Nice work on the Russians.
Nice muszkas, Freddy!
Freddie, great work.
Thank you!
I was in the Budapest Military Museum last weekend and was quite inspired. I haven't studied 19th century "Central Euope" since my school days 45 years ago. I may look at the period with Sharp Practice in mind. For the Austrians Osprey produce a 2 volume series on their forces of the period in their Men-at-Arms range.
Yes, it is a great museum, you could check the broad bladed sabre of general Damjanich I mentioned in the opening post
I have the Osprey books, but even with two books, their size is simply too short for sufficiently covering such a long period. They have nice pictures though.
SJWi: skirmish isn't my thing at all, but if it's yours, this war has so much scope for unusual actions. Hussars darting into a town just to raise a Hungarian flag as a gesture. Abduction of a sick Austrian officer. Insurgent actions of all kinds. Epic sieges and associated sorties, assaults and relief attempts. Swimming across rivers to steal or burn ship-mills that can be used as bridges. Raids to capture supplies, cattle, or thoroughbred horses from imperial stud farms. And so on.
...and thats before you start to involve the 1848 stories of classical Hungarian literature
Very nice coloring of the miniatures. One can feel the hakarket of the warriors of Nicholas 1
I really liked it
Lovely brushwork Freddy on the Russians.
Thank you! regarding the colour, I used my standard recipe for ,,Russian yellow", I use the same to paint Russian uniforms for ww1, ww2 and Cold War era (Soviet-Afghan war). After a lot of experimenting, it is:
-preferably a white basecoat
-Tamiya XF60 Dark Yellow base colour
-GW Athonian Camoshade wash
-a little GW Badab Black wash in the lower areas where more shadow is needed
-minor corrections with Dark Yellow where the wash is too much
-white drybrush
As I said, they came from a Warlord Games Crimean bundle: 3 boxes of infantry and the two canons (with 4-4 crew). The infantry boxes have 4*6 gunmen on plastic sprues:
and also a command team of 4 men, but the drummer and the two banner bearers being headless (intended to use leftover heads from the plastic sprues):
I tried to maximize the pickelhaube heads in my Russian army, but, as you can see, I do not have enough, so I will have one battalion with field caps. I do not know what was the real ratio, but I try to avoid rag-tag look, these soldiers were from a standing army relatively fresh to the conflict, so neither hastily equipped, nor battle worn too much.
This, and the 3 next battalions form the "red-red" regiment: the first regiment of the standard Russian division. It had 4, the second being the ,,red collar-white epaulette" one, with my 80 little soldiers I will able to fill these 2, so a full brigade.
Another characteristic feature of the Warlord box is that everyone is wearing greatcoat. Despite the Hungarian campaign of Nicholas I. took place in late spring and summer of 1849, this is not a problem, Russian soldiers liked the greatcoat in every time of the year, in warm weather they simply wore it without a jacket (so right over their shirt). The summer trousers were white, I had to be careful for that (the cold weather trousers were green).
One last thing to mention is that the Warlord sprues have mixed soldiers with and without swords, swords were the equipment of the grenadiers, who formed the first comany of every (4 company) battalion. They did not differ from regular soldiers otherwise, so on battalion level it is OK to mix sworded and swordless guys, on lower level I will have to be careful.
As I said, my first approach is Black Powder. The Honvéds and the Imperial line regiments will have the standard line infantry profile, the Russians will have 1 point lower shooting for their often insufficient shooting training and lower quality muskets (they used flintlocks, which proved unreliable especially in wet conditions compared to the Ausrian/Hungarian standard percussion muskets), on the other hand they will get +1 to Stamina reflecting their bigger battalion size and their stubborn/unswerving approach of warfare on every level from the drill of the individual soldier to the battle plan.
Then we will see other systems too (BBB
)
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There is a little town in Transylvania called Körösfeketetó (due to the Versailles treaties after ww1 Romania took it, the Romanian name is Negreni), there is a traditional fair there in every October. It is a huge one, mostly a big flea market, we visited it this weekend. I am always looking for books in these places, and look what I got this time. The history of the Freedom War, 3 volume, straight outta 1894, in great (regarding its age of 120+ years...) condition .
19 March 2016, 02:41:05 PM
