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Procopius

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Everything posted by Procopius

  1. Last night I was desperate to have some indicator of progress on any front in my life, so I painted one (1) guy and based him. Nominally sumpfmuster 43, but it doesn't really show well. I also made bangers and mash (with mild Italian sausage playing the role of ersatz bangers), and made the onion gravy and mashed potatoes from scratch myself. Would my children even deign to try it? No they would not.
  2. The Helion Book is also infuriating in that despite the title, it doesn't actually cover the attack!
  3. Some actual progress over my rather hectic birthday weekend! (My mother in law, whose birthday is the day after mine, came to stay with us, so it was somewhat truncated.) I painted and based a 20mm platoon command squad of Fallschirmjager in Sumpfmunster 43 smocks. There are tulips on the base so you know it's the Netherlands. Mrs P cruelly played "Fields of Gold" by Sting when I made the mistake of showing her. As you can see, two guys have the helmet covers, three have the feldgrau soft cap, and one relentless individualist has the uncovered parachute helmet painted dunkelgelb with rotbraun and dunkelgrun brushstrokes added. I've seen that a lot on Normandy FJ, but neglected to consult my references to see if the replacement battalions of Fallschirmjager actually did so. Mea culpa. I've also been amusing myself printing some of the more eclectic units of the fighting: Kampfgruppe Chill allegedly had two Panzerjager R35s, converted from Renault 35s and sporting a Czech 47mm AT gun attached to it from the 304th Panzerjager Company. They must have found facing the Shermans of 44 RTR an enervating experience, to say the least. I'm fairly sure the FAC "Tentacles" in use in Market Garden were using the White Scout Car, but I couldn't resist the siren song of weird Commonwealth armoured cars:
  4. I feel like this is someone I could hang with.
  5. A boatload of 20mm metal figures: A platoon of US paratroopers and some supporting elements from Adler Miniatures, which will no doubt take some time, as they're retiring their napoleonic ranges and are deluged with orders from frantic grognards and Fallschirmjager and regular heer infantry from Simon's Soldiers in Australia. Every miniatures company making 20mm figures seems to be run by some genial wargamer in his sixties or seventies who's been playing miniatures games since Edward Heath was a going concern, and all of them are a delight to deal with, but Simon is particularly nice, reaching out to me to help me secure some extra HQ figures, throwing in copious extras, and all in all being extremely enthusiastic and helpful. And anyone who knows me knows how little I merit such consideration. Also two books of retold Greek mythology by Bernard Evslin for Winston, who is hooked on the wretched Percy Jackson books and might as well get some good versions of the tripe he's ingesting.
  6. Quartered Safe Out Here is a great book; the bit with the PIAT is a particular favourite. The first Flashman book suffers, I think, from the era it was written in; Flashy outright rapes a woman (which has real and painful consequences for him), but it's a little bit much to permit one to think of him as a cheeky rogue. In later books, the character is softened (as is, to some extent, GMF's opinion of the Victorians as a whole) and is much more palatable, although as a scale modeller, I find raw sexual magnetism difficult to relate to.
  7. I'm 41 (or will be next week), and so I'm a member of probably the last generation to have regular contact with people who lived through the war. My grandfather inflated weather balloons on Midway as a meteorologist (and may, based on his service record, been involved in supporting the first Privateer detachments in the USN's air service), but didn't really have much to tell or much interest in discussing the war, and my great uncle was an enlisted man in MacArthur's headquarters in the SWPA and beyond, and typed up the surrender document for the Japanese to sign (he shrewdly kept his carbons, which were donated to the MacArthur museum in Norfolk, VA, many years later). He was in Manilla shortly after its disastrous liberation, and did not care to discuss it. (This was typical of Uncle Walter; when he and his longtime companion Bob were mugged and knifed in the early 1980s, they were rushed to separate hospitals. Walter lived; Bob died. My parents went to pick him up after he was ready to come home -- he had been opened from stem to stern -- and when handed his shoes, covered with the blood of the person