It's well past due, but the time has come for me to move this blog to something with a little better performance. I have hosted it on my own Linux box since 2002, and it was an old piece of scrap then. I had a few choices. I could have bought a beefier server to install it on, and have come close a few time. But, even if I don't buy top of the line, that's a few hundred dollars that don't go towards miniatures, so, you know, that's a negative. I could have hosted a virtual server on our family's more modern Windows XP machine, but I think that's going to be more trouble than it's worth, plus I'm still hosting it out of my house. I could pay for a hosting service on the Internet (and still might), but right now the easiest option seems to simply move the blog content to a new service. So that's what I'm going to do. The new home will be http://littleleadheroes.wordpress.com (currently working to move it over), but don't change your links just yet. It may still move somewhere else, but I will always be pointing http://www.littleleadheroes.com/ at the current location. The gallery will reside on the old server at www2.littleleadheroes.com for a while longer...I'm not seeing an easy way to move my large image gallery easily while correcting all the old links in all the old blog entries. But, I may work on it over the next few weeks and see what I can come up with.

Conquest Miniatures is reporting a theft of a display miniature during Historicon-- take a look and see if you can help find it.

I got the rest of my Historicon pictures uploaded. I'm back home now and tired, having gotten a couple of months worth of gaming in during a weekend!

I'm uploading these now. I'll probably have them up Monday morning.

So, yet another Historicon has (mostly) gone by, and I have to say, I had a great time. Think what you like about HMGS East, about the only way they actually effect me is in how they run their cons, and so far, I think they have done a great job. There was a lot of complaining about the move to Baltimore next year. I don't know-- the host is a bit of a dump, but it has a nice atmosphere. I really take it for granted that we'll be able to drink beer at our games for Historicon, and it sounds like we won't next year. That will affect a lot of people's enjoyment. No more coolers (or mini kegs!) at the game tables. The free kegs on Friday night might have been a bit much-- I heard one guy was found passed out on some stairs and the police were called in-- but they were still appreciated. Anyway, 2009 ranks up there as a great con for me.

My thoughts-- it was fairly crowded. There seemed to be no fewer games than normal, and several people, including myself, had problems getting reservations into the games they wanted. The preregs slots were gone very quickly. Like most years, however, every game I walked up to was able to make room for me. I think every GM should prepare to take 2-4 people beyond the published limit, just in case.

There were a lot more air and naval games than in years past. Personally, I think modern micro naval games are just morally wrong. Just paint some toothpicks grey and throw them on a light blue bed sheet, why don't you. But, obviously, many people enjoy them. And Wings of War was the definitive pick-up game of the con. I've never walked around and thought, "Wow, yet another game of" whatever before, but WoW was really all over the place. There's always a good number of pick up games, and the only game I saw played more than two or three times was WoW. And it was played much more than twice.

And the people at Historicon are friendly. A guy I know only through online, who plays no historical games whatsoever, showed up with his son. His son is very interested in WW2 and Flames of War in particular. I helped where I could, but I'm not really into FoW. We went to the dealer area and looked in a vendor selling FoW. Pretty soon, another customer was answering his questions about what to buy. It turns out, this guy is Bob of I-95 Gamers and helping to run the FoW tournament at Historicon. And though my buddy was just at the show for a few hours and thus had missed every single FoW event, Bob promised to run him through a little demo. He did, and really made my buddy's son's day. He walked out obviously having had a wonderful time and wanting to come back next year.

Despite being here for three full days of gaming, I was never bored once. Not one second. In fact, I have to say, I simply couldn't do everything I wanted to do. Despite not getting in quite as much gaming as I could have, I still missed one flea market session completely, didn't spend as much time in the dealer area as I wanted, only sat down to eat once or twice (I kept sandwich stuff in a cooler in my room-- I hope Baltimore has decent ice machines!), didn't get to take as many pictures as I wanted, and never made any of the interesting sounding painting classes, or-- despite having Scott Bowden, James Arnold and John Gill sessions on the 1809 Danube campaign (my main Nappie interest)!!

It was inspirational, it was fun, it was great to see old friends again and just hang out with them. I have some trepidation about Baltimore-- it's a lot of money to spend to not enjoy the show-- but some part of me will definitely want to go next year, just for a chance at this again. And if it sucks, maybe we just all go to Cold Wars instead.

Too drunk to upload pics tonight...spent the night drinking with Piquet and Wargames Factory guys...g'night...

Here are the Historicon 2009 pictures I've taken. I'll update them in the evenings as I get more. I also made a little video of the vendor hall.

It's been quiet around here-- and this is why. My family and I visited my wife's home in Germany, to have our youngest child, Silas, baptized by her father. Due to his recent birth, this is the first time we've all been back in Germany together in at least two years (it may have been longer since I was there-- I'd ask my wife, but she and the kids are all still in Germany, whereas I had to get back home and slave away at my job).

I usually suffer terribly from jet lag, but this time I tried a new strategy. I got very little sleep the night before I flew, then tried to make sure I slept on the transatlantic flight with some Dramamine. Once I realized I was flying on an A 330, I chased it down with a few tiny bottles of wine to achieve what the wrapper warned was "marked drowsiness." It seemed to work, with me sleeping about six of the nine hour flight, something of a record for me.

It was a good thing that I did, as we hit the ground running. The next day, we visited the Urwelt-Museum Haff fossil museum in Holzmaden. This was a small, but very nice museum consisting of sea fossils found in local slate beds. After visiting the museum, we went to a local slate quarry where for €1.50, you got a hammer and a chisel and got to go at it. The kids had a blast, but we would up with thirty pounds of rock to lug back to the US... Still, we had a few nice pieces, and everybody agreed it was fun.

The next day we drove through Holzmaden and out to Legoland Deustchland. I had no idea what to expect, but had really pushed to visit since my oldest son, Sammy, is a huge Lego fan. It turned out to basically be a Lego themed amusement park, with a good number of rides and such like any other amusement park you've been to. However, the center piece of the entire park was an incredible display of famous German and other European country landmarks recreated in Lego. They were displayed in the style of a Garden Railway, with real plants representing trees and such. Many vehicles and boats moved like a railway, too. It was really impressive.

We did several other things-- visiting Schloss Rosenstein natural history museum, celebrating my daughter Sophia's 10th birthday with an African dinner, visiting the State Museum of Württemberg in Stuttgart's Altes Schloss, visiting Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and spending time with the family.

The main event, though, was Silas's baptism in the chapel of Schloss Solitude, the same place my wife and I married.

Somewhere along the way, I posted my 1,000th entry on this blog. I'm not the oldest or the most voluminous, but I figure I'm near the upper echelon of both, despite my periodic absences. Anyway, here's to me and my handful of readers! This site is hosted out of my home, which explains its sluggishness at times, but next week should see a new 25 Mb/s down, 10 Mb/s up (from me to you) fibre service installed! Hopefully, that should noticeably speed things up. After that, maybe a modest server upgrade...it's currently running on a pretty old Pentium III...

I've never been much of one to play with figures other people have painted. I've bought and used a handful of used units before, and I've sent a few units to Fernando Enterprises, and one thing is clear to me: I just don't enjoy my miniatures as much unless I have painted them. Plus, you tend to have the additional cost of painting labor on top of the figures themselves, making the whole thing more expensive. Yet I finally broke down and bought an entire army.

Our Trucidos campaign, like most campaigns, stalled and died. However, unlike most campaigns, where one or two players get tired and quit, we had one get fed up with the hobby altogether! He kept saying he was going to sell his army off, and I kept telling him not to, but to make sure and come to me first if he did. He had painted these figures in a burst of productivity (which maybe burned him out on it altogether) alongside us, and had done a really good job on the figures. After trying to get him back into it and letting him know I'd rather he kept them and played, he seemed insistent that he wanted to be rid of them, so I made an offer, and bought my first army.

It's around 1,500 points of 40k Imperial Guard. That's an army that has appealed to me, since the figures could be used for just about any Sci-Fi game, but it's one which requires a lot more figures than most, so I've never seriously considered it. I sat down and figured that if my 2009 painting rate persists, it would take me approximately 16 years to paint this much stuff.

Which, frankly, made me rethink my whole distaste with the idea of buying painted miniatures.

Maybe at this stage of my life, it's actually cheaper just to buy my way into a game. I mean, clearly, it's cheaper to buy the metal unfinished-- but not if I never finish them and never actually used them. Maybe just not buying unpainted figures and buying a painted army or two a year is a better way to go.

I'll be mulling this over for a while...and not buying any unpainted figures for a while as I horde my pennies...

Anyway, here are some pictures of my new IG army. It feels like it was worth the money right now.

Updates have obviously trickled dry after a nice little run as life caught up with me. I have three kids, the youngest of which just turned one, and they can be quite a handful. In the last month since my last post, I managed to play in a game of Red November, which I found fun. I thought the rules were a bit ambiguous in places, but probably with a few plays through to sort that out, it would make for a quick, fun game. I got in a couple of games of our monthly 3.5 D&D game, as well as the online GURPS game I participate in (I'm Tonim). I even ran a game of Spirit of the Century. I also finished the Dan Abnett Ravenor trilogy. Looking at that, I guess my gaming life hasn't been the wasteland it's felt the last couple months. I mean, it's almost May, and I've only painted just 14-15 figures, less than four figures a month!!

Let me just scoop TMP and TGN and point out that Reaper is announcing a "substantial" price decrease starting 3/30. Awesome! Hopefully, this will cause more manufacturers to follow their "lead." Haww, that's funny!!!

I always wanted to say to one of my players upon the start of the game, "Why don't you just grab a suitable figure out of the many in my display case." Now, I can. Gamer Achievement unlocked!

The top two shelves are my Darkest Africa figures, some of the best I have, including some Fernando "collector" Ruga Ruga and a Steve Dean askari pictured on Foundry's website I picked up on eBay for $5.

A sampling of my 15mm Napoleonics, including the HQ stands. I like having them in there, but I really can't put that many in there, and their largeish bases really cover a lot of real estate and darken the shelves below them. I may redo them.

Superfigs and other superheroes and survivors, and my 40mm AWI/FIW.

My Blood Bowl teams-- Skaven, Orc and Human.

Lastly, my Chaos in Cairo figures looking lonely in the bottom deck. I think I will add the Nightlings my kids painted in there.

Got my curio cabinet in and managed to find a little time to put it together. Looks nice! I need to get two extra shelves cut and hangers for them, plus install a light, but so far I'm fairly pleased! Too bad they sold out, doesn't look like I have a chance for a matching one...

Fun with GIMP while waiting for my washes to dry!

It may not be 24' x 7', but I'm still pretty pleased with how large I can make my gaming table! For our Trucidos campaign, we were discussing how we could play simultaneous campaign games so that we would all be together for each game. Mik and I both have dedicated tables-- he has a custom built 8' x 4' tabletop, and I have two 8' x 2.5' banquet tables I cover with felt to get 8' x 5'. I initially thought we would have to play our games separately, but then realized I had two 6' x 2.5' tables up in the attic. I spent most of my Saturday moving crap around and hauling them downstairs and finally got them set up for a huge (for me) 14' x 5' table!!

I don't have the felt to cover it, having always bought felt with 8' length in mind. That's okay, since this is two games, I have used a green felt on six feet, and tan felt on another six feet. I'm not sure where I'll go to get 14' of felt...many fabric stores in the area have gone out of business in the last few years...

Lou Zocchi of GameScience makes you hate your dice. Continues with part 2. He gets bonus points in my book for claming that "...a lot of gamemasters prematurely kill off characters who deserve to live..." by using bad dice. This man hates bad dice!

Wargames Factory is really blowing my mind. Their Liberty and Union League takes ideas for new products from the public and gets pre-orders as votes, a la Eureka's 100 and 300 Clubs. But they don't just stop there. Since they are designing the figures digitally, they are posting renderings of the figures and changing them in real time based on potential customer's comments. That's pretty awesome. I committed to 10 sprues of their zombies. I already have 20 West Wind and Foundry SWAT figures and a couple of civilian survivors...time to start looking for some zombie rules and scratch build that mall terrain I've always wanted...

Home sick today. Was already taking the day off, just happened to have the cold I've been fighting the last week flare up and ruin it. I don't even feel well enough to paint. I did manage to get a little basing done, though... Dangerous stuff, a gamer trapped in his gaming room, nothing to really do but think...think about all those new projects he could be doing...

I've thought about doing 25mm Thirty Years War for a couple of years now, sort of covering all the wars of Germany. I now see that Warlord Games is planning an ECW and TYW line in hard plastic... I will definitely need to pick up the productivity to pull that off...

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for a lot of things, but somewhere down the list you're going to get to walking into Table Top Game and Hobby and buying two of their three Monsterpocalypse starters right out of the UPS box. I dabbled a little bit with my son, and I think it'll probably be a fun game.

I'm in Kansas City for the holidays, but it's okay-- Table Top Game and Hobby is a very nice little gaming store in the area. The best thing about it is that they have a lot of extremely nicely painted miniatures on display. It just makes you want to jump up and paint everything you own!

I have been pretty discouraged with gaming desk lately. The area to work on got smaller and smaller as it filled up with miniatures waiting to be painted, spare bottles of paint, and general other junk. The last straw was that I flocked my recent terrain pieces on it, and naturally have a fine dusting of flock everywhere.

In a moment of madness, I swept the whole thing clean! Never has my painting desk been so clean and organized!

Never has my gaming table been so dirty and disorganized! Weeeeell, not very often. Weeeeell, not so much lately, anyway. Just look at the skads of primed miniatures waiting to be painted! I never finish anything. :-(

I decided to make my own paint racks to hang paints on the side of the bookshelf over my desk. Here's a cardboard mock up of what I'm thinking of. It will be very simple: a 1x8 plywood shelf on the bottom with 1/4" MDF shelves above it, separated by glued dowels, and then painted white and rested on the angled shelf brackets. Total for three shelves was under $20, which was the single cheapest prefabbed shelf I could find. Of course, who knows when I'll get around to doing these...

I have a high tech system for recording and cataloging the paint schemes I use on my miniatures. I scrawl them out onto a piece of paper and then stack it on my desk! It actually is quite useful, although I forget to do it sometimes. I record mixtures, or any unusual techniques I did, as well. For colors not available anymore, I'll write down the mixture for something similar when I need it again. It comes in handy when you return to a project after a couple of years away from it.

Not that it's really that interesting, but I wanted to take some pictures as a backup in case these ever got lost. I'm not sure how far back this goes, but I'd say at least five years, probably more on the order of seven.

I just received an order in for some H&R micro-armor from Spirit Games. I ordered it on November 1, a Saturday, and got it November 13, so about a week and a half turnaround. Not bad at all, across the Atlantic! I don't get that kind of speed from some stores in the US. Spirit Games has been around a long time, and I wouldn't hesitate to order from them again. I've ordered a few times over the years, and always had really great service. Glad to see the exchange rate creeping back to our favor so it makes sense to order from them again!

Over at Junior General, there's a Ruins of Tolen Sci Fi campaign being set up which includes world development and paper figure creating. It looks pretty interesting.

My painting desk was getting very crowded. It's about 2 feet by 4-5 feet in surface area. I pulled all the stuff off of it, and more than filled an 8 x 2.5 table. Some things didn't even make it to the table, like that 15 year old bunch of rock hard milliput. You know, I just don't think I'm ever going to use that. New rule-- if I haven't used it in 10 years, it goes straight into the trash. The worst is the paint. I have way more paint than I'll ever be able to use in my lifetime, but I have a hard time getting rid of any. You just know that one of these days I'm going to need that metallic purple or hydrangea pink paint, and then I would really regret ever having thrown it away!

Here is more old stuff that never sold that has been setting around, rephotographed. I think I'm having a change of heart, though. If the kids are painting and playing Fantasy with me, then maybe I should be hanging onto my Fantasy to play with them instead of just selling it off for cash. And, I like these two Old Glory cowboy figures (Poncho and Lefty), and there has been talk about gaming cowboys in our gaming group. So...I'll just have to think about whether or not to sell this stuff.

