Paint Desk Saturday

A motley bunch in progress.  I want to finish the odds and ends off before I tackle the next whole unit.

Front left, GW LOTR Orc drummer (Minas Death Metal Battaltion), and on the right, a RAFM adventurer who will probably be recruited into my Weird War project

Centre, a lovely a dangerous Wargames Foundry elf from their defunct Realms of Faerie range, who I am painting as a supplication to spring.

Back row, first of the Bob Murch Yukon adventurers for my Rockies Ablaze project.

Blessings to your brushes!

Diplomacy Game: Spring 1904 Results Are In

Results for the Spring 1904 Turn (Turn 7) of our PBB Diplomacy Game are now in.

Austrian and Turkish troops movements indicate a high degree of trust between the two powers, while Italy appears to be taking a prudent stance as the Turks move into the neighbourhood.   Russia’s fortunes continue to ebb, and more German troops arrive in a quiescent England.  France continues to fight on, though once again Marseilles changes hands.

The Daily Dissembler is tracking all this mayhem. and there are rumours that Miss Amelia Roosevelt has taken the Orient Express to seek an audience with the Sultan.

 

Results for Spring, 1904 (Movement)
    
General Notices:
    
Order resolution completed on 01-Apr-2016 at 16:34:29 EDT
    
Order Results:
    
 Austria:

 A gal Supports A sil - war;  F gre - alb; A ser - bud; A sil - war; A vie Holds
      
England:

No order for unit at London. Hold order assigned.

No order for unit at Mid-Atlantic Ocean. Hold order assigned.

No order for unit at Portugal. Hold order assigned.

A  lon Holds; 

 F mao Holds  Dislodged from wes (2 against 1). 

 England: F por Holds
      
France:

 F eng Supports F wes -mao; 

A mar - gas Bounced with spa (1 against 1). Dislodged from pie (2 against 1). 

F wes - mao
      
 Germany:

A ber Holds; A edi - lvp; F hel - den; A hol - yor

Convoy path taken: hop - nth - yor. 
A kie - ruh;  A mun Holds;  F nth  Convoys A hol - yor
      
Italy:

F lyo Supports A pie - mar; A pie - mar; 

A spa - gas Bounced with mar (1 against 1). 

A tun HoldsI; F tys - nap
      
    
 Russia:

F nwg - cly; A stp Supports A ukr - mos;
 A ukr - mos; Bounced with mos (2 against 2). 

A war - gal Bounced with gal (1 against 1). Dislodged from sil (2 against 1). 

        
Turkey:

F aeg - ion; A bul - rum; A con - bul; F ion - tys;  

A mos Supports A sil - war Support cut by Move from Ukraine. 

 F rum -  bla; A sev Supports A mos
      

We are now in the Retreats Phase.  The following units must retreat:

English F MAO must retreat.  Possible retreats: NAO, IRI, BRE, NAF (still waiting to hear where the English will retreat to)

French A MAR must retreat.  Possible retreats:  BUR  (French retreat to BUR)

Russian A WAR must retreat.  Possible retreats:  PRU, LIV (Russians retreat to LIV)

Imagining Wars To Come: Science Fiction, the Military, and the Wargamer

 

State of the art science fiction - future tank from Alexander Korda's Things to Come (1936)

 

 

As a wargamer, I'm not drawn much to SF (unless one counts a handful of W40K figures left over from my son's adolescence).   I tried WW3 based microarmour when I was an undergraduate, but it all seemed very deadly and rather tedious to me.   I do enjoy listening to other gamers imagine future conflicts - there was a very good thread on the Too Fat Lardies email list some months back with some very good commentary. I respect people like Robert Avery, whose undersung Quadrant 13 rules seem like an honest attempt to look far into the future using a simple gradient of tech levels.  However  I suspect there's a far future event horizon beyond which we simply can't imagine what war would be like, since we have no way of really envisioning future technologies, human or alien,

 

As a soldier, however, I take great comfort in knowing that my peers in the areas of strategy, doctrine, research and development spend a of time imagining what war in the near future will look like, even given our well-known predilection for imaging that the next war will look like the last war..   A book I reviewed recently on my other blog outines US military research in broad strokes, and includes an interesting piece on how the Pentagon is not adverse to picking the brains of science fiction writers.

 

There's an interesting collection of SF short stories available free here.  A US military think tank, the Atlantic Council Future Warfare Project, pulled together a number of smart writers and published their work online in a collection called War Stories From the Future. The collection includes a forward by General Martin Dempsey, who was te 18th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, which tells you that this was not seen as a flake project.  Some of the contributors are well known SF writers like David Brin, and others are young newcomers. 

 

You won't find aliens or ray guns in this collection.  Instead, you'll see how much netcentric command and control systems, the computer and satellite systems by which today's miltaries are controlled, concern commanders as advantages and laibilities from kinetic attack in orbit or cyber attack on the ground.    Of my two favourites, one is "A Stopped Clock" (Madeline Ashby), which envisions a modern Asian city being shut down by cyber attack, and it's citizens trying to cope - it's a modern update of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".  My other favourite is Linda Nagata's "Codename Delphi", in which a small unit of US troops in armoured exoskeletons operating in an asymetric environment are still vulnerable and dependent on a  remotely-located civilian battlespace manager giving them real time intelligence and telemetry updates.  

 

Some of the stories are downright tedious and poorly written, but they all have something to say about what war will probably look like at some point in the 21st century.