closest to him, he glanced at them, said "Well, I'll never wear these again," and threw them in the wastebin.) I always think of this passage in Achtung Schweinhund!, by Harry Pearson: As I endlessly tell people, as a small boy of nine or ten, I wrote a letter to the Spitfire Society's magazine, DCO, and asked pilots to write to me (as any normal child living in Middle America does), and quite a few did, and were rewarded in return with largely incoherent missives from a small, excited child who had access to an early version of Microsoft Word and could thus communicate without reliance on his unintelligible handwriting. But what I was trying to tell them, from the depths of my being, in a way I couldn't fully understand myself, was that I loved them, more than anything, more than my parents, more than my pets, and that on some elemental level for me, everything that made life bearable or worth living was in some way because of their efforts, however small they may have seemed. Stephen Bungay mentions in The Most Dangerous Enemy that for him it was like meeting one of Nelson's men, but I might go further. There's a passage in the Iliad, where Diomedes, the noblest of the Greek captains, "hefted a boulder in his hands, a tremendous feat—no two men could hoist it, weak as men are now, but all on his own he raised it high with ease," that I think of often; to me it was as if I were exchanging words with demigods. And while I know now that they were all fallible men (or boys, falling at ages young enough to make them a child to me), that has somehow only increased their stature in my eyes. And of course, being normal, healthy people, with a good sense of proportion, they would have found this ridiculous, if not embarrassing. As probably anyone should. Anyway, right now I'm slogging through To Hold the Westwall, nominally about Panzer-Brigade 105 in the autumn of 1944, by Timm Hassler, who is German and even if I didn't know that, his writing style is so Teutonic that it would be obvious to even a casual reader. The book relies heavily on primary source material (EG operational records, daily reports, etc), leavened with postwar extracts from veterans newspapers and reminiscences, and makes for very dry reading. One often gets a sense that the situation was extremely confused, but (perhaps due to translation from German) it's a very detached feeling, and typically all one learns of an action is something like "Panzerregiment 2105 sent detachments to Doopledorff (or wherever), but it is not known in what strength. However a Panther was knocked out on hotdogstrasse in Doopledorf by the Americans at 2230, and this must have been the rearguard. Eight men were killed." Riveting stuff. The sheer effort to comb through both American and German archives is not easily dismissed, however, and a lot of work clearly went into this. As I putter along on aimless and meaningless wargaming projects, including recreating part of Panzer-Brigade 107, it had a lot of very useful information on the composition of Panzer-Brigades and how they were formed. Between this and my recent reading on Market Garden (and my attempts to find good sources on the fighting along Hell's Highway), one really gets a sense of how small the actions were that were taking place during these huge offensive movements, often a battalion or two, fighting along a very wide front, the "empty battlefield" we hear so much about, and which wargames are so poor at showing.
  8. The hideously expensive Kampfraum Arnheim, 2nd Edition, by RZM Publishing. Hope it's good. 1/72 Special Hobby Suez F-84F The Roer River Battles: Germany's Stand at the Westwall, 1944-45 by David Higgins And the Polar Lights 1/2500 Strange New Worlds iteration of the USS Enterprise, for Mrs P, who likes it for Spock-related reasons that I choose to remain as ignorant of as possible.
  9. I don't mind lack of supports as much any more, since every printer I've owned has been as eccentric as its owner (they especially hate tyres), so custom supports are almost always the order of the day. I've printed a LOT of Horus Heresy miniatures, including a bunch of Night Lords I just gave away to someone local who actually plays the game. The last guy was for Winston, who's probably broken it by now. Anyway, along with a bunch of building pieces I printed for a local fella who sells terrain (I don't do paid prints for people, because that imposes expectations and responsibility upon me, two things which I have historically handled quite poorly, so I typically just barter if someone wants something printed, or refuse to do it outright if I don't wanna), the last of my Tiger II turrets is printed and waiting to cure.