My old pictures of those GZG resin hovercrafts languished with no interested on Bartertown. Within 48 hours of placing the new pictures of those resin tanks, I've got the money in my PayPal account. Hmmmmm... I will be using this money to buy the 40k main rules (with a little left over), which complete my attempt to trade a headless, worthless figure for the 40k rules. Only took me over a year...

While I'm on the picture kick, I might as well take some decent pictures of some things I have for sale. Here are the painted figures of my WarMachine Khador and some resin GZG vehicles I have available.

And the vehicles:

I retook some more pictures using these newfangled ideas...

U.S. Rocket Corps and Zeppelin crewmen.

Genestealer cult.

40mm Sash & Saber AWI/FIW Indians.

Okay. Well. I recently complained about how much I hated photography. I have taken some good pictures in the past, it's just always been a huge hassle-- set up a light tent, remember all the friggin' settings on my camera, muck about with lighting, loading each picture in some complicated program like GIMP, etc... It just wasn't worth it to me. However, reading that post from Wee Toy Soldiers, I really thought he made it sound manageable, so I took another crack at it-- and was suitably impressed. It's still a bit of a hassle, but something I'm willing to manage to get pictures that look like this. I think the key thing I brought away from the article was using Picasa. It was simple and had all the tools I needed ready and easily available, as well as letting me have quick access to all my different photographs. Win! So, I went ahead and took pictures of my Orlock Necromunda gang, something I've been wanting to do for a while.

First, here are the Goliaths and Ratskin brave again, in much better presentation. You can even see the eyes!

And now, on to my Orlocks. These guys have been painted over the span of 14-15 years or so, ever since Necromunda first came out. Thus, they are painted in a variety of styles.

The Ratskin Scouts.

The oldish (new at the time) metal Catachans made EXCELLENT Orlocks, many without any conversions!

The Heavies. The rocket launcher is a converted Catachan loader.

The Leaders. The Catachan officer was a later addition, with a lot of milliput work. He has rat skull insignia on his shoulder pads.

The Juves.

Close combat specialists.

Whew! The guy on the right needs some touching up.

Shooters. If I recall correctly, the boltgun on the right used to be a lasgun.

More Catachans.

Bounty Hunter, Scummer and a Warmaster Necromancer as a Weird. If you look, his shoulderpads are Scaly hands, and each skull is from a Scaly, including the little children Scaly skulls. I mean, this guys really hates Scalies.

Yes, as though to mock me, my surfing around today alighted upon the very interesting and informative article entitled You Don't Need A Fancy Camera (To Take Great Photos of Your Miniatures).

Finished up some more figures I have been working on tonight-- some Necromunda figures and Pulp Figures U.S. Rocket Corps. I have also decided that I detest miniature photography more than anything else on the planet. I couldn't take a decent picture to save my life.

First up are some Necromunda figures I received in the process of trading up for the Warhammer: Legends of the Old West. Well, I admit it, I cheated on this after finding a cheapish copy on eBay. I don't know what I'll do with these figures. I've never liked the Goliaths...until I started painting them. These are really cool figures! Plus, they have the best eyes I have ever painted ever. When I sat down, it had been so long since I'd painted eyes, I couldn't even remember how I used to do it. Then the magic happened-- all in proportion, all fixed in the same direction, only a little touch up.

To Dr. Methuselah's Chronozeppelin-- and beyond! I've had most of these Rocket Corpsmen painted for a while now, but just got around to getting the last four off the painting table.

Jon Tuffley from Ground Zero Games, makers of Full Thrust, Dirtside 2, and Stargrunt 2, is working on a new set of rules called Stargrunt: Assault Company. They are geared to reside between Stargrunt and Dirtside in terms of scale, with multiple 15mm figures per base. I'm sure the rules will be great, just like all the other GZG rules, and I will probably buy them just to have them, but I just don't see myself playing them. I've never seen a single multi-figure base Sci-Fi game in the US. I've seen pictures of a few in the UK, so maybe they're more common there. Jon seems to be gearing rules towards his better selling 15mm line, and after 14+ years, FMA Skirmish seems to be officially Jon's lowest priority, which makes me quite sad and disappointed.

I got these 25mm Ground Zero Games Stargrunt vehicles in trade a while back. I had intended to trade them up for the 40k rules, but procrastinated-- a good thing, since the new version was coming out. Anyway, the main reason I held off painting them is because I just don't paint vehicles. I've never been any good at it, and was frankly hesitant to do it. I took them as a challenge, and I think that the results of my attempt are good. See for yourself how I did it.

First, I cleaned the vehicle and primed it. I actually dabbled with priming white or black, but the spray paint I used covered so well that I couldn't tell any difference. Thus, most are just primered white.

Next, I spray painted the vehicle a sold color-- in this case, Testor Model Master's Afrika Mustard. I then masked off large, irregular areas with torn pieces of card stock. Some are white and new, others have already been used and are thus olive drab.

With the masks applied, I painted the entire vehicle Testor Model Master's Olive Drab.

Here's what it looks like with the masks removed. Pretty nice!

Next, I hand painted additional details, like the hover skirt and the gun barrel.

I washed the entire vehicle with Games Workshop's Gryphonne Sepia wash. It was a fairly thick wash, and glazed the entire paint job quite nicely.

After drying, I finished up with some light drybrushing of tan for weathering and scratches, and viola!

I started my miniature gaming with Epic and Blood Bowl back in the day. I still play Blood Bowl, but have never been a fan of the mainstream GW games. I got tired of the rules complications and contradictions. I also complain a lot about the prices, but the fact is that have bought a large number of 40k models, just because I liked them (and could, typically, get them at a discount on eBay or where ever). The fact remains that I never cared for the 40k rules much and have stayed away for a long while. Until last night...

I'm sure Mik will have some pictures up soon, but we played a very fun 1,000 point 40k 5th edition game last night. Yes, it was overly heroic and involved charges across vast expanses of open space with cricket bat-sized hand-to-hand weapons in the face of enemy armor. However, the rules were reasonably clear, not overly complex and, frankly, gave a fun game.

I had 1,000 points of Necrons against an alliance of Mik's Tau and Ray's Imperial Guard. Every figure, except for one of mine, was painted and painted well. It was a nice spectacle, although we do need to work on terrain. We played on a 6x4 table, and-- I don't remember the scenario specifics-- had to capture four objective markers on the table in 5-7 turns. Knowing there was a deadline pushed us, but the uncertainty of when, exactly, it would occur left all of us not quite where we wanted to be at the end of the game, with me in possession of a single objective for the win.

Anyway, it was a very fun way to sit around and drink beer with your friends and push models across the table. I still won't go to tournaments and subject myself to competitive adolescent min-maxers, but I'll sure play it again in good company.

If you've been holding off buying any UK figures because of the poor exchange rate the last few years, things have rapidly been getting better for you.

Some pictures of my kids' painted figures.

The first pictures show all our figures together. The photography isn't that great, and I could have done a little better on mine, but I still think they did a very good job for their first time out. I have seen worse paint jobs at Historicon.

Why ship your figures halfway across the world to pay Sri Lankan children to paint your figures, when you can just grow your own locally? Now, I'm sure once you start accounting for prorated shelter, food, education, bail, etc..., it's not quite as cost effective, but if you ignore all those real costs, it actually looks quite cheap!

I got my two older children, 7 and 9, painting this weekend. I have sold Old Glory Pancho Villa line US Marines that I was probably never going to do anything with. I mounted them and primed them, then painted up a few to serve as samples. Then on Sunday afternoon, we all sat down and painted a few figures.

I taught the kids to paint with the Velas technique I've mentioned here before. The figures were all primed white. The paint was diluted 1:1 with water, like the "stain" technique, leaving natural highlighting. This was as far as the kids went. I dipped the figures using Minwax Polyshades Tudor that night, and will base them and seal them tonight.

The kids painted fairly well! The technique is a speed painting technique, and fairly forgiving of mistakes. My 7 year old painted 2 figures and my 9 year old 3 before pretty much getting bored and wanting to do something else. Still, once they are based and finished, you won't be able to tell which I painted and which the kids painted while you are playing. Closer inspection would be needed.

When I present them the finished figures, I will also pay them each $2 for their time. $1 a figure is more than I intend to pay them in general, but hopefully it will make a nice incentive for them to do this on and off. When they are older and can paint unsupervised, I have visions of vast well-painted armies that I've paid pennies on the dollar for.

As long as I can keep them from figuring out how to sell on eBay...

So the son and I watched Ep 1 yesterday-- the daughter was grounded, so she will be catching up on Friday. Anyway, I went in as open minded as I could. I didn't let my opinions cloud my son's judgment, and I thought maybe I was simply playing into the conventional wisdom about how bad the movie was. But no. It really is a genuinely bad movie. It has genuinely terrible dialogue at times. Ah well. My son knew all the names of everything from reading (and rereading) a Visual Dictionary I have. Especially during the underwater scenes. As they enter the water, he says, "Ah, that's the Water Breather 99!" or some such. A monster appears, "That's the Sando." I was on the verge of laughter! He seemed to enjoy the movie, and didn't seem to think it was any better or worse than any of the others he had seen (IV-VI).

My kids have been on a big Star Wars kick lately, and I've bought them some of the Collectible Miniatures. You may recall that I bought a bunch of these a while back. There is now a fixed Obi-Wan in a starter, so I picked that up, too. Well, my son got a Reek in his pack and was about to wet himself wanting to play with it, so I sat down and rumbled with my 7 year old son.

We ran through the starter's introductory game, with Obi-Wan and two rebels vs. Darth Vader and two stormtroopers. I played the rebels, and got beat.

So, for game two, we built our own 100 point forces. My son took the Reek, a Vornskr and a Dark Trooper Phase III. I took Obi-Wan, a Rebel Captain, a Rebel Heavy Gunner, and Elite Rebel Soldier, and Wookie Soldier and a Twi'lek Bodyguard.

I felt bad for the poor kid as I didn't take it easy on him. I set my Captain and my heavy gunner up at the end of a long hallway to take twin fire from both on the Reek as he turned the corner into to melee with Obi-Wan. The Reek was tough, though, killing the Wookie and with 200 HP, soaked up a lot of damage until the Dark Trooper could emerge halfway through the hallway the heavy gunner was shooting down. Again, my tactically poor son killed his own Reek by using missles against Obi-Wan-- which did damage to Obi-Wan and killed the Elite Rebel Trooper. Hmmm...maybe those tactics weren't so poor... The Dark Trooper then killed the Captain, depriving the Heavy Gunner of his Twin Attack. The Heavy Gunner managed a Critical hit, but couldn't stop the Dark Trooper before going down himself.

That left Obi-Wan and the Twi'lek! Hang on, I could still pull this out. They double-teamed the Vornskr as the Dark Trooper Crited Obi-Wan! The Twi'lek bodyguard valiantly through herself in front of Obi-Wan, saving him, and he had both the Vornskr and the Dark Trooper on the edge before going down himself to the Vornskr. Junior wins again!

I didn't think the CMG rules were that bad, really. I had fun playing. There was probably a bit more reading and math than my son could do and really have fun, but I helped him along and he enjoyed whipping his old man two games in a row.

R.I.P. Bear, my good friend.

...I'm just very, very tired. My wife and I had our third child, Silas, on March 12.

He was quite premature (32 weeks), but everything has gone really well and he is home after about four weeks in Intensive Care.

Here's some stuff I've painted recently, and some I will be posting on TMP for sale.

First up are some 40mm Sash and Saber FIW Indians.

I haven't been particularly historical with the tattoos. I figure they varied quite a bit among individuals. I've tried to use what I've seen in the Ospreys as a basis. Now, the guy on the left, I painted a black line down his face. Then I thought it would look could with a red line down either side. Then I realized his head looked like a football helmet. I do like the guy in the shirt-- even if I did forget his eyebrows.

I got a bunch of Fantasy done. Here's a reaper Egyptian:

Black Tree Designs giant spiders:

A Reaper giant spider:

A Reaper giant bat:

And finally some old RAFM spider mutants:

Oops! Almost forgot, Poncho now has Lefty to contend with:

I had intended to sell the spider and such before Halloween but real life, as always, intruded.

Color Match 1.0 is a very interesting utility which will match various paint colors. Using the full line search, for example, you can find the nearest matches to Games Workshop paint colors in the Delta Ceramcoat line. It really needs to include support for the Decoart Americana line.

In a real blast from the past, Mik and I played a game of Blood Bowl last night. His Chaos beat my Humans 1-0. It was a great game. I really had forgotten what a fun, great game Blood Bowl is. We're starting up a league.

You may be aware of FUMBBL-- I finally got around to registering for it and plan on playing some games there. What you may not be aware of-- in fact, you definitely aren't aware of it unless you're one of about ten or so people who have very great memories-- is that I was one of the first people to play Blood Bowl online. I started getting guys from the old Blood Bowl mailing list to play via IRC. This is probably 10 or so years ago. I made irc.icx.net-- long gone, but there are still references to it hanging around-- and wrote a chat bot called NuffleBot to roll dice for us. There were no graphics, I had my board out next to the computer with both teams on it, like old school chess, and would relay the changes to my opponent. "#12 from E4 to J1" or whatever. Ah, the good ol' days!! Talk about just like old times...Mik caught me in an Illegal Procedure, and I forgot to use my Apothecary!

Did I tell you about taking 3rd place in the '95 UK Games Day? I'm in two issues of White Dwarf... Didja see my stunty Gutter Runner? Huh? Didja huh?

Update: Here you go, old school. That looks like almost 15 years old...man, I'm old.

Yes, they do.

TGN has an Elfball review up. One of these days, I'm going to actually play this game...

Brian of Repple Depple is new locally. I met him at Historicon this year, but missed his recent Check Your Six! game, Too bad, it looks awesome! I've added him to the blogroll.

Some pictures of what I've been painting lately.

First, the rest of my 40mm Sash and Saber FIW Indians. That's my 10 figures for the month. Make sure and check out Mik's Minis, where I'm sure he'll be posting pictures of his ten S&S Indians, which are no doubt painted by now! ;-)

A Reaper Eye Beast, probably to be sold off on TMP soon. He turned out a lot nicer than I expected!

Old Glory Army's latest figure, Poncho. Will probably go in trade.

The Iron Duke from Silver Age Sentinels. He might go, but I like him a lot, I may keep him.

Yes, busy indeed. My third child is due around the beginning of May!

Will I finish my SG2 stuff before the end of the month? I'm not doing too badly with it so far, but I don't think I'm quite going to make it. The Real World (curse it!) has thrown me a couple of left hooks this month, and I just have not had the time to work on things. If it were just me slacking off, I'd feel a lot worse about it, but it's been mostly legitimate, so no complaints. I'll at least keep the queue unadjusted, and maybe I can catch up a little bit in the next month.

Not much. Not much that was any fun, at least. I was oncall for work, and got called in early on Friday morning. It seems our data center's air conditioning failed, and it was as bad as I've ever seen it. I had equipment so hot, it would burn your hands to touch it. One CPU outlet was registering 58 Celsius. Friday night, a major data circuit failed. Saturday, a tech at a property wiped his core switch configuration trying to do a password recovery. Plus, each kid had a birthday party to attend, but not together. Whine whine bitch moan. Anyway, I did start on some buildings...

I had intended to scratch build the buildings, but decided I just didn't have the time, so I poked around for some 15mm buildings. There wasn't a lot, but I decided to use some from Dream Pod 9 for Heavy Gear. They're a little small next to the figures, but the ground scale works out nicely. Putting the buildings in scale with the figures makes them almost 50 yards long. I kept my scaled-up test for a large warehouse, and will print out several smaller buildings to accompany it. They go together quickly, and I will probably base them on thin plasticard (tip: you can get cheaper plasticard in the form of For Sale and such signs at hardware stores).

