward bashing. 

These figures are once again from Lucid Eye, and are listed as "Jaguar Tribes" on their website. I've differentiated the units with red and green detailing, because otherwise they're almost the same sculpts across both units.

I like the variety, from nearly nude to quilted shirts and the brightly colored "long johns" style outfits, which are laced up the back. They do have shields, but those are going to wait for warmer weather to prime and paint. 

And a group shot of both units together, in case I'm ever using these for a game with ten-figure units:

 Yes, the guys wearing the quilted shirts are bare-assed. I guess they're too brave to worry about turning around and getting shot in the butt! 

And finally, I've finished a pair of Gringo 40s Maya casualty figures, painted to use as Panicked markers in Tribal. As you can see, trying to flock under and between their legs was a bit of a fool's errand; next time I'll flock the bases first and then glue the figure down on top of it. 

So that's 10 28mm figures at 5 points apiece, plus two prone casualty figures... call that 55 points all together? And no new squirrel points. 

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Sylvain: What a great project. I was always fascinated by precolonial warfare in central and south America because it seems so "exotic". And you bring it all up on the table top with very well painted and based miniatures. Excellent travail!

From HerrRobert: Quantity has a quality all its own (20 points)

The commander folded the paper with stiff fingers, aware that its phrasing allowed no appeal to weather, fuel, or enemy strength. Ahead, the forest line burned with intermittent muzzle flashes, and somewhere beyond it German guns waited patiently. The BA-20’s engine coughed into life, its tires biting into frozen mud. As the vehicle lurched forward, the commander understood that, not victory, not survival, but obedience, absolute and unquestioned is what mattered in the brutal winter of the Russian front.

My first entry for the 16th Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is a Soviet BA-20 armored car. It's a roughly 1/50 3D print I sourced off of ebay for a 1941 Chain of Command campaign several years ago. It sat in the primed pile of shame for years until The Cull warning approached, and I needed some quick points. So I picked it up, dusted it off, and got to work.

You can see a lot of the lines and layers of the 3d print in both the original and the photos, but I honestly think that works for Soviet vehicles in WW2.

For those of you wondering what a BA-20 is, Wikipedia provides a pretty decent summary, and several images of surviving BA-20s in various museums to use as inspiration. It's basically a Russian copy of a Ford truck, given a bit of armor and a 7.62mm machine gun. Since it was used in the Spanish Civil War, the Khalkin Gol incident in Mongolia, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Winter War with Finland, and the summer and winter fighting of 1941/1942 against the Germans, I wanted a pretty universal color scheme for maximum versatility. Fortunately, I found a few good examples in the Wikipedia article to copy:

I think I did a reasonable job approximating the plain green:

Paint choices were pretty simple. Prime with Vallejo Russian Green, paint over the primer with Vallejo Russian Uniform, wash with Army Painter Quickshade Military Green and paint the tires. I used craft paints for those, first Mondo Llama Fresh Pavement (available from Target), and then dry brushed with Apple Barrel Pavement. The goal was to get as close to the worn look of rubber tires in actual service.

Comparing to real world examples - not too bad!

It was reasonably simple to put together. The only difficult part was getting the axels to fit into the chassis, since the slots to glue them in were narrower than the axel pieces. Fortunately, the axels are the same width as my very large file, so some elbow grease and a lot of unkind words eventually solved the problem. 

I admit to a slight bit of cheating on the photos. As many of you know, I've always been trying to get the pure black background Curt uses in his photos, and I think I have finally cracked it, by having Preview on my Mac remove the background, so the black of the blog shows through. It has worked on these photos, so we'll see how it works on more complex ones in future entries. 

Scoring:

• 1 28mm(ish) vehicle @20 points per = 20 points

So that's it! I'm on the board and 20% of my way to my goal, and I now have a BA-20 ready to zoom off and scout, or maybe just get blown up. Only the dice gods know.

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Sylvain: Remarkable vehicle and paint job. The amount of research you did to find that "perfect color" is impressive. Excellent travail!