Tactical Painter's Second World War in 20mm (updated 07 09 25)

[TacticalPainter]

Good work, as normal for you.

I once explained the wheel sub assembly for the Airfix Churchill thus:-
Imagine balancing a row of peas on a knife, then trying to match a second knife on top of the peas. 

Ah, then you don't know that the wheels are spaced on the sprue exactly right to fit into the chassis. You can glue them in place while still on the sprue and then cut them off once glue has dried. It doesn't solve all the issues by any means, but it does make that particular exercise a lot easier!

[Skipper]

It's been a long time since I built one of those.  And this would have been nice to know then. So much for my powers of observation.

 Ice job on the figures.

Skipper

[has.been]

Ah, then you don't know that the wheels are spaced on the sprue exactly right to fit into the chassis. You can glue them in place while still on the sprue and then cut them off once glue has dried. It doesn't solve all the issues by any means, but it does make that particular exercise a lot easier!

Ah, but I was a naïve 11 year old & Airfix said that if I wanted the tracks to work the bogies
MUST NOT be glued. I wanted the tracks to move.... Airfix lied to me.

[TacticalPainter]

Vespid are a relative newcomer to 1/72 plastic kits, but so far they’ve produced a few very good models. I’ve added this Comet Ia to give me something for my late war British force. The crew are from AB Fgures.





Together with the Cromwell (from Armourfast) and a Sherman Firefly (from PSC) that gives me a few British manufactured (or adapted) tanks.



The Comet has a few features similar to the Cromwell but is a superior tank (and you can see within it the origins of the design that would eventually be the Centurion).

[CapnJim]

Aaahh.  Another dose of nice-looking tanks.  Thanks for posting!

[Wellington Bonaparte]

Wonderful thread, the breadth of your painting skills is breath taking, loved every tank and plane and to think they are 20mm is astonishing. 

[Hoagie]

Impressive as always! How does the Vespid kit go together? Well fitted? Haven't heard of them before.

[TacticalPainter]

Impressive as always! How does the Vespid kit go together? Well fitted? Haven't heard of them before.

Excellent fit, they are very good kits. The range is smallish at the moment but always growing, a mix of WW2 and modern subjects. I have one of their Panthers and that’s a lovely kit too.

[CapnJim]

Lovely work on that panther...

[TacticalPainter]

Despite the fact I've been posting a lot of British vehicles lately, I've started a Chain of Command campaign set in the Hurtgen Forest, so they won't be seeing any action there. This campaign is against a friend who I've been teaching the rules. I won't be posting full game reports of this on the blog, so thought I'd share a few terrain pictures here.

As always with a forest/jungle table the challenge is actually filling the table with appropriate terrain. For Hurtgen I wanted mainly pine trees, but don't really have enough (I made a batch for our Bloody Bucket campaign in the Ardennes, but not near enough to fill a table). I've also wanted to alter those trees I had made to give them bigger trunks and more height (coincidentally also making them much more game friendly). The original trees were based in twos and threes on bases like this:



For our first game in the Hurtgen, I experimented by using wood dowel to make longer tree trunks for some of the trees. I did it with only a few but I liked the effect.





It probably works best with the larger trees and so you won't be surprised to learn I've ordered another batch of them off eBay. Meantime, I've converted the rest of my existing pine trees. What I particularly like is the fact it improves the look of the forest and makes it much easier to place figures.



And of course, there is no real 'scale' for trees. What is a big tree for a 20mm figure, is a smaller tree for a 28mm figure.....



I can see lots of uses for these be it from the Ardennes to Hurtgen or East Prussia to North America.

[BeneathALeadMountain]

Great stuff TP! As a retired surgeon (of trees ) I?ve been struggling with a similar issue and settled on a very similar solution. I know it?s only toys on a table but the under sizing of trees (and them all being wolf trees) does tend to make me tick. It?s finding the sweet spot between correct height (far too big even in 15mm) and practicality.Having scoured YouTube for model railway tree making guides I settled on making mine using guttering protector (hedgehog something?) and dowels and they look great but are quite labour intensive (and hard on the hands). I?ve gone for relatively regimented (but not necessarily forested) multiple bases for those taller, dowelled trees away from the parameter with smaller, group bases of varying sized wolf trees for edges. Overly complicated and a detail I?d imagine only I?ll appreciate but like you I can?t wait until I can populate a table with a reasonable amount.

Thank you for the ongoing inspiration,

Andrew
BeneathALeadMountain

[TacticalPainter]

Staying with terrain, this is an MDF kit. Made by Warbases but only sold through 172 Scale Miniatures (as far as I'm aware, as it's not available through the Warbases website). As I've done with other MDF buildings for the Far East this one was clad in textured craft paper that does a good job of breaking the sharp lines and flat surfaces that are so distinctive with laser cut models.







Couldn't resist trying a picture with an appropriate backdrop to see the scene:

[HerbertTarkel]

Beautiful armour, and that far east house looks amazing with the textured cladding - fantastic! 

[has.been]

Good job on the building.

[fred]

That textured paper is super effective.

Would be good if the European models came with brick effect paper!