In an effort to keep myself more consistently productive and to channel that productivity towards specific goals (which is my real problem), I've decided to keep track of everything I've finished as well as commit to future dates when specific projects will be finished. You can follow along in the right hand column here towards the bottom, under the links. My real goal is to have a new project once a quarter. My definition of "project" is fairly liberal, pretty much a new scenario I can run that requires some creative effort on my part. Examples would be maybe a small scenario in a new scale/genre, or something which expands things I already have.

Initially, I'm being a little aggressive, with two projects in two months. The first is to run a double-blind Stargrunt 2 game. I have been threatening and threatening to do this for at least a year, maybe longer, so now I'm just going to knuckle down and get it done. Fortunately, I don't have an extreme amount of work to do to get it done. My buddy Mik has one of the forces, and I'm nearly done painting the other. I will need to create some new hill and trees which match items I currently have, and I want to make some buildings for it. I should be able to get it done by the end of August.

The second project would be woodland Indian skirmishes. This is currently somewhat tentative. I bought the 40mm Sash and Saber FIW packs at Historicon, and gave ten to Mik for his birthday. This would let us start painting them and getting them on the table. I have some rules in mind, but I haven't received them yet, so this might still change.

Maksim has a nice post on 6mm autos, something I've needed on occasion.

Okay, here is a batch of stuff that I've finished lately and finally got around to photographing. They're a tad underexposed, but not too bad.

My 40mm AWI Grenadiers from Trident/MSC. These are really nice figures. I should go back and touch up a few of the eyes, but I'm pretty pleased with these. I'm looking forward to doing the rest of my militiamen, although I might wait until after I get the spare hands packs, just to see what I can do with that.

Zeppelin Troops from Bob Murch's Pulp Figures. I've had these and the US Rocketmen for about a year or so, but the .45 Adventures rules got me excited about them again. Plus, you can get started playing with just a few figures.

One of the things I was really looking forward to buying with my Old Glory Army discount was some Cobalt 1 Palansi. I love these guys! Well, of course West Wind discontinued the line right before I got my membership. I still managed to find some seriously discounted at Historicon last year.

SWAT teams. I got 20 painted up, 10 West Wind and 10 Wargames Foundry. They're both nice, although god forbid the US starts arming their SWAT teams with SAWs!

These have turned out to be some of my favorite figures of all time, my Genestealer Cult. I've had these figures for ages, and in fact, I remember starting the Ogryn hybrid at a place I haven't lived at for ten years, so it counts and the figure it has taken me the longest to complete! The robot is a TALOS unit from Kryomek. I tried to make him very weathered and rusty. The effect didn't really turn out that well, the rust looks like some sort of camo pattern to me, but he still looks good in general.

Superfigs! I got almost all of these at Historicon last year (although there's a power armor girl in there from VOID). I love these figures, really nice, lots of character.

I'm too tired to muck around with linking the photos to the front page right now, I will do it later, but I have taken a lot of new pictures. Check out the tail ends of the AWI 40mm, SciFi, Superheroes, Survivors, Pulp and Misc folders if you're interested. Otherwise, I'll try to make a post tomorrow with them all in one place for easy viewing, with some explanation about what they are or why they're cool (to me).

I painted 10 25mm SWAT figures and 3 40mm AWI British Grenadiers. I'm on a roll!

So, I'm lying in bed sick, and I realize my head feels like Rosie O'Donald Trump is locked inside it with a bad toupee buffet just on the other side. But it could be worse...

Boy George W. Bush: When he invades your country and puts your people back to work, bombings go down. Suicides, however, are way, way up.

Henry Kissengeri Halliwell: Do you kill yourself on principle? Or squeeze a breast and try to blow your brains out before the full horror of what you've done sinks in?

George Michael Pataki: Goodbye, NY Governor. Hello, NYPD, plunger division.

Barbara Walter Kronkite: Boy. There's just no upside to that one.

Rick James Bond: I'm Bond. Rick James Bond, bitch!

Marion Barry Bonds:"Bitch, set my drugs on the table."

Halle Barry White: "Oooooh, nooo." Five cans of whipped cream can be fun-- once. Every time, and you have a problem. Likes to decimate buffets and leave without paying.

Prince William Shatner: "I'm...going to...BE...king...someday."

Lenny Bruce Willis: "Yippee-Ki-Yay, ****sucker!"

Larry David Hasselhoff: Very depressed that Bush stole K.I.T.T.

Nicole Ritchie Valens: "Va-va-va-vaaaaa-va-valium! Va-va-va-vaaaaa-va-valium, percoset, whiskey! Concentration camp figure!"

Add comments if you have an idea. I'm going back to bed.

I finally got around to fixing the gallery. I'm not crazy about the layout change, but I think it might grow on me. The subalbum listing is convenient.

Okay, it's true, I suck. In my defense, I have been pretty busy in the real world, and just have not been gaming or devoting the time to this site. I shall return, though! Probably after turkey season...

I upgraded some stuff on the server, and broke the gallery. No big deal, but it may be a day or two before I get around to fixing it.

I went to see my first hockey game Friday night, as our neighbors' children were playing between periods for our local bush league team. It was a blast-- there were two fights in the first ten minutes. My wife was obviously not very familiar with hockey, and leaned over and asked, "Is that allowed?" I said, "No, but it's expected." I don't know if this is normal for hockey fans or just because the fans around here are a bunch of rednecks, but they were enthusiastically cheering the fights and booing the referees for interfering. Even my wife said, towards the end, that she'd like to see another fight! I feel like the Junior General. Now I just need a cat and to start complaining about Peter Forsberg, whoever he is.

I got my five year old son Heroscape for Christmas. He is really enjoying it. We played a little intro game, which he won, and then he played a lot "free style." Mik was coming over tonight for some Necromunda, and my son wanted him to play Heroscape, so he ran his first game ever! He really got into it. He and I were on a team, and things were going poorly for us. We had killed nothing all game and were on the ropes, when he kills his sister's dragon. The boy stands up in his chair and and goes crazy!! We almost pulled it out, but in the end, we lost. He had his head in his arms and was about to cry. I will have to have a talk with him tomorrow about sportsmanship. After he went to bed, Mik and I played Necromunda and I kicked his ass!!!!!!!! TWICE!! WOOOOOOOOO!!!! IN YOUR FACE, MIK!!!!!! ;-) I'll try to post some pics tomorrow.

I upgraded to the latest version of blog software. Please let me know of any problems you notice. In particular, I'm trying to turn off the old blacklisting utility which had, I think, started to cause more problems than it solved. Update: Okay, I think I broke all comments. Give me a little while, I'm tied up at work and can't work on it right now. Update: I think I've fixed it now. There may be more spam on the site now, but I will try to nuke it as I see it.

Well, I finally broke down and bought some figures. There was a batch of Infinity figures on eBay and I bought a fair bit. I could have let them pass, but I got them at 20% off the War Store prices, including shipping, so it was a deal too good to let pass. In all fairness, I had achieved the monetary goal I was looking for, if still three weeks short of when I expected to.

Maybe people don't believe it at first sight, but below is a screen capture of the greatest video game ever made, a game I have been playing for around 15 years-- Nethack.

Fundamentally, the game is a dungeon crawl. You have to take your level 1 character down through the many levels of the Dungeons of Doom, find the Amulet of Yendor, and escape with it. The game itself has been under development for 30+ years-- the source code to game is freely available, leading to a variety of people contributing to the game throughout the years.

Most people are turned off my the ASCII graphics and the UNIX vi direction controls, but if you download the PC version (as opposed to telnetting to nethack.alt.org), there is a nice graphical overlay and you can use your keyboard's arrow keys to control your character.

In this screenshot, I have just cleared the fifth level of the Dungeons, the first level of the Gnomish Mines. I let the game select my character class at random, so I'm playing a Tourist, one of the hardest character classes. In the middle of the level, I ran into some Hill Orcs. They always come in groups, and are pretty tough at low levels, so I was worried. To make matters much, much worse, one of them had a wand of Create Monster, and zapped it empty before I could get to him. Even worse, the Orcs and all their various creations were ALL between me and both the up and down stairs. However, I was pretty handy with my +2 darts, and had about 30 of them, and I had a drum. I started beating my drum, and scared off the Orcs and all the non-undead creatures they had summoned. My pet dog Hastur and I finished off the undead, although he was of limited use due to his tendancy to stop at every non-rotten corpse and eat it! Using a couple of Healing potions I had, and the drum and my Expensive Camera to cause fear in the all the creatures, I managed to attack the creatures piecemeal and defeat them. Whew! It really is one heck of a great game.

A gaming buddy, Mik, and I went to the local IDPA match again, and here are the videos. I will see if I can't get the fullscreen stuff working later. Update: the full screen videos now work, with a resolution of 640x400, so they're a little larger. Update 2: Results are up, we did alright. That's the first time I've made the top third, and a bunch of the top guys are best in the state from Cleveland.

The first stage was highly appropos-- you started typing at a keyboard and then cleared your house. However, because of all the walls, it wasn't really worth filming.

On the second stage, however, you are entering the house.

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Here you are double-bunking at Historicon when, enraged at cracks you took at Phil Barker's writing, crazed DBA tournament players attack your hotel room! You should really know where to draw the line.

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The modified Bill drill again. I didn't do as well this month as I did last month. Update: Actually, I did about a point better. A little faster, but a little less accurate.

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A stage with a car. Some places actually use real cars.

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Mik had recently gotten a new GLOCK 17 so we hung around after the match and plinked at some (8"?) steel targets from about 25 yards.

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Hope everybody enjoyed Thanksgiving. I haven't been updating much because I was in Atlanta for a week on training and then in Kansas City for Thanksgiving. That's a lot of driving! Yet, despite visiting the War Room and Table Top Game and Hobby, my resolution to buy no miniatures through the end of this year remains in tact. I doubt I'll finish up the 40mm AWI I recently got in time to buy any more...I just haven't had time for the hobby much this month, and my Grenadiers are languishing, half-painted.

This weekend, I was working with lead in a different form. I shot an International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA) match sponsored by the Oak Ridge Sporting Association (ORSA, IDPA page). I just found out that had started-- it's one of a couple around Knoxville, and fortunately closer than Greenville and Chattanooga. It's been about a year since I last participated in IDPA, and I was pretty rusty but glad to be back in it. We spent a very nice Saturday morning running through seven stages. I then beat my head against the wall for several days figuring out how to embed the video in my website.

My overall score for seven stages was 120.63 seconds, 92 points for accuracy (each point is a half second penalty), and 10 seconds in penalties (two failure to neutralize). That was 17th out of 34 people, but my accuracy really hurt me. I'd have to go back in check, but I had one really bad stage I rushed through too quickly. I'll update this post with my scores on the individual stages once I get those again.

The Bill Drill. Draw and put six shots in the target as fast as you can. Since it was a drill and not a stage, you could elect to not use concealment (my jacket), but I chose not to. Man, watching the video, my draw seems soooooo slooooooooow. In my defense, like I said, I hadn't shot outside of a static range in a year, and I was taking it a bit easy.

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El Prez. Turn and shoot three targets twice each, reload, and shot twice again.

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Bill Drill variant. I placed 4th on the day here, my best showing. Draw, shoot furthest target 6 times, reload, shoot middle target 6 times with strong hand, reload, and shoot closest target 6 times with weak hand. The first 15 seconds of the vid are lenscapped, though, but all the shooting is there.

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Walking the dog! What kind of bad guys jump you when you're walking the dog?

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Shooting while seated. This is the stage I rushed and had really poor accuracy on. The video looks good, though, except for the slow draw and my coat sleeve getting snags on my mag pouch. Again.

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A fun stage with a door and a moving target (which you can't quite see...you can see the rails once the door is open). I was pleased to get the popper on the first shot, one handed.

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Another moving stage. Apparently, the other groups shot the last target through the window, but we went around the side.

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Note to parents: getting your five year old son, no matter how badly he wanted it, a black and camouflage head-to-toe ninja outfit to go trick-or-treating after sun down is a baaaad idea. At least he had a flashlight, I could almost keep an eye on him.

We moved over the summer. We had so few trick-or-treaters at our old neighborhood that we actually drove back there and hit a few houses so they would have somebody! At our new neighborhood, it was like a block party, with gaggles of 30 people at a time moving up and down the streets, meeting each other multiple times as we criss-crossed the subdivision blocks. And they won't stop ringing the bell! Here's a tip: when it's 9:00 and the lights are all out, WE ARE OUT OF CANDY!! Besides, you look like you're 18, I wouldn't give you any candy anyway!

The resolution is out the window once I get my current batch of Trident 40mm AWI figures painted (and they're next in my queue). Check out the new releases I just got in an email!

MORE FROM TRIDENT DESIGN'S "BATTLE ROAD" RANGE

(Figures are $3.50 each unless noted) (Discounts apply for large orders)

(Ready to ship first week of Nov.)

Minutemen

AWC 29- Officer/Sgt. waving men on with tricorn in one hand pointing with spontoon in the other.

AWC 30- Standard Bearer running, tricorn, vest.

AWC 31- Standard Bearer kneeling, Standard in one hand pistol in the other, bareheaded.

AWC 32- Drummer advancing under fire, playing drum, floppy hat.

AWC 33- Drummer kneeling leaning on drum taking aim with pistol, tricorn.

British Grenadiers

AWB 9- Officer pointing with sword shouting orders.

AWB 10- Standard Bearer walking with standard.

AWB 11- Drummer, drum slung on back crouching down walking, with pistol in hand.

British Regulars

AWB 30- Mounted British Officer pointing directions with sword, tricorn..........$ 12.50

British Light Infantry

AWB 200- Standing firing in leather cap.

AWB 201- Kneeling firing in leather cap.

AWB 202- Standing loading in leather cap.

AWB 203- Kneeling preparing to fire in leather cap.

AWB 204- Standing preparing to fire in leather cap.

AWB 205- Standing at ready, musket with bayonet in leather cap.

AWB 206- Running, musket with bayonet in leather cap.

AWB 207- Advancing, musket at 45' with bayonet in leather cap.

AWB 208- Advancing, musket across body with bayonet in leather cap.

AWB 209- Officer running with sword in one hand, firing pistol in the other in leather cap.

(Coming in a few weeks: "Militia Artillerymen and Gun" )

(Still to come from "Battle Road", British Regulars, Fusiliers, Artillery, & many more surprises.)

New AWI Ranges from Trident Designs to come soon:

1. "Equipment & Supplies" (of the AWI)

2. "Characters & Personalities" (of the AWI)

3. "Settlements Ablaze" (Woodland Indians of the AWI)

4. "The Early Years" (Early War units of the AWI)

5. And more ranges projected in the AWI

Well, one way to get around my resolution is to trade! I traded a buddy some VOR Union power armor for some of his old Harlequins, and am currently working a deal for some more Star Wars figures. I think this in the spirit of my resolution and no big deal.

Here's the update on my no purchases resolution-- sixteen days, two paychecks and no purchases! In all honesty, though, I did see a couple of deals I couldn't pass up, but they either got bid up on eBay so they weren't a bargain anymore, or shipping was a killer, or stuff like that. So far, so good, but it does seem that I might be tempted by a deal too good to pass up!

Yesterday was "Call In Sick And Play Wargames All Dang Day." A guy we used to game with came into town, and I took the day off to hang out a buddy's house and play some games with them. We did some Supersystem and then some Warmachine, but we mostly just fooled around and chatted. In the evening, the rest of the guys who didn't take the day off showed up and the guy from out of town wrapped up the Sci-Fi d20 Modern campaign we had been playing when he moved away. It was a pretty fun day, but I'm beat today.

The Super Simians and the Khador figures are mine. Updated: One picture from the RPG game-- the point where Buzz and I said, "You know? We don't really need to hang around this place."