  10. We get around, you know. And we're a very forgetful people.
  11. My promise to myself is that if I actually "finish" any of these, I'll do some Rhine Crossing LVTs with Polstens, as there's a nice STL out there for them. I love the Quar! I love the setting so much that I offered to do some additional writing for it to the creator and leveraged my experience as a fourth-or-fifth stringer writing for BattleTech, and putting myself out there is something I never, ever do. Hopefully some of what I wrote for it will see print some day. It took forever to figure out how to print them properly, let me just tell you. Some King Tigers (yes, yes, I know that's not their real name) came out of the printer after two 25-hour print sessions, seen here after priming: Of course, AFTER I printed them, I read up on the Tiger IIs at Arnhem, and the one photo of one appears to have the production turret (also, I learned about eighteen hours ago, erroneously known as the Henschel turret): Mercifully, the turrets take a lot less work to reprint than say, the hull. Ultimately I'll have four hulls, four pre-production turrets, and three production turrets, and I can swap out turrets as needed. I've also, I think, reached an end to my long-running saga of attempting to print an airborne jeep. Jeeps (and Kubelwagons, and Sdkfz 222s with their stupid mesh anti-grenade screens) suck to print. Airborne jeeps, lacking the windscreen, are somewhat easier. I know Airfix makes a 1/72 airborne jeep, but they really did not do a good job of making it an airborne jeep. So I found an STL online for sale, only to discover that while it was nominally 1/56, it was actually in 28mm "heroic" scale, which made it something like 15% larger than it needed to be. Then I had to ask the designer to remove the front-mounted spare tire as it was a weird shape and size, which he kindly did, and then I stretched my Blender skills (nonexistent) well beyond their theoretical limits to modify the Vickers K gun mount that came in the fileset. As supplied, it was a twin mounting, as was used by the SAS (and incidentally on armoured cars as the PLM mount), but 1st Airborne Division had two different Vickers K single mountings in use on their recce jeeps, one modified from an M1919 mount and the other from the PLM mount. The latter is both weird looking, and incredibly distinctive. Additionally, the files as suppled had the handles on the sides of the jeep, which were removed on the airborne versions, so I had to shear those off in 3D builder as best I could. I ended up using the wheels from another set of Jeep files, as I liked them better: Ta-da!
  12. Yes, the one at Overloon looks amazing, I wish they shipped books overseas; I'm likely going to have to buy some stuff from them and have it sent to a friend in Germany for him to send on to me.
  13. I mostly shop at https://www.wargaming3d.com/ for this sort of stuff, despite its terrible search function and generally bad interface. I imagine that owing to the pernicious influence of Team Yankee, most modern AFVs will be 15mm. I have some really nice BAOR stuff from Bob Mack, but he doesn't do the French as yet.
  14. "There you go again. Always getting wounded. What a silly bottom I was to come and talk to you in the middle of a battle." -- Lieutenant Colonel John Frost DSO MC to Acting-Major Douglas Crawley MC, immediately after they were both injured by a very near miss from the same mortar bomb during the fighting in Arnhem in 1944. I semi-recently came to the conclusion that the fighting in the Netherlands in 1944-45 was probably the most interesting and fertile period for me as far as wargaming went. It has lots of interesting late-war equipment, many interesting units, and the presence of most of the Western Allies, sometimes even in the same battle, which is a rarity. On the German side, there are lots of weird units, including Luftwaffe ground personnel, some presumably extremely confused and alarmed supernumerary Kriegsmarine crews serving as infantry, tons of flak-armed SPWs, and even a tank or two. I further concluded that since I'm wasting a lot of time on this to no real effect, I ought to document it here and at least keep my oar in. Since I -- purely in theory, unless I can make friends, or convince the children to play Battlegroup Market Garden -- want to cover a few major battles, I opted to focus on a few different units and sort of roughly replicate their TO&Es for platoon or company-scale 1:1 wargaming: The Irish Guards Group (possibly to be amended to the Grenadier Guards or Coldstream Guards Group) with Sherman Vs, Bedford QLT trucks, and M5A1 halftracks The 15/19 Hussars, with Cromwells and Challengers 44 Royal Tank Regiment, with Sherman IIs and Sherman Fireflies 1 Airborne Brigade and 1st Airlanding Brigade, 1st Airborne Division, inevitable, but I wanted to also do several units from the 1st Airlanding Brigade, Gough's recce jeep squadron and the 17-pounders in particular. 