WIP JNA / Serbian M36

[Gunbird]

Right, slight deviation from my regular plans, a little sidestep to Yugoslavia. I've found a few locals who have plans to game Yugoslavia in 20mm and me, having a small collection of stuff collected for this period, has decided to hop in.

Received a box of Armourfast M36 in the mail last week as I wanted them as Yugoslavian M36's. Decided to make the following changes to make it passable as a JNA one als also a more detailed one.
-lamp brackets (ended up oversized but very recognisable)
-lifting hooks
-gun sight opening
-armoured roof
-step hold on the front of the tank hunter
-a strip of paper to it look like the tank without the muzzlebrake, which was common

What I decided not to do:
-change the engine decking and the rear vent (JNA ones were converted to T-55 engines)
-add track detail
-add the slopes to the top armour
-create a new muzzlebrake



Just need to mount the .50 on each and she is ready for Russian Green basecoat.

Coming from JNA stocks, most have seem to be used by the Croats, though the Serb (militias) used a few as well. Since my primary focus is on the Serbs,. both will be in weathered JNA green with just a number.






Though one of them is likely to receive a look like this:


I'm assuming here this one is Serb as I think I see their sign on the lower hull, and the vehicle it is passing is carrying the Eagle. Just have to enhance the picture a bit to get the writing right.

[Mathyoo]

Hey!

Great choice of conflict to wargame...not many people are interested in Yugoslav wars.

The easiest way to know if equipment is serbian is by the writings. Only serbs use cyrillic. What is bad in reality and good for the wargaming is, that conflict was so complicated, you can game pretty much anything. If you only pick Bosnia as your theatre, you can play serbs, croats, bosniaks, international mudjahids. Pretty much all of them have some kind of "regular army" and tons of so-called "special forces" or simply groups of irregulars.

What rules do you guys plan to use?

[Gunbird]

Thx for that hint, it sure helps.

Ruleswise nothing planned yet, with any luck the first game might not be in a years time from now. I've found a ton of stats for this in Cold War Commander, but the rulesset I'm edging to is Force on Force as the scale of that seems to suit it better plus the representation of the various troops should work fine in this. What I understand from the guys sofar is that they would like the possibility to make alliances, a bit of political scheming so to say, and that no army should be the best from the start. Though I'm tempering their plans of 100-200 troops and 5 tanks on each side, that be a bit much in FoF.

I've written down my ideas about it, including a map of the territory and being able to capture land for strategic and other purposes. Also a bit of pre and in game twists would be nice (equipment failures, weapon shipments, desertions etc) and it should not be too hard to make a table for that. I'm more into a heavy skirmish then major battles, the first giving me a much more Yugoslavia feel then the latter.

Interested at the moment is for Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Muslims, with me focussing on the Serbs and also making some equipment for the Croats.

Where this will go from here I don't know that, we are just emailing ideas back and forth, so it can go anywhere.

[Mathyoo]

Alliances would work well, because whole thing was pretty messy. I'm from Slovenia myself and we were done in 10 days, but it got a lot dirtier "down below". You had croats and muslims fighting each other, then banding together to fight off the serbs and then they continued where they left. The forces choices are pretty rich, too. You had international mujahids, local militias, bunch of so called "special forces", plust the army. In 1991 there was lots of desertion from JNA, as it was multi nationalised. But it was mostly serbian by the time conflict in Bosnia escalated.

And there are no "Bosnians" as such, the country is populated by "bosnian Serbs, orthodox", "bosnian Croats, catholics" and "Bosniaks, muslims".

The equipment is easy, as they all more or less shared the same, the militias also used civilian vehicles, which could be much fun to model. Like armoured tractors and trucks, full of sand and mortar on top.