Really, if we were able to look at the sales across all the pre-painted manufacturers, they may well dominate already, and here's why. For just over $100.00, I bought a substantial amount of figures, had them shipped to me, and will be running a game with them tomorrow. From purchase to play in about a week for about $1.00 a figure. You just can not beat that. I don't think they're going to drive the unpainted market out of business, as it certainly does not provide the same feeling of accomplishment or enjoyment that I get from painting and creating. However, considering it would have taken me, realistically, two years to have painted all these by myself, assuming I even finished, it opens up areas of marginal interest, like Star Wars for me. I would never have devoted the amount of time it would have taken to paint all these figures up, I'm just not that interested in Star Wars. But, hey, if $115.00 buys me enough figures to sit down and play with my son and my friends, who like Star Wars more than me, well, I'm going to do that.

I'll be running a 5150 game with these tonight. It probably will be an Imperial ambush. Leia et al. start in the middle and have to exit off either "short" edge. Imperials start on the short edges. On activation rolls of 7, reinforcements for the Imperials show up-- probably bounty hunters or even Darth Vader. I'm working up some 5150 rules for Star Wars, I'll post them here when they're done.

I really need to work on some terrain. That table just looks sad...

I increased the font sizes and changed the fonts for the site's layout. I'm trying to make the site a little easier to read. It's lately struck me as somewhat difficult to read. If you have any opinions about it, let me know. Thanks.

P.S. Also, if you ever find you can't comment, just e-mail me. I use a spam blocker on comments, and I occaisionally blacklist stuff (like blogspot.com!) that I shouldn't, which may prevent you from posting. Every post has to be moderated by me before it appears on the site, but if it's actually rejected, you'll get a message saying so. Just e-mail me your comment, and I'll track down the problem. Eventually, I'll upgrade and change the comment URL so automated spam bots can't just post, and probably remove the blacklisting stuff altogether. I get a lot of spam on this site.

So, I was stepping away from setting the gaming table up for tomorrow night's Star Wars 5150 game, when I notice my dog, Bear. He's a twenty pound Schnauzer (or Schnoodle, the pound claimed). Both his front legs were bloody and wet!! He's had allergy problems lately, so I thought he had licked his legs to the point of being bloody. I got my wife out of bed (she had just went) since I thought I might need help with it...

Low and behold, Bear was COVERED in blood. Both forelegs and his snout, and his whole left side was matted with drying blood. I realize that he must have tangled with something outside, and I start checking for cuts. There's nothing obvious, so I carry him to the shower and procede to clean him. I still can't see anything, and I soaped him rather vigorously without any reaction. He LOVES to be toweled off after a bath, and was his usual self, covered up in the towel and rolling around. Huh. So, I'm figuring he came out on top.

At this point, my wife is calling from downstairs. The whole couch is bloody. He obviously laid there cleaning himself for a while. Now, bear in mind that my wife has gotten on to me many times for letting him in with dirty paws and him making a mess everywhere! So, naturally, my first reaction was to bust out laughing and say, "Boy, I sure am glad I didn't let him in!" She failed to be amused.

Anyway, I walked the yard with my flashlight and couldn't find anything. The yard was mowed today, so he might have eaten/rolled in something the lawn guy got, but I didn't see anything. There were no blood trails on the trees, so nothing got away that way. I'll have to go back out tomorrow during daylight and see what I can see.

I just got my order of Trident 40mm AWI from MSC today, and I have to say, these are some exceptionally beautiful figures. I wasn't crazy about British Grenadiers, as I mentioned, but those figures REALLY wowed me. I can't wait to start painting these up! You can bet I will post pictures as soon as I do!

So, I subjected my wife to her first viewing of MST3K last night. She didn't finish it, as she wanted to go to bed early. At 9:15! She claimed she was tired, but I know she was simply on the verge of laughing out loud and could no longer contain her stoney veneer! Ah, women. Can't live with 'em...pass the beer nuts.

I sent my last order for the year, for sixteen 40mm Trident Designs AWI figures from MSC, today, getting it in under my deadline for the last miniature purchases this year. I ordered another ten colonial militia, and six Grenadiers. I wasn't going to get Grenadiers, and I don't know when the Light Infantry is coming out, so I'll buy them now and if I get around to painting them before the end of the year, I'll have opponents I can play.

Note to miniatures manufacturers: Sending me free figures results in sales! So, you know, send me free figures, you bastards! May the seed of your loin be fruitful in the belly of your woman, Andy.

Muah hah hah!! Netflix has the MST3k Manos: Hand of Fate DVD in the mail. My wife has never seen MST3k before. She's going to HATE it! Muah hah hah!!

I've been on a bit of a binge lately, culminating in me blowing the last of my minis money on Star Wars miniatures. I don't even like Star Wars, but my son does, so there you go. I bought about 30 Stormtroopers, 60 rebels and all the Rebel Storm rares for under $100...that's not bad, until you consider, you know, that I don't even like Star Wars. Ah well, buying off eBay means I have the consolation of knowing that George Lucas did not get any of my money directly. Anyway, I have more miniatures than sense at this point, so I'm calling a halt at the end of September for the rest of 2006 (giving me just enough time to get a couple of last orders in...tee hee!) Moreso, since I have been feeling guilty for not reading anything much for the last few months, I hereby resolve to finish five books between now and the end of the year. So be it!

I have been tagged by Maksim of 6mm-Minis for the book meme. Sounds fun, so here goes:

1. Name one book that changed your life:

It sounds kind of callous or insensitive, but there is not one single book that I think has changed my life in any particular direction. Maybe I'm reading the wrong books. Perhaps the Bible, but that has always been there since a childhood, more of a pervasive influence than a real change.

2. One book you've read more than once:

Well, listened to more than once, as I have listened to the unabridged Six Days of War by Michael B. Oren three times and bought the book. This is simply the best historical book I have ever read. Factual yet still gripping, and giving detailed background and motivations to the actors. It's worth reading for the information it gives on Nasser alone. Unlike other histories where Nasser is a faceless opponent, Oren describes why he did what he did, and what his (stated) fears and hopes were. The Egyptian command meltdown is described in detail. This is definitely one of my favorite books.

3. One book that made you laugh:

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. It's been a long time since a read this, and I recall it being very amusing. I recently pulled it out from its hiding place and have it handy for an eventual reread.

4. One book that made you cry:

Well, the photo in King Leopold's Ghost of the father sitting on his porch next to the severed hand and foot of his five year old daughter really made me break down. It was one of those situations where I was studying the picture and just couldn't figure out what it was, and then read the caption which just jolted me. That is perhaps unfair as I never could bring myself to read the actual book after that.

What comes to mind next is Lassie Come Home, at the end of the book, when the poor Carraclaughs have tried to disguise Lassie and the wealthy rightful owner, who isn't fooled at all, is examining her feet and understands what she's been through, and then states, "This is not my dog." I was reading this in bed with the kids for the first time and it was all I could do not to just start sobbing!

5. One book you're currently reading:

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. Interesting, but sometimes dry. If it makes the crying list, it will be because I just can't wade through it! Still, definitely worth the $3.00 I paid for it. There is a lot of information about what makes a country powerful or not. The primary points so far seem to be about relative power; e.g., England is more powerful in absolute terms now than at the height of the Empire, but is relatively weak compared to the USA; about economic progressiveness allowing countries to endure the financial costs of war longer than their more backwards opponents, and the simple fact of geographic location.

6. One book you wish you'd written:

Easy one, the Atrocity Archives by Charlie Stross. It's not just the book I wished I'd written, it's the one book I should have written. The guy's a computer nerd dealing with Cthulhu-related X-Files stuff. I'm a computer nerd who likes Cthulhu. It's got me written all over it!

7. One book you wish had never been written:

Well, there are easy ones like Mein Kampf. However, listening to A History of Warfare by John Keegan, he makes the case for the highly touted On War by von Clausewitz as having lead directly to World War I, from which World War II pretty much followed, so I'll tentatively (as I haven't really explored the issue any further) throw that out as possibility.

8. One book you'd want on a desert island:

Probably something like the SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea! Yuk yuk yuk!

9. One book you've been meaning to read:

One book?! I have as many books I've been meaning to read as books I have read! What currently stands out is City Fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam by John Antal. It's been sitting face out on my bookshelf for a couple of months now, but I have been spending more time painting miniatures lately than reading. I was thinking that, as well as simply being interesting and informative, it might give some ideas for miniature gaming.

10. Tag other people:

Nah. Not many people read this site anyway! And if you do, and you find this interesting, consider yourself TAGGED.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, and list the miniature gaming groups in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Yankee Peddler: Probably the oldest group around, having been around over twenty years. They are a dues-based club ($20/mo, I believe, although it used to be negotiable based on how often you play down there) as they have their own gaming space in the rear of a strip mall. There is a large 8'x12' or so table, and a smaller one. They play a lot of Warhammer, and typically run historical games every other weekend. They often play home-brew Colonial rules, as well as 15mm Johnny Reb 2, 25mm AWI and Napoleonics (incl. Egypt), 15mm Limeys and Slimeys and others. There are also some RPG games. Games are usually run on Saturday mornings. I was a member for a while, but as my kids got older, I just couldn't make Saturday mornings anymore.

For lack of a better name, the MoA group is a group of guys I play with which includes Bob Bryant, author of Might of Arms. Mostly historical, our games include 15mm MoA (obviously) and variants, 15mm Battlefront WW2 and Flames of War, 25mm TSATF Boer War, Piquet: Field of Battle, Check Your Six, home rules, board games and others. We mostly play on Friday nights at somebody's house.

There is the Barony in Oak Ridge, an old staple which had closed down but has now returned, better than before (or so I've heard-- I haven't actually made it up there yet). There is Games Workshop, WarMachine and probably Hordes among other things. Update: It appears that the Barony has closed its retail location.

They don't mention it on their website, but Sci-Fi City opened up a store in East Town Mall or whatever it is called now (Knoxville Center Mall? East Knoxville near I-40/I-640 intersection). The rumor I've heard is a guy who ran WarMachine out at the Barony is running it at Sci-Fi City now.

You can also check out KnoxGamers for the local gaming scene, although there is more focus on RPGs there. There is also the Atomic City Gaming League for gaming in Oak Ridge.

Also, the Tenn Soldiers site. I don't know much about these guys, other than they're somewhat related to Yankee Peddler and appear to be GW-focused.

I've run two Xeno (i.e., Aliens) battles solo today with about 10 humans and about 50 bugs (plus a few dinos as I started rolling high!).

The first game, 10 militia were trying to find out why a village had stopped transmitting. Their mission basically to search the four buildings on the table and withdraw. They searched three buildings in a row with nothing, then got three Xeno rolls in a row for something like 50 Xenos charging out of the darkness. The last three went down hard though, their backs to a wall, but in the end, no match for the numbers.

In the next game, ten soldiers came in for what seemed like a cakewalk. They breezed through the first batch of Xenos and it looked like they would do the same for the second, but one Xeno managed to make it into charge distance! This made a squad of soldiers Runaway, who sought refuge in a building-- occupied by 4 Xenos who immediately got a turn. Scratch squad one. The second squad tried to fall back, but couldn't generate enough firepower and got sliced up.

I'd never heard of ERM's Corporate World line, but I like them, especially the Assassins and Slicks.

Miniatures Service Center recently ran a special giving away a free Trident "Battle Road" 40mm AWI figure. I got one, and really like it. I have generally pooh-poohed 40mm as yet another scale, but I have been thinking about it for skirmish lately. I like the figure. I'm going to buy probably about 10 figures per side and run some skirmish games with them. $3.50 is about on par with good 28mm nowadays, and these have more visible detail and will probably be easier to paint and look better on the table. So, for detailed, small scale skirmish, 40mm may just be the way to go!

Looks like Magnificent Egos is planning to produce the full line of Clan Wars miniatures. Best of luck to them. I just bought some Griffen Greys from them, and got what I ordered promptly.

I was always rather ambivilent about Clan Wars. I was a huge L5R fan back in the day, and ran Deathseeker.com, the number 1 L5R site. I liked the figures, and the game played okay, but I wanted to see massed samurai armies, to the point that I considered painting 6mm samurai armies and making my own rules. Ah well, I have lots of ideas that never get done.

I painted this Hida Sukune figure for the Clan War author.

I happen to think he looked pretty good. I guess I called the author to see if he had received it, and he opened it while I was on the phone with him. His comment, in a rather sour tone, was, "He's red." Well, no duh. Hida Sukune's armor in every picture of him ever is red. Whatever. I told him if he wasn't going to use it that I'd pay to have him mail it back to me because I was rather fond of it. He did.

The Feldmachink is a clever way of using hidden units.

I've been playing some Necromunda lately, and we decided we would all make a one foot square piece of terrain to represent one of our territories. I decided to do Vents, and here are some in-progress shots.

Last night, we played some old school 1st ed Gamma World, and I saw a buddy's Drinking Hole. It looked great!

Phil Barker has a set of modern rules, the Sharp End, up on his website. It's ultra-modern, for regular vs. irregular forces at company scale.

I ran pretty much around the clock on Saturday. I took a lot of pictures, but I never got a chance to upload them or update the website. I drove home yesterday, and am just now loading the pictures. Stay tuned.

I played Piquet: Field of Battle 1809 game last night. I commanded the Austrian right, attempting to stop the French from crossing a stream. I performed adequately, having three poorer units routed, but my better three stuck around and defended a battery that continually pounded the French when the reached the banks. All was for naught as a cavalry division full of Cuirassiers crushed our left flank. Anyway, I really liked FoB. It's still Piquet, but much simpler, and with a mechanism of ensuring even play while still allowing a better force to out-maneuver its opponents. Updated with pictures.

The table itself was really great-- 10 players each side, each with 5-6 units (foot units were 18 25mm figures-- that's a lot of Napoleonics), and we played to conclusion in about three hours.

You can see the rest of my Friday pictures here.

So, I've bought the dickens out of the Superfigs range, and built my own skyscraper rooftoop terrain, have the rules but have yet to actually play a game. So...guess what I did today?

Ook! I led Elasti-Ape of the Super Simians in a 10 player game. I drew first blood, taking out Thunderfist of the Knights of Dis. Not much later, though, Squat connected and knocked my unconcious body 45" away-- not just off the building, off the table!

I'm off to my usual start, dying miserably on the shores around Mount Suribachi with TAC: Arc of Fire, and having my French and mercenaries driven from the field by a Hapsburg tercio with Piquet: Band of Brothers 2. All the vendors say I'm a true hero, though! Fun stuff!!

In the Iwo game, an American platoon was trying to sever a narrow portion of the island with five bunkers and several large shell holes. We never really stood a chance-- the scenario was probably weighted against us, and our dice rolling was terrible. We were murdered in the first third of the table, although I did manage to take out one bunker.

The second game was a Piquet: Band of Brothers game, Hapsburgs vs. French. I ran the French with another guy, and we did okay, while French Uncontrolled Advances pushed them into difficult terrain (not something that probably would have happened had we known about it). Anyway, the French guy got tired (or frustrated, more likely) and left, so I took over for him and tried to extricate the French...not easy, and I couldn't do it before I had four routers and hit a Major Morale while digging for an Engine of War Reload card, allowing my guns to fire point blank into my opponent's Tercio. Ah well.

You can see the rest of my Thursday pictures here It looks like I uploaded them twice, so once you start seeing duplicates, there's nothing new. I'll clean it up later.

Nothing really turns on at Historicon until Noon on Thursday, so I jumped out of bed early and tried to get some things done away from the hotel.

First, I went by the nearby Farmer's Market in Bird-in-Hand to look for gifts for the family. There was lots of nice food, and I bought some jams and jellies to take home, but most of the gifts were tourist junk. I passed.