43rd (Wessex) Division, DUKWs! SS-Aufklärung-Abteilung 9: Graebner's reconnaissance regiment, as made famous by A Bridge Too Far. Sdkfz 10s, Sdkfz 250s, Sdkfz 251s, Sdkfz 222s, Sdkfz 231 (8-rad), Ford V3000 trucks and others Panzer-Brigade 107/Kampfgruppe Walther: Panther Vs, Jagdpanzer IV/70(V)s, Sdkfz 251s Panzer-Kompanie 224, Char B1/Panzerkampfwagen B-2(f) flammpanzer, Renault R-35 The US 7th Armored Division, with M4A3 and M4A3 (76) Shermans and M3 Halftracks 504 PIR, 82nd Airborne Division: The guys who did the Waal crossing, and also a rarity in Market Garden, US airborne troops still principally in the M42 uniform worn on D-Day. 506 PIR, 101st Airborne Division: I was hoping to avoid doing the Band of Brothers guys, because they're so overdone, but they were in a lot of fighting on Hell's Highway against Panzer Brigade 107, and so I have to bite the bullet. And assorted flotsam and jetsam. To do all of this, I'm relying on my Elegoo Saturn 8K 3D printer, which is arguably an improvement over my old Photon Mono 4K, although I struggle to get consistent results with it. For figures, I've found that resin printing, at least as done by me, is not ideal for producing 1/72 or 20mm wargaming figures, and so I'm using a mix of AB, Adler, FAA, and Simon's Soldiers metal figures (so far). Fileswise, I've gotten my best results with 1/56 or 28mm files meant for Bolt Action players, resized down to 77.78% size for 1/72 scale. Some WIP so far: Printed German stuff. Trucks are hard to print, as are halftracks, due to the suction cups formed by their open beds or interiors. The machine guns are quite fine at 1/72 and have been another source of misprints. I snuck in the two Panhard 178s used by the 10th SS-Panzer because they are beautiful and I wanted an excuse to print some. At least one of these was knocked out during the Germans' failed post-Market Garden counteroffensive. A Char B1 Flammpanzer, the Tiger of its day, next to a lowly Sherman V. At least one German Char was hit by a 17-pounder in Oosterbeek, and the result shows the relative power of 1944 weapons against 1940 AFVs: Cromwell IV (Type F hull) with a Sherman V and two FAA Miniatures US airborne, mounted on the cheapest bases I could find. Some of Graebner's trucks had oil drums filled with sand loaded in the back, either as improvised armour, or, as Christer Bergstrom contends, to use as barricades once they broke through and joined the blocking force preventing the rest of 1st Airborne Division from reaching the bridge. After printing these, I read that the Irish Guards Group may have used Sherman dozers, rather than armoured D7s. Oh well. I had to reprint all the turrets after I learned that the Guards Armoured Division's Shermans appeared to have universally lacked the cheek armour. Ho-ho-ho. The (A30) Challenger is a very stupid tank, and I love it anyway. They seem to have done reasonably well in Market Garden, and 15/19 Hussars at least were very sad when the replacement pipeline dried up and they got Fireflies. It's Holland. Starting to paint the details, including the rubber on allllllllllllllllllll the roadwheels. Axis armour. Jagdpanthers were present in Overloon and in action right before Market Garden during the fighting for Joe's Bridge. You would not believe how few early-model Jagdpanther files there are out there. My very rough attempt at matching the camo scheme of Panzer-Brigade 107. I still need to print their schurzen. More later, hopefully.
  15. Two 1/72 Special Armour Sd.kfz 10 halftracks, for wargaming purposes. Which is very rational, as I have no opponents and no compelling reason to do Grabner's last ride in 1/72 and 20mm, yet here we are.
  16. The problem with 3D printing (aside from the toxic fumes and ungodly mess) is that it goes through nitrile gloves so quickly that I have none to spare for airbrushing.
  17. To distract myself from the strong urge to throttle my older two children: Two boxes of 1/72 PSC Sdkfz 250 neu One box of PSC 1/72 Humber II/IVs One box of PSC 1/72 Sdkfz 231s Grabner's last ride is much on the brain.
  18. I apologize wholeheartedly if I left you with the impression that I know what I'm doing and thus have no need of advice!
  19. A bunch of AB Figures 20mm WWII miniatures, because with no social circle in my immediate area, I definitely need to start getting and painting wargaming stuff again. In the same vein, I bought some 1/56 scale/28mm kits from Warlord Games: two Sdfkz 231s, an airborne jeep with Vickers K and trailer, and an SdfKz 10 with a flak gun on it, as I have a box of 28mm British airborne lying around as well. In my head, I always have ambitious visions (game out Grabner's last ride, a decidedly one-sided fight between five armoured cars, some half tracks, schwimmwagens, and the mightiest weapon in the 9th SS's arsenal, a motley assortment of Fords, Renaults, and Opels with cement filled drums as field expedient armour on one side, versus a crack paratrooper battalion with two six-pounders astride a chokepoint -- who wouldn't want to play the Germans in that?) that rely upon me having more world and time than I could possibly ever have. Also, of late, a bunch of somewhat more terrestrial reference material than I normally read: The World War II GI: US Army Uniforms 1941-45 in Color Photographs The World War II Tommy: British Army Uniforms, European Theatre 1939-45 The British Soldier: From D-Day to VE-Day For King and Country: British Airborne Uniforms, Insignia, and Equipment in World War II Plus both volumes of The Montgomery Papers from the Army Record Society.
