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Procopius

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Procopius last won the day on December 29 2022

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About Procopius

  • Birthday 15/03/1983

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    Chicago, but dreaming of a green and pleasant land.
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    You, baby, you.

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  1. The Helion Book is also infuriating in that despite the title, it doesn't actually cover the attack!
  2. 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:
  3. I feel like this is someone I could hang with.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. We get around, you know. And we're a very forgetful people.
  10. 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!
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. "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.
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