And yes, it is true, this is Amish coutry:

I'd been to Lancaster three times before, but never realized that it contained the oldest tobacconist in America, Demuth Tobacco Shop. I swing by to buy a souvenir pipe (a small, straight P-lip Peterson with a long shank and a short bit).

I was going to write about this morning, but uploading pictures is taking longer than I thought, and the dealer's room opens in 20 minutes, so I'm heading that way. If you don't hear from me again, I was crushed under the throng of gamers stampeding to blow their money. I regret nothing!

Left Knoxville at 8:30 AM and arrived in Lancaster, PA at 6:30 PM. VROOM! That's even stopping for a 30 minute lunch at Shoney's. Not my favorite place to eat, but the guys I'm travelling with selected it. We ate dinner at Applebee's, got our registration materials, then sat on the deck overlooking the pool, drank bourbon and beer, planned games and talked a little history and politics.

Lessons Learned: Infantry Squad Tactics in Military Operations in Urban Terrain During Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, Iraq [PDF] from the Marine Corps Times is a very interesting article about MOUT in Iraq.

I saw a few bounced messages in my e-mail box this morning indicating some spammer is forging the littleleadheroes.com domain as a source address for spam. If you're visiting, rest assured, I'm not a spammer.

I am in the new house. Unfortunately, my stuff gets unpacked last, so I am still about half in boxes. I wanted to smoke a pipe while we celebrated the 4th, but couldn't find them. My original Zulu movie poster that I've had for years without any place to hang it hasn't been located, either. I couldn't keep track of things in the old house even after living there for ten years, now we're in a bigger house and everything is in a new place anyway. It's going to be a long few weeks getting the place comfortable.

I hope you enjoy this Independance Day weekend. We close on our house tomorrow, so I will be spending the weekend loading boxes, hauling them across town, and unloading them at the new house. Movers will come on Monday and get the heavy stuff for us, so we expect our first night in the new house to be Monday night. If the site is down for a few days, that's what's going on.

So, with me in locked-down no-mess mode, I've been reading and playing a solo VBAM campaign...

1. I read Die Hard: Dramatic Actions from the Napoleonic Wars. For some reason, I had in my mind that this was more story-driven, but it was your typical historical narrative, which made it seem somewhat less dramatic to me. Still, it details several actions, such as Hougomont and the crossing the Beresina. I think it's an okay book for somebody with only general knowledge of the period.

2. I read Miles, Mystery and Mayhem, and really enjoyed it. I'd heard a lot about the Vorkosigan saga, but it seemed very Sci-Fi fannish, and not very appealing to me. Plus, I haven't been very crazy over the Sci-Fi I've read from Baen. However, after reading the free story the Mountains of Mourning on Baen's site, I was hooked. I wasn't sure which book to read, but MM&M seemed like a very good introduction.

3. Victory By Any Means is a very cool system. You basically manage an interstellar empire, building fleets, colonizing planets, negotiating treaties and making war. I've played over a year of a solo exploration campaign and am about to start a couple of PBEM games. It's fundamentally a simple system, but there are a lot of optional rules that you can pick and choose from and drop in as you like.

4. I should start moving into the new house a week from tomorrow. I think Monday the 3rd should be our first night there.

5. I've also been watching the World Cup!! As frustrating as it has been for a USA fan...at least all the games are televised this year. It's been wonderful! And I have a TV at my desk at work...lots of soccer in the last two weeks...

We have begun cleaning clutter up around the house in order to prepare it for viewing by possible buyers. According to my wife, most of my precious hobby is clutter, so it is being boxed up and hidden away. I prefer to think of them as entering carboard chrysalises, to emerge as beautiful armies at their new home. Or something like that. I chunked my old, well-worn 1'x2' flat terrain boards into the trash, as I mostly use a ground cloth anymore, and plan on making nice 2' square pieces at the new place. I also threw a way a bunch of old styrofoam pieces-- I am big on ideas but low on productivity, a sure way to accumulate a bunch of trash.

Being a Short Discourse on Miniature Wargaming has a list of interesting and amusing historical military anecdotes.

I am 35 years young today. Scored some Victory By Any Means books, some 15mm BH/OG Napoleonic Bavarians and Württemburgers, and a new carrying bag for my pipes. Yay!

It currently looks like we'll be closing on the new house at the end of June. The home inspection went really well. My primary gaming area will be about 22' x 16'. Nice! But that's not all, folks. There will be an upstairs finished attic annex directly off that room that is 10' x 15', and has lots of closet/attic storage space. I'm thinking wargames downstair, RPGs upstairs. Sweet. I'm thinking about soliciting designs on this site, with some cash prizes. Stay tuned!

Well, I cut my thumb badly and was unable to paint, I've been to Chicago on business, coaching both my son's and my daughter's soccer teams, had my in-laws in for a couple of weeks, and it looks like I'm about to buy a new house. In other words, I have been busy. On the upside, though, my thumb is better and I've just finished a pack of 15mm OG French Hussars, soccer season ends Saturday, and the new house will have lots of gaming space, so things could be worse!

Phil's Phigs are available again from Impact Miniatures, which also has some new Fantasy Football figures.

A couple of buddies came over Tuesday night. We were planning to play some PKowboys. We had previously discussed doing something similar to Warhammer Quest, which we have been playing lately, with starship crews. I had written up some rules which we looked over and wound up playing.

I didn't keep notes, but here's pretty much how it went.

Both guys made a small, unarmed ship with four crew and set out to salvage. They got stopped by a government warship, but their papers checked out and they were sent on their way. They got lost, but working together, managed to get back on track without too much trouble. Finally, they found a derelict ship they decided to try and loot. We played out the tabletop using PKombat (playtest Sci-Fi rules based on PKowboys by Nick Hawkins).

Upon exiting the airlocks, they found the corridors covered with a secreted resin-- sure signs it was Infested (think aliens/genestealers). They ventured down a long corridor, with Mik's "scruffy female Engineer" leading far out in front.

They found several security rooms, and as the Engineer was searching one, a fire broke out and started to spread. Leaving the room, three "hatchlings" (Tyranid Rippers mounted individually) rounded the end of the hall and attacked. With a little help from the rest of Mik's away team and some of Chris's, they killed all of them.

However, as soon as things settled down, a "juvenile" (Tyranid gaunt) dropped from the ceiling, slicing into one of Chris's crew and taking him down. The lights went out on the ship, and a giant "adult" emerged from a darkened Security room.

Mik's two-gun blonde locked the door on the adult, grabbed Chris's down character and ran him back to his airlock, but in the ensuing melee, Mik's Engineer went down and was cut off by the juvenile. The adult muscled open the Security door, but Mik's captain Heroically hooked it with his axe and closed it again. One of Chris's crew grabbed the engineer and began to haul her the length of the corridor under they scything arms of the Infestations.

Mik's captain, in the meantime, was bound and determined that nothing would stop him from searching the Hydroponics bay and grabbing some equipment for his ship. Chris's character, having roused Mik's Engineer, decided he'd done his bit and beat his way back to the airlock. The Engineer was soon to follow, leaving Mik's captain rumaging through hydro tubing while the big nasties closed in on the only way out...

We called it at this point, it was 1:30 AM and everybody had work or school the next day. We actually felt Mik's captain had a better than even chance of getting out if he left right then, as the juvenile was wounded and the adult had to get the door open again.

All in all, everybody seemed to have fun with it. The biggest problem was the battlemat, which was a parting gift from our old RPG GM when he left town, and I ruined it by using Dry Erase markers on it!

Okay, that's more like it! I got rid of the white background and put them in front of some terrain, and was able to get better pictures, so I reshot all of them.

Here are some more super hero figures I finally got around to taking pictures of.

All except the chick with two guns are from Superfigs. Even though I have never run a supers game and probably never will until my kids grow up and pester me into it, I really love the Superfigs figures. I have probably almost twice this many unpainted, and just got Battering Ram in the mail today. I should have gotten Ape Austion, too...ah well, next order. I don't remember what range the chick with the two guns is from, but I remember Sandra Garrity sculpted her. I actually Dipped her, and it looked so awful I painted over the top of it. She turned out okay.

I had just terrible luck with the camera tonight. I don't know what it is, I set it up just like always, but all the pictures came out dark. I think maybe my lights weren't arranged well. I don't know. I hate, hate, HATE, HAAAAAAAATTTEE taking pictures of miniatures. Why in the firk ding blast heck does it have to be such a pain in the ass? I mean, I'm looking at the display on back of my camera, and it looks just fine. Why not put THAT picture on the disk? Grrrrr.

I haven't posted in a while, but I haven't been completely idle. Mostly, inspired by my first game of Warhammer Quest, I've been working on a solo Sci-Fi campaign system. It's extremely rough right now, but already fun to fool around with. I'll post something here when it's reasonably well put together. Also, I started painting up my JC Figures girls. Pretty nice figures, and I think I painted them well. When I've finished, I'll get some pictures up. I promised I would finish them before I started my Infinity figures, which should arrive Monday. I also ordered some casts of Hirts Arts' new Sci-Fi floors and walls from Castle Kits, with the idea that if I like them, I might buy the molds.

Since I had the light tent out, I took some pictures of some Sci-Fi figures I hadn't yet.

First are some Copplestone Castings Future Wars Hunter Aliens.

Next, I'll show how I accidentally painted a Tyranid army! I always liked the Hormagaunts, and bought a "Gaunt" box to paint some up as generic slashy-type alien monsters.

Well, since I was at it, I also had a bunch of old Space Hulk Genestealers I'd never painted, so I got them out and painted a bunch of them up.

That was it for a while, then I thought, what the heck, I'll paint the rest of the Gaunt pack. I don't like the "meat guns," but I'll use them. Plus, I based the Rippers singly to use as face huggers.

I was in Memphis celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary this August, and visted the Games Workshop factory store, the Battle Bunker, there. I wanted to buy something game-related, but every game store I knew of in Memphis had shut down. Plus, the new Carnifex looked really appealing to me, so what the heck, I bought it plus some Warriors and Ravenors.

The Carnifex is big, beautiful and expensive, which for me typically means he sits in a box for several years before I do anything with him. However, I painted these figures "Aliens" style, which pretty much means black with lots of grey drybrushing. It's an easy, quick paint job which gets the job done but still looks good. I think they turned out pretty well, and I didn't spend much time at all on them.

I set up my light tent at lunch and took some much better photographs of RAFM's White Collar Survivalist. I really like how this miniature turned out.

Taking a break halfway through a bag of 15mm Légère, I painted up my new White Collar Survivalist from RAFM. Updated: Better pictures here.

I took more time than usual, trying to do some of the more artistic techniques I've seen people discussing. It turned out nicely, but it took all of my spare time over two evenings to finish. I can't handle that low a volume, I've got quite a backlog of figures to paint! It was fun, though.

I really need to break the light tent out for him and take some nicer pictures. He really does look much nicer than the photographs show.

More on my VAT issues with Irregular. I got this response today to my e-mail to them.

sorry about the long delay in getting back to you.I've been in touch with the VAT people and they tall me that proff (!) [proof -Andy] needs to be supplied (by us) to zero rate goods being exported. They're sending me a booklet about it. We have offered to deduct VAT on orders over £50 in the past as this was what i was told was the legal requirement, but it really was a bulk order discount in effect without the need for documents and red tape. I'm inclined to keep things that way.

Sounds like a legitimate disagreement. I can't really fault anybody for not understanding precisely how tax laws work, they tend to be arcane and uninteresting.

I'm glad to see they did respond to my message and appear to be investigating the issue, even if they do ultimately decide to maintain their current policy.

Did you ever find a figure and have absolutely no idea where it come from?

I was looking through my Darkest Africa stuff tonight, and found a single figure in a small ziplock bag. It appears to be a Games Workshop Zulu (c) 1987. I didn't even know they made Zulu, much less that I had one. How on Earth could such a unique figure have wound up in my lead without me remembering it? It's the only figure in a bag in ten small drawers of figures! I swear it wasn't there the last time I looked!!

It's only a week and a half until NaNoWriMo, but I think I will pass on it this year. Finishing was a blast last year, but it took up all my spare time and then some for a month, and I just don't want to devote that much energy to it right now. I have too many other things going on.

I had a 20% coupon for the local games store. I didn't really need any miniatures or RPGs they carried, so I decided to look for family games. I bought Carcassone on the recommendation of my friends, but it was listed for both 8 and 10 years or older, and both ages are older than my kids. The manager showed me Blokus. Lay down funky shapes and try to play them all? Sounds lame. But...it did have a Mensa award and the German "Spiel des Jahres" award, pretty high praise, I thought, so I bought it.

It's a big hit at the house with the kids! It's listed for five and older, but my son, who is about three months short of five, picked it up in no time and was competitive in his first game. In fact, we've played four games so far, and he's come in second three times, beating his six year old sister. He asked to play it twice yesterday. Here's a three way game we played. I was red, him blue, and her green.

The rules, examples, scoring and variants take up both sides of a single piece of paper. Basically, you must cover the small square in your corner with the first piece you play, and every subsequent piece must touch at least one other piece of your color at a corner, but may not touch any piece of your color at an edge. Try to play all your pieces.

Update: Heh. I now see that if I had played the 1x1 block, which I'm pretty sure was the last block I played, in the gap of the U shaped piece on the left, I could have played my final piece along the left side!

I posted some pictures from a game last night of PKombat, some playtest Sci-Fi rules based on PKowboys.

I've been looking at 6mm Fantasy again lately. Not as many resources as 6mm Sci-Fi, but here's what I've found:

--==> 6mm Fantasy Resources <==--

The 6mm yahoo groups is a good resource (all genres, not just Fantasy):
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/6mm_Miniatures/
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/6mm_Minis_Photos/

6mm Wargaming has pictures of 6mm Lord of the Rings armies. Note the judicious use of customized figures in other scales:
http://6mm.wargaming.info/page1.shtml

Mercenary Brush has some pictures of painted Baccus figurs:
http://mercenarybrush.com/6mmfantasy.shtml

TMP Thread:
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=52786

Pictures of my own 6mm Hordes of the Things armies:
http://www.littleleadheroes.com/archives/000393.html#000393

--==> 6mm Fantasy Manufacturers <==--

Baccus:
http://www.baccus6mm.com/

Irregular:
http://www.irregularminiatures.co.uk/

Lots of Ancients and Medieval figures would be appropriate, too.

--==> 10mm Fantasy Manufacturers <==--

Irregular:
http://www.irregularminiatures.co.uk/

Kallistra:
http://www.kallistra.co.uk/Shop/H%20and%20H%20Shop.html

Minifigs:
http://www.minifigs.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=194_209

Pendraken:
http://www.pendraken.co.uk/fantasy.htm

Warrior:
http://www.warrioronline.demon.co.uk/10mm/10fantasy.htm

Wow, good news-- according to this thread on TMP, rights to the old German Metal Magic Spacelords have been sold to em4 who will re-release the entire line!

Some links on how to see stereoscopic photography if you're having problems: here, here (these are parallel), and here. I find that it helps, as the two blurry images get close together, to pick out a distinctive feature you can make out in both and concentrate only on that.

One tip that might really improve my photography is the One in Thirty Rule, that the pictures should be taken at a distance apart equal to 1/30th the distance to the object being photographed. I tried to keep it about the distance apart my eyes are, which is much further apart than 1/30, probably more on the lines 1/4. This may explain why some of the accidental ones work much better than several of the intentional ones.

Hey, a website devoted to stereoscopic photography!

A few more stereoscopic/stereographic pictures I did tonight. Read on...

The others are here.

Okay, so while fooling around with my new light tent, I decided to try something I always thought was cool-- stereographic, or stereoscopic, photography. I've never seen miniatures done like this, but see no reason not to. The results were pretty good! Read on...

It's like those "Magic Eye" pictures. You want to relax your eyes and look *past* the photograph. The two images will begin to blurrily move towards each other. As they superimpose over each other, they will suddenly snap into focus in 3D.