  20. Please feel free! I find it's cathartic to say what's bothering you (my sister claims my love language is complaining, which, uh, my posting history here certainly bears out). Possibly it doesn't. That's of course the horror of being a parent, you don't really know; you're just groping your way through the dark, and not the fun kind, more the navigating an unfamiliar cave sort. I was not a good child. Ultimately, I ran way from home and lived in grinding poverty for several years; I'm trying desperately to forestall that fate for Win. There's little wrong with Winston that wasn't wrong with me; much of it I still struggle with to this day. I had hoped my problems were due to nurture, not nature, but being a parent has badly shaken my belief in the primacy of nurture over nature, because we are radically different parents than my own, and yet with Winston I see a clear echo of myself. But I wanted to emphasize to him the permanent nature of the consequences he would face for doing something like this outside the home. I live in a largely Jewish area (I am not, but my parents keep kosher, long story), and there are frequent police reports of anti-Semitic graffiti in the area. I'm sure 90% of it is just bored teenagers doing something that means less than nothing to them, with little actual malice beyond "scaring the straights" or whatever, like Siouxsie of the Banshees wearing swastika jewelry in France in the 1970s. But my favourite Aristophanes quote has always been "boys throw stones in sport, but the frogs die in earnest". The people who are frightened by these things can't be certain who did them or why, they only know how it makes them feel. And, as Siouxsie Sioux discovered when she got a vicious thumping from some Frenchman in their fifties, their response can have little to do with your intent. Yes. And that's the crux of it. I know my parents' methods didn't work on me. Possibly my faltering attempts won't work on him, and he'll have to learn in a harder school than the one I offer. But I have to try.
  21. Winston carved a swastika into the dining room table yesterday. He was not in trouble at all, so it wasn't out of revenge. I had let him have a pair of model clippers and glue to build some of the model soldiers he got for Christmas. He used the clippers I gave him to gouge it into the table while he was building a German figure. He has already gotten in trouble for drawing one at school, in front of a Jewish classmate. We have talked to him, multiple times, about why this is not acceptable. I have certainly not been ambiguous about how much I hate the symbol and all it stands for. So it's not like he doesn't know what it means. To say I'm heartbroken and incandescent with fury wouldn't be going far enough. He is my greatest creation and I don't even want to look at him. It was imperative that he understand that there are real, permanent consequences for doing things like this. I threw out all of his Christmas presents, as much to punish him in a way he would feel as to punish myself for failing so comprehensively as a parent. It will be a very long time, if ever, before he's allowed to build a model again. Yesterday was my worst day as a parent so far. Even when I thought his skull was fractured and he was dying, and I had to hold him down for the CAT scan, that was easier than this. I had him help me putty and sand the table down, and stained it today, which his brother, who has all the balance of a two-legged tripod, promptly put his hand in. So I'll stain it again tomorrow and he can seal it with me. Mrs P (and my mother-in-law, who isn't shy about letting me know her opinion, which is as welcomed as it is desired) feels like I shouldn't talk about this sort of stuff, but after working in social media for a decade, I'm just so tired of people pretending everything is great and that they do everything well, and all of that stupid artifice. I realize this is just Winston's ADHD made manifest, again, and I know little boys seek out transgressive behaviour almost as a matter of course. But even discarding the moral dimension, if he did it at school and a parent decided to go to the matresses over it, Mrs P could lose her job. He could destroy his own life before it's begun. I just wish that just once, just once, something I tell him could penetrate the whorled recesses of his mind and enable him escape from his solipsism to feel empathy for anyone else, even if only for a moment.
  22. Well, the water heater repair bill came. $700. I'm calling today, hopefully there was a mistake (but I doubt it). In other news: I'd love to say this was great and a good time was had by all, but while they didn't have a bad time, they soon tired of it and it became very clear to me why a normal sane person would not invest a month of their one precious life on earth to set this up. Oh well, I tried. This means I should stop painting 28mm guys, since they'll just lie fallow, but for some reason I bought some 1/56 SdKfz 232 with the insane idea of doing Grabner's last ride at Arnhem, which has now got me trying to figure out what trucks he used with his armored cars and halftracks. OTOH, Maddie quite enjoyed her applesauce. Grant, who appears to have inherited his mother's dyslexia, is in tutoring for reading and writing, with perhaps predictable results:
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