 

So here's a question.  If you were to design a wargame or rules system for, say, 2060, how might it look different from war today?  Autonomous hunter-killer robots?  Advanced UAVs?  Enhanced human soldiers with neural networks and load-bearing exoskeletons?  Jammers to negate C3 systems?   How would you preserve the importance of the human element (leadership, training, morale, endurance) while modeling disparities in tech levels between combatants^

 

What would your near-future war look like or would you even want to go there?

 

 

Thatch Patch and Rohan Defenders

Thanks to all the folks who responded to my crowd-sourced request for advice on some Dark Ages thatch roofing for my Sarissa model.  The consensus of the hive-mind was that my roof, made of chopped up bits of washcloth, looked too white.  I had saved some bits so used your advice and test-painted a strip, using a base coat of dlluted Brown Umber craft paint, and then, once dried, a heavy dry brush of yellow ochre.  It looked pretty good, so I went for it.

 My faithful reader Dai Dead sent me a photo of his mum’s thatched cottage in the UK, which made me think I was on the right path.   The photo reminded me of Madame Padre’s favourite mystery series, Midsomer Murders, a Netflix staple chez nous, where half of England seems to live in quaint thatched cottages, when they’re not murdering one another.   I would never venture into the English countryside, as judging by that show, the murder rate must be catastrophic. Mind you, it’s all nasty toffs killing toffs, so I guess Canadian tourists are safe.

 I now have a cottage to form the nucleus of a village to defend in my Dux Rohirrim project.   Here are two finished Rohan defenders to protect it.  These are two of the three figures I gratefully received from my 2015 Secret Santa, from the Foundry Casting Room Miniatures Dark Ages Saxon line.  I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t be Rohan Royal Guardsman or part of the retinue of a Lord of the Riddermark.

 The chap on the right, with his more ornate cloak and helmet, seems a likely captain of an elite eored (a company of 120 men) and the lancer one of the captain’s hearth guards.  They are a little more armoured than the GW Riders of Rohan models I’ve seen, but none the worse for it.  The horses are big, substantial brutes, with long bases, too long to fit on the GW plastic bases that ship with their cavalry models, so they will stand out in base width from my GW Rohirrim, but I’m not too worried about that.  Likewise their shields are bigger than ones the GW sculpts carry, and they are missing the quivers and bows that the GW Riders carry, but since these are elite shock cavalry, I can live without those features.

 I’ve tried to follow the greens and browns that distinguish my other Rohirrim, which I admit is the same palette that characterizes the Rohirrim in the SirPJ films.

 Nice embroidery on the captain’s cloak.    Makes him look suitably important.

Blessings to your brushes!

These figures bring my 2016 totals to:

28mm:  Foot Figures: 29; Mounted Figures: 3; Buildings: 1

6mm:  Mounted figures:  36;  Buildings:  2

Your Latest Daily Dissembler, Your Guide to a Quaint and Distant World in Flames

The latest edition of the Daily Dissembler, your guide to Europe in flames, is now available for discerning readers everywhere.  (For those not in the know, this is the latest newsletter from our ongoing play by blog Diplomacy Game. This issue includes creative and much appreciated copy by the Turkish and German players.

 

In this issue (link here) you will find:

Miss Amelia Roosevelt, America’s Girl Reporter, describes her exclusive meeting with the Kaiser.

Sir Erasmus Blatt’s perspicacious analysis of the European situation.

An eye-witness account of the Fall of Moscow!

Also, as an extra feature, we provide the latest English language news from Turkey, a Rising Power.   While the issue is included in the Dissembler, you can find a crisper imprint of the Ankara What here.

 

Diplomacy Game: 1903 Build Phase Complete

Our online Diplomacy game has now finished six complete turns and we have now completed the Adjustments Phase.

Austria, England, and Italy neither had to remove or got to build units.

Two countries had to disband units because they have insufficient Supply Centres.  France removed A Bur and Russia removed F Nwy.

Two countries gained Supply Centres and got to build units.   Germany built A Ber and A Kie.  Turkey built A Con.

Here is the leaderboard:

Turkey: Ankara, Bulgaria, Constantinople, Moscow, Rumania, Sevastopol, Smyrna (7 total).

Germany: Belgium, Berlin, Denmark, Edinburgh, Holland, Kiel, Munich (7 total).

Italy: Naples, Rome, Spain, Tunis, Venice (5 total).

Austria: Budapest, Greece, Serbia, Trieste, Vienna (5 total).

Russia: Norway,  St. Petersburg, Sweden, Warsaw (4 total).

England: Liverpool, London, Portugal (3 total).

France: Brest, Marseilles, Paris (3 total).

    

Here are the dispositions at the start of Turn 7, S1904.

 

The deadline for orders for this turn is 31 March, though that date may move up if everyone gets their orders to me before then.   Watch for an issue of the Daily Dissembler to hit new stands in the next day or so.

Blessings to your intrigues.

Dark Ages Thatch Match?

 As part of my Dux Rohirrim project, this is a Sarissa model, Timber A Frame, from their 28mm Dark Ages range.  I wanted a few buildings to be tempting targets for orc raiders and this has a useful generic feel without taking up too large a footprint on the table.   

I am crowdsourcing some advice on the thatch whether to paint it or leave it alone.

The Sarissa kit comes with a plain wood roof, scored to suggest planking, but gives some suggestions for thatch.  I stole an idea from a wargaming blogger (I wish I could remember who) on using terrycloth bath towels as thatch. I found a beige wash cloth at Walmart, chopped it into sections and glued them onto the roof.   

 

This reconstruction of a Dark Ages hut from a dig in the Cheviots in the UK looks a little more brown to my eye, but truth be told, a google search of dark ages thatched roofs shows a variety of colours and textures.

Any thoughts?

Blessings to your buildings!

MP+