I didn't really take any special steps to make these. I would just take a picture, move the camera over about the width between my eyes, and take the second. In fact, the Masai shields weren't even intentional. I took multiple pictures from slightly different angles to make sure I got one good one. After looking at them, I threw two together to see how they looked.

Let me know your thoughts on these...I'm still experimenting, and trying to figure out what works well and what doesn't.

This page has some good links on stereographic photography.

I spent MLK day building a light tent for photographing miniatures. Read on...

I was looking through the light tents for sale on eBay, and saw one with a frame of PVC tubing. I went to Lowe's and bought six 5' pieces for a dollar each, and some 20 cent "elbow with outlet" pieces to form the corners. The outlet is threaded, so I had to also buy similarly cheap thread to socket converters. I sawed the PVC tubes in half with a hacksaw, and had a 2.5' square frame. I went to Jo-Ann Etc... and found some white fabric for about $3 a yard, and bought four yards of it. I draped it over the frame and back around the rear. It's not too pretty since it's not cut and sewn perfectly to fit, but it works just fine. I used some paper binders I had laying around to secure it to the frame. Total cost for the entire tent was about $25, and it will break down into a very small area when not in use.

I had two old photography lamps I used to use, but they were big, hot and the clamps for the reflectors were too weak to hold them up. I went to Lowes and Wal-Mart and bought some cheap aluminum reflectors. I bought three smaller ones, 6-8" diameter, with good clamps to hold 100w bulbs, and two larger ones, 9-10" diameter, with a grill for 150w bulbs. I have the 150w on the left and right sides. Two 100w bulbs are clamped on top of the tent, aiming down into it. The last 100w is to the rear, near the top and aiming down. You could probably make do with fewer bulbs of higher wattages, but I don't like getting burned and worrying something will catch on fire.

I found a very nice third party Nikon Coolpix 950 user guide. It discussed setting the camera into aperture priorty mode to increase the depth of field. With these few improvements, I was, I think, able to greatly increase the quality of the pictures I take of my miniatures. Compare these pictures, some I took with my old set up:

Now look at the new pictures I took using the light tent, and aperture priority mode with my smallest aperture:

While the details of these pictures look good to me, I need to work on the colors a little bit. They are on a dark green felt, which looks grey in the pictures. My next experiment will be to play around with the white balance to see if I can clear that up. All the other colors look reasonable, though, so maybe it has something to do specifically with it. I don't know yet. They could also use a bit more thought into the background scenery, and something like a low backdrop to block off the white light tent in the background. Still, this is an improvement.

Ran across this home made light tent page looking for tips on photographing miniatures.

I've added pictures of Arsenal Miniatures 20mm War on Terror US figures to my Operation Iraqi Freedom gallery.

I've posted some pictures of a recent Chaos in Cairo game.

I got some new 20mm Arsenal Miniatures US troops painted up, along with pre-assembled, pre-painted Dragon Armor Bradleys and Miniature Building Authority Middle Eastern buildings. Take a look.

Got my Chaos in Cairo figures finished. Take a look!. Read on for my custom CiC group:

Captain Sean O'Shaughnessy (64)
Captian O'Shaughnessy and his crew, Mediterranean pirates, fell under the Mad Moroccan's spell, figuratively or literally, while bringing him to Cairo.
STR: 2
AGL: 3
MND: 4
RES: 4

AP: 7
DR Pool: 4
Vit: 6

Special Traits: Cowardly, Iron Will x2, Medic, Crack Shot x3, Sharp Senses x2

Items: Knife, Large Caliber Pistol

The Tentacle Mummy (73)
A construct of the Mad Moroccan.
STR: 4
AGL: 6
MND: 2
RES: 3

AP: 8 [15]
DR Pool: 5
Vit: 7

Special Traits: Inhuman, Terrifying Aura, Lightning Reflexes x2, Extra Attacks x3, Melee Attack x3, Extra Movement x4

The Mad Moroccan (71)
A North African Arab wizard.
STR: 2
AGL: 3
MND: 4
RES: 4

AP: 7
DR Pool: 4
Vit: 6

Special Traits: Fortune x2, Iron Will x3, Leadership 6, Tough as Nails, You Haven't Seen the Last of Me!

Items: Forbidden Lore x3, Lucky Charm, Knife

Abdullah (65)
The Mad Moroccan's right-hand man.
STR: 3
AGL: 4
MND: 3
RES: 3

AP: 7 [10]
DR Pool: 4
Vit: 6

Special Traits: Crack Shot x3, Extra Attacks x3, Extra Movement x3, Lightning Reflexes

Items: Knife, Large Caliber Pistol

The Clay Golem (72)
A construct of the Mad Moroccan.
STR: 6
AGL: 2
MND: 2
RES: 5

AP: 4
DR Pool: 8
Vit: 11

Special Traits: Inhuman, Combat Prowess x3, Natural Armor x3, Terrifying Aura, Melee Attack x3

Captain Sean's Crew
STR: 3
AGL: 4
MND: 2
RES: 2

AP: 6
DR Pool: 4
Vit: 5

Special Traits: Combat Prowess, Tough as Nails, Veterans

Items: Rifle, Sword

After some delays, I'm back on track, with 2/3rds done!

Wow. Keyhole from Google is a very easy to use service which I think would be a good resource for gamers.

Brian Misiaszek's Introduction to the Pulps looks like an interesting resource for pulp games. Hattip: Miniature Wargaming

So...I've been travelling a lot this month for business, plus battling a sinus infection, so the site has been pretty idle. I do have a unit of French Dragoons and Generals painted up, as well as the good guys from Chaos in Cairo, but none have been based yet so I haven't bothered to take any pictures. Plus, I'll be doing NaNoWriMo next month, so I doubt too much will get done. What to write about? Tough call...I wanted to do Napoleonics, ala Sharpe, but figured I just didn't know enough to make it historical, and if it's not too historical, what's the point? I'll probably do something Sci-Fi, maybe relatively modern horror. I'm still thinking about it. Watch my progress here:

Just finished up my Austrian artillery stands.

Jim Dunnigan's Strategy Page has a Prediction Market. It's pretty simplistic, but has a lot more items than most others I've seen, and is free until at least November 1.

My kids, a boy 3 and a girl 5, are getting into Superheroes. The other day, I went and bought a bunch of single common Heroclix from Twilight Cards of a lot of the guys they recognize-- Captain America, Spider-Man and Hulk for him, and Hawkgirl, Batgirl and She-Hulk for her. I also bought a bunch of baddies to fight: Vulture, Doc Ock, the Lizard, Scorpion and a Skrull. I gave them as action figures to the kids. Cost me about $17, with shipping, for 11 figures. The kids went NUTS over them!

Ugh...scratch one helicopter kit...I just knocked my plastic solvent into the box!

Bob MacKenzie has put up a page with 6mm infantry size comparisons.

Hey, I missed the anniversary, but I've been doing this site over two years now.

I came across a very good buy the other day-- an 8 pack of 1:43 scale modern diecast cars at Toys R Us for $8. Check them out:

Apocalypse Miniatures has an interesting range of Sci-Fi Atlanteans.

We played a game of Road Rage v8 [pdf] Friday night. It was a fun little game of beat up Hot Wheels cars with guns on them. Doesn't look to be much support for them any more, but the rules are still around (just like Axles and Alloys). Hmmm...Road Rage News, an auto dueling blog I just found, looks interesting but idle.

The FUMBBL online Blood Bowl league looks very cool. I remember back in the day, we used IRC to chat back and forth. I kept a board out and moved proxy players on it to keep track of where everyone was, and I wrote a little dice-rolling and card-drawing bot.

Homemade Tools includes instructions on building a paint shaker and a foam cutting tool, among other things.

The Colonial Angle has some good advice on running a convention game.

Fozzbozz Trading Company has some economical foam carrying cases, as well as distributes Sloppy Jalopy.

If you need some blank maps of countries around the world, this site has them.

UC Berkeley Library Digital Topographic Map Sets has some freely available topographic maps, including a full set of 1:50000 maps of Israel. Found via terrainmap.com.

shiryon's Photo Albums contain a number of pictures of IDF armored vehicles. It's a good modeling reference for modern wargamers.

I'm expanding the focus of this weblog to my other interests, such as pipes and Go. It'll probably be a little more personal, but will still have plenty of wargaming material.

In case you're wondering, I've been locked out of this blog for the last month, which is why you haven't been seeing any updates! I finally got around to identifying the problem and correcting it (an unrelated security update must have changed the database libraries to an incompatible version, and I could no longer log in or even extract the data in a raw form). Anyway, I THINK things are back to normal. If you find any problems, just add a comment here or e-mail me at andy@cowell.org. Thanks.

I'm auctioning off my old Spacelords figures. Check it out.

I don't dwell on the WTC attack much anymore, so I've spent the better part of today being surprised at just how furious I still am over it. You can see a great editorial cartoon about the anniversary at Cox & Forkum, mirrored below, and read a great article about the event from James Lileks:

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

A new Yahoo group has started, AK47Campaigns, devoted to Peter Pig's AK-47 rules. Sounds interesting, although I don't care much for the system. Check out the longstanding Wargaming_Africa list if you're interested in modern Africa.

Complete Air Force Overview from Scramble Magazine has a lot of information on current air forces across the world.

I made a quick and easy miniatures display shelf. You can, too. Read on:

Go to the Millwork section of your local mega-hardware chain, in my case, Lowe's. They will have "hobby" wood cut to lengths and nicely edged. I bought a 1x2, 1x3, 1x4 and 1x6 and two and four feet, and simply screwed them together, one at a time starting at the top, leaving a 1.5" shelf on each "step." I sanded them smooth before hand, then after, I stained them and applied polyurethane. I think they look good! Overall price for the wood was around $15-20.00 or so for the larger one.

The Miniatures Atlas is a very well ordered and indexed listing of miniatures.

I've uploaded my Historicon 2003 pictures up into my gallery. I'll work on adding captions and rotating the sideways images as I have time.

In addition to Baccus 6mm, NavWar now has 6mm Samurai. The codes are as follows:

MR21 Mounted Samurai
MR22 Samurai w/sword
MR23 Samurai Firing Bow
MR24 Ashigaru w/arquebuse
MR25 Ashigaru w/bow
MR26 Ashigaru w/spear

Today is the one year anniversary of Little Lead Heroes. I hope you've found it interesting!

Wargaming Vietnam is a great resource, full of information and product reviews.

I recently asked on the Vietgaming mailing list about opinions on 20mm Vietnam figures. Here are the responses I got back.

From: Andy Cowell <andy@cowell.org>

I'm looking at maybe picking up some 20mm Vietnam, and was wondering if more experienced folks could add to the research I've done.

Qualiticast - Nice, but expensive and several prone figures.
SHQ - Very nice...any downside?
Britannia - Wide variety, but chunky
Platoon 20 - Wide variety, can't find pics...
RAFM - Can't find pics, but alright IIRC. Don't know on price...

Do Qualiticast and SHQ match up at all? I'm guessing Britannia doesn't match with the others. Am I missing anybody else?

Who makes good resin/metal vehicles in this scale? Thanks for the input.

From: "steven walker" <panzerfauste@ntlworld.com>

> Qualiticast - Nice, but expensive and several prone figures.
i think these are the old FAA/MLR figures, very nice but tall.

> SHQ - Very nice...any downside?
weapons are thin and can break very easy

> Britannia - Wide variety, but chunky
very nice, worth getting if you like the style.

> Platoon 20 - Wide variety, can't find pics...
> RAFM - Can't find pics, but alright IIRC. Don't know on price...
the same range of figures from what ive seen, brital metal used in the figures can break easy.
>
> Do Qualiticast and SHQ match up at all? I'm guessing Britannia
> doesn't match with the others. Am I missing anybody else?
none of the above will match up its down to personal choice.
>
> Who makes good resin/metal vehicles in this scale?
britania do nice vehicles, esci make some good kits when you can find them, jb models also do some good m113's in kit form., skytrex make metal vehicles as do platoon 20 but they are large compered to the figures.
>
for reviews try the www.urbanlogic.com/fieldsoffire/ or www.gruntonline.com web sites

steve

From: rapidefire@aol.com

also liberation miniatures - wide range of nam afv's and some figures www.webspawner.com/users/libmins other afv's by skytrex ( metal ) and red star ( inc the LVTp 5 and support version )

qualiticast don't match shq at all - out of your list q are the biggest/tallest whilst shq are the smallest / thinnest .i don't think brittania match the others well at at all - fat/chunky figures . the later platoon 20 figures are very good - marines and nva come to mind , however the figs are in desperate need of remoulding and they are coming up to 20 years old now .

It appears that Britannia Miniatures will be producing a Simba Uprising line. They have a few previews on their website. Will they produce Roland and van Owen tommy gunners? ;-)

The Basement has more MoFo modern pics, and Spanner & Yank has a review and release schedule.

The Basement has the first pictures of the new MoFo Moderns line.

According to this AP article (mirrored below), several Western US cities could experience "serious water conflict" in the next twenty five years. Sounds like an interesting idea for some speculative wargames to me.

Study: Water battle likely here
By Seth Hettena The Associated Press

SAN DIEGO - Albuquerque has been fingered by an Interior Department study released today as one of the six Western cities most likely to experience serious water conflict within the next two decades.

The other five communities where conflict is "highly likely" by 2025 are Las Vegas and Carson City, Nev., Denver, Houston and Salt Lake City.

"In some areas of the West, existing water supplies are, or will be, inadequate to meet the demands for water for people, cities, farms and the environment even under normal supply conditions," the department said.

Explosive growth across the West is straining water resources that also support billion-dollar farm economies and are crucial to maintaining the survival of a host of endangered species.

Court action within the past year in the central Rio Grande has sent farmers, municipalities and environmentalists scrambling for positions that will allow agriculture, drinking water consumers and the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow all to get adequate water supplies in the midst of a serious drought. The city of Albuquerque plans to switch from groundwater aquifers to river water for its supply by 2006, using in part water diverted from the disputed Colorado River.

On the department's map, the Rio Grande and the Colorado River were marked in red as highly likely sources of future conflict.

There was a "substantial" possibility of water wars in other Western cities, including Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix and San Antonio among others, according to the department's map.

A third level of cities had a "moderate" chance of future conflict, including Seattle, Dallas, Casper, Wyo., Boise, Idaho, and Salem, Ore.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton ordered her staff to develop the map of potential future hot spots in the hopes of averting a repeat of the crisis in Oregon's Klamath Basin in 2001. Armed federal officers were called in to protect supplies from farmers angry over the Interior Department's decision to cut off their water to protect endangered salmon. The Klamath River had a "substantial" possibility for sparking conflict again by 2025, according to the Interior Department.

Another water war erupted this year in California, after the state failed to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to sign a deal aimed at reducing the its historic overdependence on the Colorado River.

In response, Norton reduced the amount of water California can draw from the Colorado River this year by 600,000 acre-feet, enough water for 1.2 million people.

"Crisis management is not an effective solution for addressing long-term systematic water supply problems," Norton said in a statement.

She was expected to answer questions about the program in a news conference at 1 p.m. MDT today.

As part of her program, dubbed Water 2025, Norton wants to focus federal dollars and technology in key Western watersheds to predict, prevent and alleviate water supply conflicts.

President Bush's budget calls for an initial investment of $11 million in such efforts.

The secretary said her initiative could help stretch existing supplies through maintaining and modernizing her department's network of dams, reservoirs, pumping stations and pipelines.

Investments in research and development could help provide more affordable ways to boost water supplies through desalination.

"Water 2025 provides a basis for public discussion of the realities that face the West, so that decisions can be made at the appropriate level in advance of water supply crises," Norton said.

Sorry for the delay. I've been playing Go. If you've never played Go, see this excellent introduction.

This is a fictional story about SOF operators as athletes, very interesting.

The message on modmil (you may need to subscribe to read it) has some interesting guides on artillery effects for wargame umpires.

Here's the message, you may want to read it in a fixed-width font.

Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 20:36:02 -0000
To: modmil@yahoogroups.com
From: "jkemppi"
Subject: [modmil] Re: DPICM effectiveness

--- In modmil@yahoogroups.com, Bob Mackenzie
wrote:
> So far I have found only few snippets in Finnish
> artillery fire effectiveness guidance to umpires but they do not
> discuss ICMs (my Finnish military book about statistics and
> propabilities in 1984 explicitly states that there have been no in-
> depth information of calculations of effectiveness ICMs)
>
>
> Dear Janne
>
> I'd very much lime to see that data if you have it in a handy e-
mail
> freindly format

I do not bother to write those calculations as they get VERY
complex in the end but these are some combined rules of thumb
from referee books.

This is from old 1982 Indirect Fire Use Referee Guidance

Typical Indirect Fire Effects
INDIRECT UNIT IS UNIT IS DEFENDING
FIRE MOVING FOX HOLES NO COVER
----------------------------------------------
Round hit Stops for No Effect No Effect
nearby 1-3 minutes
----------------------------------------------
1 Fire Stops for can fight can fight
Strike 5-10 minutes effectively effectively
0.5-1 min 1-2 min
afterwards afterwards
----------------------------------------------
3-4 Fire Stops for can fight cannot fight
Strikes 1-3 hours effectively effectively;
3-5 min only limited
afterwards resistance
----------------------------------------------
My take is that -based on sources this book sites-
these are based on 1960's munitions.

The newer manual from year 2000 is the Referee Guide
that describes all various units and unit types in
battlefield.

This takes more calculative approach to firing and
offers more detail.

Target Unprotected infantry
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 10% 5% -
18x155H - - 20% 15% 10%
6x122MRL - - 50% 25% -
9x120M 25% 7% - - -
NOTE! In open areas use of proximity fuzing adds 50% to casualty
rates.

Target hasty foxholes (they protect from direct fire
only)
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 7% 2% -
18x155H - - 10% 7% 3%
6x122MRL - - 20% 10% -
9x120M 5% 2% - - -
NOTE! In open areas use of proximity fuzing adds 50% to casualty
rates.

Target hasty foxholes and protected fox holes for
living (they protect from fregments)
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 4% 2% -
18x155H - - 6% 3% 1%
6x122MRL - - 2% 1% -
9x120M 2% 1% - - -

Target Infantry in APCs
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 4% 2% -
18x155H - - 6% 3% 1%
6x122MRL - - 20% 10% -
9x120M 2% 1% - - -

Target Portable foxholes in use (these are made out of wood or
corrugated steel or equivalent, they protect from sentitive fuzed
artillery rounds)
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 2% 1% -
18x155H - - 4% 2% 1%
6x122MRL - - 2% 1% -
9x120M 2% 1% - - -

Target Portable foxholes in use (these are made out of concrete or
steel or equivalent, they protect from slow fuzed artillery rounds)
UNIT 3km 6km 8km 16km 24km
18x122H - - 2% 1% -
18x155H - - 3% 2% 1%
6x122MRL - - 2% 1% -
9x120M 2% 1% - - -

NOTE! If aiming point for artillery misses by 100meters, cut
casualty rate by half.

NOTE! If several artillery firing units are used, casualty rates
increase by 20% per each extra firing unit: For example: 20%
casualty rate firing unit shoots with a totla of 3 unit grouping.
the casualty rate would be 20% x (1+0.2+0.2) or 20% x 1.4 = 28%

NOTE! Almost all of artillery casualties are caused in first 10
seconds of firing. This should be represented in casualties: for
example: use unprotected infantry in first minute, then protected
infantry, etc.

NOTE! Guided munitions are available to mortars for destroying
tanks. These munitions have accuracy of 1 hit in 3 rounds for ranges
between 1-5 km and 1 hit for 6 rounds in ranges beyond this.

One Fire Strike expends 108x 122H or 72x155H or 240x122MRL or
108x120M rounds.

Artillery "Beaten Zone" areas are following:

122H/155H Battalion at 6km range: 90m x 300m
Each kilometer adds zone +10 m x +50m

120M Battalion at 3km range: 70m x 150m
Each kilometer adds zone +20 m x +50m

122MRL Battery at 8km range: 500m x 600m
Increasing range adds width of firing (but no calculative value is
given but depth of beazen zone remains same)

Artillery groupings (example is 3 battalion strike) has beaten zone
of 300m x 300m circle at 6km with circle diameter increasing by +50m
for each extra kilometer.

But nothing on those ICMs yet... :(

Russia's military arms company Rosoboronexport has a page with videos of Russian weapons and vehicles in action.

Baccus 6mm has their first release of 6mm Samurai up.

Jim Henthorn's Vietnam Vet Page has high quality scans of Vietnam War era 1:250,000 topographical maps of North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and parts of Thailand.

This post lists a number of map sources that could be interesting. I haven't had time to try them all out yet.

A little off-topic, but here is the DoD's list of ways to support our troops.

The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation is an interesting article about the future of warfare (some of which is already here).

The US Marine Corps Doctrine Division looks to contain a lot of interesting information.

There's a new 6mm Miniatures discussion group with active moderators to curb abuse at the 6mm_Miniatures Yahoo group.

East View Cartographic has a lot of highly-detailed topographical maps for sale, including unusual locations such as Africa.

Phoenix Model Company is a kit vendor which has a very nice selection plus the ability to search via scale and category. Looks very nice.

Here's a mother lode of military links.

Artificial Intelligence and Games has some interesting info as it relates to wargaming, particularly Lecture IV: Modelling Fatigue and Morale.

I'm selling a nice lot of my painted 15mm Aliens with Queen, Predators, Marines and Colonists. Take a look.

BKPainting has an interesting page on Editing Photos with Adobe Photoshop.

Tom's Spaceship Miniature/Game Lists is a nice resource for spaceship-related games.

I've uploaded my Cold Wars photographs to the new miniatures gallery. Updated: DavidsGameSite has also put up a number of Cold Wars pictures as well.

The Primary Main Objective... is another blog run by a deployed U.S. serviceman.

The General Dennis J. Reimer Training & Doctrine Digital Library also has a one page copy of The Defense of Duffer's Drift, making it easy to save a local copy. If you're interested in that, also check out my review of The Defense of Hill 781.

Leva Productions makes some nice looking micro armor terrain pieces.

L.T. Smash is a blog run by a U.S. officer currently deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom.

The U.S. Army Center of Military History has an interesting list of operation code names as well as many other interesting things.

This AP article describes some of the new weapons that may be utilized in a war with Iraq.

A new study suggests the real-life incident behind the Ghost and the Darkness may not have actually been such extraordinary behavior for lions after all.

RPGnet has an interesting article relating to game design, Thinking Virtually
#61: Designing Strategy: The Random Factor.

Battlegroup Boston's Havoc XIX page has a very nice page About the Historical Miniatures Hobby.

This On-Line Days of Knights-Kingmaker Campaign looks to be an interesting example of an e-mail medieval campaign for the War of the Roses.

6mm Wargaming is an MSN group which includes an Assault on Hamutal Yom Kippur scenario (map here).

Rudi Geudens has started posting documents from Tony Bath's famous Hyborian Campaign.

Wargames Foundry horde deals seem to be a pretty good deal, some are 80 figures for $125.00, no extra shipping.

London Gamers have a nice site which includes the Gripping Beast Gallery, a very nice section supporting Gripping Beast figures.

Bob MacKenzie has posted his impressive collection of links.

The Cold Wars website has been updated, see you there.

Defense Tech is a defense weblog, which looks interesting.

PFC/C-in-C in online at http://www.pfc-cinc.com/.

Military Miniatures Magazine is a German website devoted primarily to plastic kits and figures, but contains a number of useful tips and ideas. It can be read in English.

Fields of Fire is a bulletin board devoted primarily to 20mm Vietnam wargaming.

Rich Jones has a WW2 AoF site, and there is a new AoF Yahoo Group.

Mayne Thiele of Dragon Miniatures is a local (Knoxville, TN) fantasy and Sci-Fi painter.

My Devil Dog Design minis came today. I tooks some quick pics of my airborne pack.

Here are some pics showing how I based them, choosing not to use the slotabase system. I cut the tab off and pinned a brass rod up one or both legs. On the running poses, to provide some extra strength, I pinned all the way up to the knee. The pins were epoxied to some sheet styrene, which had holess drilled into for the epoxy on the 3/4" fender washer base to grab hold of. This was a long, irritating process. The table clutter is actually supporting two of the minis while the epoxy cures; notice the odd mechanism of blue tac on the side of a bottle.

Small | Large

Small | Large

Small | Large

Small | Large

Small | Large

I contacted Chiltern Miniatures about their 28mm modern range. They responded that their website would be up in the new year, and for the meantime, provided a product list.

Wargames Journal is an online miniature wargaming magazine which looks interesting.

Brooks Miniatures has a temporary website at http://www.atelierminiatures.com/. Their permanent URL will apparently be http://brooksminiatures.co.uk/.

This message board post, OPFOR commander's observations on XXIst century warfare, provides some very interesting ideas for modern day asymetrical conflict. The original post is at the bottom of the page, and mirrored below.

Scott Cunningham
Member, vast right wing conspiracy posted 09 Dec 2002 20:33 Log:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Inherent Vulnerabilities of Technology: Insights from the National
Training Center's Opposing Force
by Colonel John D. Rosenberger, U.S. Army

Introduction

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

To the 2,500 troopers of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Opposing
Force (OPFOR) at the U.S. Army's National Training Center (NTC), it came as
no surprise to watch the 3d Serbian Army march back into Serbia virtually
unscathed by the relentless attacks of NATO air power during the Kosovo
conflict this past year. Moreover, it came as no surprise to see the Serbian
Army employ a wide variety of physical and electronic deception techniques,
remain tactically well-dispersed, and hide their combat systems in the
infrastructure of cities and villages to preserve their combat power.

This is old news to the combined-arms team of the NTC's Opposing Force.
These same Serbian adaptations have been learned and employed successfully by
the OPFOR at the NTC since 1994-adaptive countermeasures critical to
preserving combat capability at the tactical level of war against the
impressive array of intelligence collection and attack technologies employed
by America's joint team. Moreover, this is only one of several insights the
OPFOR can provide into the limitations and vulnerabilities of the current
warfighting technology that underpins America's style of warfare in the 21st
Century.

Limitations and Vulnerabilities of Air Power and Reconnaissance Platforms

(Slide 2)

In the past six years, the NTC OPFOR has exposed many limitations and
vulnerabilities inherent to the warfighting technologies our joint services
are currently pursuing. Moreover, they've learned to defeat them just like
any adaptive and savvy opponent will do-just as the Serbian Army did this
past year. In my view, these vulnerabilities that we have exposed are
compelling, not simply to make smarter technological investments in the years
ahead, but equally important, ensure we do not forfeit combat effectiveness,
the ability to deter, or the ability to quickly defeat our enemies at both
the operational and tactical levels of war in the years ahead.

To begin with, we have learned that active and passive force protection
measures are vital to preserving combat power against asymmetric
technologies, asymmetric in this case meaning some technological capability
that provides a decisive advantage over an opponent in combat. For example,
cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, satellite reconnaissance systems, high
altitude reconnaissance aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles have provided
us an asymmetric combat advantage over all our opponents this past decade.

In response to these capabilities, we have learned that thermal deception,
vehicle and unit dispersion, decoys of all types, camouflage, concealment,
and electronic deception are vital means and ways to protect and preserve our
ground combat power. Furthermore, the OPFOR has learned that air power and
overhead intelligence acquisition systems have significant limitations and
are inherently vulnerable to deception-even in desert and mountainous
terrain. And by extension, even more so in densely forested areas and
jungles, not to mention complex and urban terrain.

Take fixed-wing attack aircraft. It is not difficult to survive against the
existing suite of joint close air support aircraft (F-16, F-18, A-10, and
equivalents), attacking at altitudes above 15,000 feet, even in the desert.
Given the target acquisition capability and the speed in which these aircraft
fly, target acquisition and target recognition at these altitudes is
difficult at best. We have learned that if we limit our movement, don't
create dust clouds, remain tactically dispersed, use camouflage, and employ
decoy equipment, we will absorb few losses to fixed wing attack above 15,000
feet-the same methodology of force protection the Serbian Army and
para-military forces employed in the dense forests, cities, and villages in
Kosovo.

By using a combination of these force protection techniques, the
effectiveness of high-altitude, fixed-wing attack against ground forces can
be limited and thereby endured. Moreover, this ability to eliminate the
effectiveness of high-altitude fixed-wing attack, in turn, places an even
higher value on overhead target acquisition platforms like satellites,
JSTARS, and unmanned aerial vehicles. And as we have learned, these
overhead intelligence collection systems-the operators and analysts-are
inherently easy to deceive.

Take reconnaissance satellites in low earth orbit. Given our experience, it
takes about 18 hours to complete the targeting process using these
sensors-from acquisition, to imagery analysis, to integration into the ATO,
to effective attack. Consequently, we've learned to move critical combat
systems every 10-12 hours to protect them and keep them in the fight.
Frequent survivability moves, in small packets of vehicles are an essential
technique to employ to preserve combat power.

Or take JSTARS. This impressive Air Force reconnaissance system, providing
both Moving Target Indicator data and Synthetic Aperture Radar images, is
able to acquire and track moving vehicles within a 10,000 sq/nm area,
depending on weather and terrain conditions. Under the right conditions,
this formidable capability can provide commanders at many levels a near-real
time appreciation of the enemy's size, strength, composition, movements, or
the array of forces throughout a Joint Forces Commander's battlespace.
Mountainous terrain and weather degrade its capability, but it still remains
an invaluable instrument of war for both tactical and operational commanders.
However, we have learned how to deceive the operators and analysts behind
the JSTAR screens, and leverage them to set conditions for success.

Since JSTARS cannot reliably acquire and define the composition and types of
vehicles in a column of vehicles, the OPFOR routinely organizes
battalion-size truck columns, perhaps led by 2-3 armored vehicles, all
dragging 20-30 ft. lengths of concertina wire. This column, easily acquired
by JSTARS, is then employed along an expected route of march towards the
enemy. This imaginative technique is aimed at deceiving the enemy commander
as to our intended point of attack or main effort. Being told that this is
an armored column by his JSTAR data analyst, the enemy commander will
typically react and shift targeting assets, or his mobile reserves to
interdict the advance. This technique in offensive operations can be used
to create a weakness in the enemy's defense permitting rapid penetration and
exploitation. Employment of this technique has set conditions for OPFOR
tactical success several times in the past.

The other technique that works to defeat JSTARS is infiltration-the movement
and concentration of a large mobile organization by moving it in small
packets of vehicles along multiple routes, seemingly without any
pattern-concentrating forces over time.

The Serbs used similar techniques to preclude effective air attacks against
their ground combat forces and deceive NATO forces of their actual strength,
disposition, and location. Even more ingenious, they used the appreciation
of this vulnerability to lure NATO attack aircraft, cued by JSTARS, into
attacking organized columns of civilian vehicles, then exploiting the scenes
of carnage via the international media-information warfare at its best,
designed to attack the solidarity of the NATO coalition.

In short, against a savvy opponent, JSTARS acquisitions have little
intelligence value to tactical and operational commanders unless the data or
images are confirmed quickly by another real-time imagery system such as a
UAV, AFAC, or a well-trained reconnaissance team that has the capability and
optical resolution to discern the exact composition and type of vehicles
acquired.

The same goes for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In response to the
presence of UAVs on the battlefield, we have developed several techniques to
deceive and defeat its capabilities. We use a combination of physical and
thermal decoys to deceive the UAV pilots and image analysts, and thereby
nullify the effects of indirect fires while preserving our actual combat
systems and crews.

For example, we will construct deception fighting positions and in them place
tank decoys made of fiberglass turrets, gun tubes made out of steel/PCV pipe,
and other materials to create a realistic physical image. Furthermore, we cut
55 gallon barrels in half, and place them where the engine compartment of the
tank is located, then we fill them with burning charcoal to create a
realistic thermal signature. Flying at an altitude of 2000-5000 feet, and
looking through the narrow field of view to achieve resolution, a UAV image
analyst, unless very experienced, cannot tell it's a decoy. From these
altitudes, they look just like tanks. We also use vehicular decoys made of
fabric and wood frames, just like the Serbs employed. They work.

Finally, we have become adept at conducting air defense ambushes to destroy
UAVs. We place actual unmanned, usually inoperable combat equipment, such
as an armor or air defense system, into a position where the enemy would
expect to find them. We will throw in a blanket of smoke to attract their
attention and really draw them in. We ring this equipment with multiple
organic air defense radar and missile systems, camouflaged well with engines
cold. Basically, we lure UAVs into an area. Once we visually or
acoustically acquire the UAVs-which can be easily acquired by their sound-and
determine they are within range, we unmask and fire. Using this technique,
we routinely destroy 50%-75% of UAVs employed against us during the course of
an NTC training exercise. In case you're wondering, we employ systems that
accurately replicate ZSU-23-4s, SA-18s, SA-8s, and SA-9s. By the way, the
hand-held, shoulder-fired S-18 air defense missile is our most effective ADA
system against both rotary wing and UAV capabilities.

Vulnerabilities of Information and Communications Systems

Another important lesson we've learned is this.the key to defeating forces
equipped with sophisticated collection, targeting, and situational awareness
technologies is to quickly gain information dominance in the initial phase of
the operation. We have learned that if we focus reconnaissance assets and
lethal/non-lethal fires to acquire and destroy or disrupt the enemy's ability
to move information across the battlefield, then we can quickly level the
playing field, negate this asymmetric advantage, and thereby set conditions
for success. Against the Army's current situational awareness, information,
and communications systems, fielded or in development, it is not a difficult
task given the capabilities we possess.

Take the Army Tactical Command and Control System (ATCCS), a suite of 5
different software systems (MCS, ASAS, AFATADS, FAADC3, and CSSCS), designed
to provide critical combat information to commanders and staffs at brigade,
division, and corps level.

These information systems, in various stages of development, employ a
line-of-sight communications system called the Mobile Subscriber Equipment
(MSE) system, as the means to move information across the battlefield between
commanders and staffs from battalion to corps level.

Based upon mission requirements, the MSE system operates at multiple
frequency ranges from tactical VHF to SHF ranges above 15 GHz using a digital
communications signal. We have learned that the electronic signature is a
relatively easy target to acquire and jam, using a technique we call dual
harmonic jamming. Basically, the MSE signal frequencies lie above our
ability to jam with the systems we have, but we have learned that by taking 2
jammers and jamming 1/3 of the primary carrier wave and ½ of the primary
carrier wave frequency simultaneously, the combination of these attacks
affects 5/6 of the carrier wave therefore most of the transmission is not
received. No MSE transmission, then no ATTCS-no ATTCS, then no situational
awareness from brigade to corps level.

Furthermore, because it is a stationary, line-of-sight system, the MSE system
is limited in its positioning to easily predictable terrain locations and the
node centers present a large physical signature. They can be easily
acquired by aerial and ground reconnaissance teams and have very little
security, if any, surrounding these sites. They will be one of the first set
of targets we attack.

In short, destroy the brigade MSE node complex with indirect fires or direct
attack, and you stop the flow of information and sustainment of both friendly
and enemy situational awareness. In other words, by attacking this
vulnerability, the OPFOR has learned how to level the playing field very
quickly and eliminate its opponent's asymmetric information advantage.

Or take the Army's Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below system, FBCB2,
the Army's flagship information technology designed to create common
situational awareness between crews, leaders, and units on the battlefield
below brigade level-a "tactical internet" for the Army's combined-arms team.

FBCB2, the Army's tactical internet currently in development, employs two
line-of-site communications systems as a means to move digital information
across the battlefield between computer systems mounted in combat vehicles
and headquarters. More specifically, the situational awareness information
created by computer software, internal to crews and platoons, is carried on
a backbone of the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS
SIP), operating in the VHF band.

At platoon leader/platoon sergeant level and above-all the way up to the
brigade commander-the situational awareness information is carried on a
backbone of the Enhanced Position Location Reporting System (EPLRS), a UHF
radio. Both operate in the frequency-hopping mode.

Of the two radios, EPLRS is the primary means of moving data across the
battlefield and creating icons on computer screens that reflect the current
location of every combat vehicle/crew on the battlefield. In other words,
it is the principal means of creating both friendly and enemy situational
awareness throughout a brigade task force. Information is transmitted via
data transmissions through a network of stationary base stations-5 per
division and 1 per brigade-positioned on high ground within a division's area
of operations. Furthermore, it has an embedded relay system. This provides a
jam-resistant, robust, high-speed, high-volume communications network to
multiple, simultaneous users. In fact, the OPFOR's current legacy IEW
systems are unable to electronically acquire and locate these systems on the
battlefield. Of note, however, some current commercial off-the-shelf
electronic warfare systems have the capability to track and capture the
limited hop-set group of frequencies in EPLRS, and through the use of
wide-band barrage jamming techniques and multiple jamming systems,
transmissions can be blocked or severely disrupted.

However, the OPFOR has learned to attack EPLRS's principal vulnerability, the
physical signature of the EPLRS base station; a group of vehicles, antennas,
and generators normally co-located with MSE node sites adjacent to the
brigade tactical operations center. The location of these stationary, and
relatively immobile communication node centers is easy to predict, given a
line-of-site analysis within an area of operations. There are a limited
number of accessible positions where comprehensive line of sight
communications can be established and sustained.

Find the MSE communication sites and you'll find the EPLRS base station.
Accordingly, the OPFOR tasks both its division and regimental reconnaissance
teams to find these large, easily identifiable communication sites during the
reconnaissance phase of an operation, then we attack these sites with
accurate long-range artillery, rockets, or fixed-wing assets during the first
phase of offensive or defensive operations-to include persistent and
non-persistent chemical strikes. This stops the flow of digits, quickly
levels the playing field, and eliminates the asymmetric advantage afforded by
the technology. As a side note, the JSTARS downlink, the Common Ground
Station, is also co-located with the brigade tactical operations center.
Successful attack of this complex will also eliminate JSTARS feed to the
brigade commander.

The second piece of the system, the SINCGARS tactical VHF radio, is a
line-of-sight radio easily disrupted by hills and mountainous terrain, unless
continually supported by multiple aerial or ground retransmission stations
positioned within the brigade's area of operations. Furthermore, it is even
more limited, if not ineffective, when fighting in cities; a lesson
painfully-learned by the Russians in Grozny, Chechnya in 1996 and again this
past year. While they struggled to maintain FM communications to control
operations, the Chechnyans used cellular telephones and commercial satellite
communications to coordinate their defensive operations within the city.

Although invulnerable to our current electronic warfare systems, the OPFOR
has discovered that the range of the SINCGARS radio is cut almost in half
when placed in the frequency-hopping mode. Consequently, in order to sustain
communications, operators will switch to single-channel mode to extend the
range of the radio and re-establish communications. A SINCGARS radio,
passing digital packets of information in the single-channel mode, is the
easiest communications signature to acquire, locate, and jam with our current
suite of jammers. We can quickly block the transmission.

Although we have not been permitted to jam FBCB2 yet, we have become very
adept at acquiring and jamming similar information systems employed by our
Army's fire support team-TACFIRE, IFSAS, and AFATADS-thereby precluding the
execution of fire support during battle. It follows then, that our FBCB2
system, when fielded, will be similarly vulnerable to disruption.
Furthermore, there are available commercial off-the-shelf systems that can
capture and track the SINCGARS hop-set, thereby making the system vulnerable
to disruption by barrage jamming, using multiple jammers. If you can disrupt
transmissions through barrage jamming, then the SINCGARS radio loses system
synchronization. Once synchronization has been lost, the operator is
required to re-enter the net in the single channel mode, a mode easy for us
to acquire, locate, and attack. Equally important, disrupting
synchronization stops the flow of situational awareness information from the
computer system.

On the ominous horizon, we foresee the proliferation of GPS jammers-small,
effective, and inexpensive jammers that will block GPS signals eliminating
GPS navigation and precision guidance capabilities within an extensive area
of operations. For $40,000 today you can buy an effective lightweight,
portable GPS jammer from the Russian firm AviaConversia-in fact they make
four different variants. These GPS jammers have an output power of 4-8
watts-making them very tough to acquire-and can effectively block GPS signals
out to ranges of 150-200 kilometers, depending on terrain, even more if
mounted on a UAV. I understand that business is picking up.

By the way, the SINCGARS radios supporting FBCB2 depend on GPS signals to
sustain synchronization and sustain situational awareness. Take out GPS
signals-no SINCGARS-no SINCGARS-no FBCB2 or situational awareness internal to
platoons and companies.

For a joint force that has become GPS-dependent for its style of warfare and
effectiveness, this is a classic asymmetrical response that will level the
playing field, perhaps eliminating the dominating capabilities our technology
has provided us the past decade. We plan to introduce GPS jammers in our
Opposing forces in the near future. It's increasingly clear that we learn-or
re-learn-how to fight without GPS capability.

No Substitute For Ground Reconnaissance Teams

(Slide 3)

Finally, the we have learned that there is no substitute for well-trained
ground reconnaissance teams in warfighting at the tactical level of war.
Despite all the intelligence and information technology provided to our
brigade task force commanders over the pasts 6 years, the OPFOR regimental
commanders, using 1960s-1970s technology and unaided by any overhead
reconnaissance systems, have always had better, near-perfect information
about the strength, composition, location, and disposition of their
opponents. Their opponents, on the other hand, have remained and continue to
remain relatively blind despite the bloom of technology.

This ability to see the battlefield better than their opponents, despite the
introduction of sophisticated technologies, is provided by our division and
regimental reconnaissance teams, undoubtedly some of the best trained
tactical reconnaissance teams in the world. The indisputable fact is that
well-trained observers (reconnaissance teams) in sufficient number to
establish observation throughout the depths of the battlefield, armed with
effective, secure communications, easily offset the supposed asymmetric
advantages of overhead reconnaissance platforms in the business of close
combat at brigade level and below. Moreover, from a practical perspective,
overhead reconnaissance platforms cannot classify a bridge and determine if
it will support the movement of forces, find and determine feasible fording
sites across rivers or streams, find minefields or bypasses, or provide any
accurate information about enemy strength and dispositions within cities, the
most likely battlefields in our future.

Conclusion

In conclusion-if the insights provided in this presentation cause you to
question the direction, design, and investments we've made in trying to
create information dominance at the tactical level of war, that's good. If
these insights foster a change in your perspective about the practical value
and utility of technology by exposing its limitations and vulnerabilities,
that's good, too. If it drives our joint team to pursue more prudent
technological investments in the future, or drives the creation of better
organizations, equipment, doctrine, tactics, and techniques for employing
technology in the future, that's even better. If it convinces you that we
should keep teaching our Soldiers and marines how to read a map and navigate
with compass in hand, or keep teaching artillerymen how to survey their
firing positions, or teach our staffs what to do when the screens go blank,
that's icing on-the-cake.

Finally, if it convinces you that our Opposing Forces at our combat training
centers can provide critical insights into the limitations and
vulnerabilities of technology, informing our judgment to ensure we wisely
adapt and dominate our threats in the 21st Century, then my objective has
been accomplished. One thing is for certain. If we ignore the lessons and
successful countermeasures our Opposing Forces have made and continue to make
against technology, then we ignore the work of these great Soldiers at our
peril. Thank you for the opportunity to share this with you today.

Plastic Soldier Review reviews 1/72 scale plastic figures.

Earthquake's Skirmish Pages has added a 28mm modern figure review page which lists manufacturers and his experience ordering them. Nice.

Read about how a model railroad enthusiast incorporated a wireless camera into his layout.

Peter of Baccus 6mm has put up a piece defending the validity of 6mm wargaming and comparing it to 25mm. Very nice. Plus, he has reduced his international shipping costs.

The Army Men Homepage has some fun info, including wargames rules, for plastic toy soldiers.

While not directly related to wargaming, this MSNBC article on voting procedures is very interesting in regard to rules theory.

Wargames Foundry has some interesting new releases, French Foreign Legion and WW2 Burma.

The new address for 6mm micro armour manufacturer Pfc/CinC is:

1202 State Highway 95
Princeton, MN 55371

Donald Featherstone has sent out this response to correspondance regarding his recent heart attack. I received the same letter.

Peter Berry, owner of Baccus 6mm, is now devoting himself to running his business full-time. Hopefully this means that his samurai range is just around the corner!

I'm currently running a number of auctions on eBay right now. There are two nicely painted 20 man units of Wargames Foundry Indian Mutiny Highlanders, plus unpainted 25mm Eureka Planet of the Apes figs, 15mm Starship Troopers bugs, and WEG 25mm Star Wars figs. There are also several RPG items, including the rare LUG Dune RPG.

Don Featherstone apparently suffered a serious heart attack recently. I've included the messages I received.

From: "pfc_augereau" <toysldr@aol.com>
Date: Thu Sep 5, 2002 7:54 am
Subject: Don Featherstone

Yesterday I received a note from Don Featherstone telling me that he had suffered a serious heart attack several weeks back. He was in hospital for 10 days but is home now. I spoke with him on the phone this morning and he is physically feeling better but I think he is feeling pretty low emotionally. If you would like to do something nice for someone that has done so much for us and our hobby, please take a moment and send him a card or a note to let him know we are all thinking of him. He could use some cheering up right now.

His address is:

Don Featherstone
28 Glebe Court, Highfield Lane
Southampton, Hampshire
SO17 1RH
UK

Thanks!!

Jim Getz

PS - Sorry for any duplications you may find of this posting, but I would like to get the word out to as many of Don's friends as I can.

andy@okura:[/home/andy] show last +inbox
(Message inbox:498)
Subj: Re: [HMGS-MS] FEATHERSTONE CUP
From: Major Bill Harting

To: HMGS-MS@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2002 21:02:22 MDT
-- /blue/homes/cowell/Mail/mhl.format --

Baxter and all: This may be more important than just our playing with our toys. See below:

Gentlemen,

I just received the following from our dear friend Don dated 29 August 2002. Let's all send him our "positive vibes" for strength and an early recovery!!

--- Jim Butters

---------------------------------------------------
(COPIED LETTER FOLLOWS):

Dear Jim,

I am very sorry to have to tell you that I am a casualty! About two weeks after returning from the States, I was rushed into hospital with a Major HeartAttack and only came out yesterday. I am very weak and a shadow of myself, very breathless and more or less tied to the house for the time being. I have got a blood clot in the heart still, and lungs filled with fluid - which makes things a bit difficult.

Of course, this changes my whole life and will put a brake on most of the things I have been doing all my life - I certainly won't ever get to see you all at Historicons again!

Despite her own physical problems, my wife Joy has been wonderful and courageously fought her way to see me in the hospital every day. I am very proud of her and love her very much.

I am sending this to my best friends in America, if you can pass the word around anyone to whom I haven't written, I would appreciate it.

Still, I have had a good run, haven't I; and maybe it will not be as bad in the future as it seems now.

Yours sincerely,

Don F.

---------------------------------
(END COPIED LETTER)

Notice of Complete Ignorance - The information contained in this e-mail may be totally ludicrous and without basis in fact. Unauthorised abuse, disrespect, or reprehension of this message is prohibited.
Maj Bill Harting USAF (Ret)
President, HMGS MidSouth