Q13: Gitungi Get Re-Inforced

Micropanzer's Gitungi are one of my favourite alien races for Q13. 

They have a very distinctive look to them; they include a good range of models; and some of those models are very definitely alien and/or demonstrative of an alien technology.

One thing they lack, however, are decent vehicles, so I have been forced to improvise from other ranges. My Gitungi already have Khurasan's superheavy tanks and a grav AA vehicle from GZG at their disposal; these are now joined by some suitably Gitungi-looking SP artillery and AA guns from Daemonscape.

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Daemonscape, if you remember, are the company that produced that big spaceship I painted up last month. I was checking the url for that blog post when I noticed they had released some 15mm armoured vehicles. A quick visit to the relevant page on their site, and I knew I had to have the ones with the dustbins as guns, and the ones with the unfeasible array of AA guns, immediately.

Once ordered, the question became which of my sci-fi armies would they suit. The answer: the Gitungi.  

The models are nicely cast, and I like the way the same base chassis is used for different gun configurations: very panzer! One slight problem is that the AA guns are so ridiculously  big that they do make the turret tip forward slightly unless the vehicle is driving uphill. Ah well: a small price to pay!

Here they are:

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"Get ready to fire the dustbins of death!"

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The turret-tipping madness of the AA array

Q13: Chuhuac Army List Updated

Here's a recent post about the Ikwen figures from Loud Ninja Games:

Some of you may already have seen my Chuhuac: 15mm velociraptor-like aliens from Loud Ninja Games. They are a great set of figures, full of life and animation, that are a real pleasure to paint up and play. I usually use them as mercenaries: a rapidly-moving, light infantry force designed to hit hard and fast and then disappear again.

So when Loud Ninja Games announced their second release, the Ikwen, I was at the front of the queue to buy a set. These are salamander-like aliens, also in 15mm, whom Eli has conceived as a sort of low-tech planetary militia. 

I loved the figures, but didn't really like the idea of fielding them as envisioned...so I've come up with an alternative use for them: they are paid by the Chuhuac as their logistics tail. The little dinos are the teeth, the Ikwen the tail...and just as the various cooks and bottle-washers in other armies have sometimes had to pick up their rifles and fight (Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge etc) so the Ikwen occasionally go into battle as well.

I've now had time to update the Chuhuac Army List to include the Ikwen engineers and taken the opportunity to make a couple of other tweaks as well. You can access it from this page here.

Q13: New Manufacturer Added

I've added DLD Productions to the list of 15mm sci-fi figure manufacturers.

They currently produce a range of vehicles under four different headings:

• the CMF (Coalition of Military Forces)
• Opfor (Opposition Forces)
• Shazakeem Defence Force
• Kir (aliens)

What I like about the ranges is that they add something new to a somewhat crowded marketplace.

CMF Badger FO Vehicle

The two main ranges, the CMF and Opfor, have more than just the MBT and SP artillery vehicles that dominate other ranges. Each base chassis has a number of different configurations that include such things as ARVs, scout of FO vehicles (loving the periscope scanners) etc. There's even at least one cargo hauler, so my need for tail as well as teeth is well satisfied.

The alien vehicles are very alien. Not, I must admit, to my taste, but very bold in terms of design: very, er, alien, in fact...and I'll def get some of their drones.

All in all, an excellent addition to the 15mm sci fi shopping mall!

CMF Truck

Q13: The Chuhuac Get Some Logistical Support

Some of you may already have seen my Chuhuac: 15mm velociraptor-like aliens from Loud Ninja Games. They are a great set of figures, full of life and animation, that are a real pleasure to paint up and play. I usually use them as mercenaries: a rapidly-moving, light infantry force designed to hit hard and fast and then disappear again.

So when Loud Ninja Games announced their second release, the Ikwen, I was at the front of the queue to buy a set. These are salamander-like aliens, also in 15mm, whom Eli has conceived as a sort of low-tech planetary militia. 

I loved the figures, but didn't really like the idea of fielding them as envisioned...so I've come up with an alternative use for them: they are paid by the Chuhuac as their logistics tail. The little dinos are the teeth, the Ikwen the tail...and just as the various cooks and bottle-washers in other armies have sometimes had to pick up their rifles and fight (Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge etc) so the Ikwen occasionally go into battle as well.

Here they are:

More Chuhuac

I'm still determined to clear all the Chuhuac off my painting table: these 'velociraptors with guns' are just too nice to leave languishing in the lead mountain. They have such animation, such character, that they deserve their place at the front of the queue.

Here is a platoon of spec ops Chuhuac in city camouflage, and four Sirrus APCs in desert colours (to go with the desert colours platoon of infantry painted earlier). Very nice.

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Q13: Chuhuac Scout Squad on Grav Bikes

More sci-fi!

As part of my drive to clear some of my lead mountain, I am really concentrating on trying to finish my Chuhuac: superbly animated velociraptors-with-guns from Loud Ninja Games.

Next off the mountain and onto the painting table was a 'wing' of nine Chuhuacs riding grav bikes.

The figures come with body molded with the bike and separate heads. This was quite cool, as it allowed me to vary the amount of neck I used to show some of the wing craning upwards and some crouched low over the nose of the bike. I have even modeled one looking to the left as if to check his mates were still with him!

My only real problem was how to show the bikes 'floating' above the ground. I tried wire, but couldn't get a decent stick. I eventually settled on using those little Hama-bead things that gave me a big enough surface area to ensure a good bond between bike and base.

Here they are:

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Q13: A Very Big Space Ship!

Following my recent post about adding Daemonscape to the list of figure manufacturers, I am sure you can guess that it didn't take very long for me to send them my first order.

My Ursids (large anthropomorphic bears from Khurasan and Stan Johansen) needed a bit of transport to take them to their next mining job, so I ordered one of Daemonscape's big 15mm drop ships called, appropriately, "The Big Rig".

The kit arrived within days. I say kit, but we're talking six big bits of resin that fitted together surprisingly well using SuperGlue and just a very small amount of greenstuff in a couple of the cracks. Very easy to put together. The only complicated thing was adding the gun barrel to the turret, but I used drill-and-pin, and found that both gun barrel and turret were easily robust enough to make this relatively simple as well.

Painting was also a dream. A quick undercoat in black, then a coat of a very yellow ochre, followed by a brown wash and then several layers of dry-brush. Once all that was dry, half an hour's worth of touching up windows and viewing domes, grills and the additional of a flag from the bits box, and she was finished.

Not the most beautiful of vessels, but very practical for planet hopping. Really nice model:  highly recommended.

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That's a 15mm figure (not an Ursid!) for size comparison

Q13 Points System: Calculating Spreadsheet Now Available To Download

One of the great things about Quadrant 13, the TFL rules for company-sized sci-fi wargaming, is the fact that you can construct and use any army from any figure manufacturer or fictional source. This flexibility, however, does come with a price.

Quite a few people have mentioned to me that they have a problem not so much with actually building the armies themselves, but with then working out what troops to deploy on each side to give a good game…especially for heterogeneous armies such as humans versus bugs.

Put simply, they can use the guidelines in the rules to give their medium tanks the right sized gun but then have difficulty in working out how many tanks to field in order to make it a ‘fair fight’ with the opposition. Unlike the TFL historical rulesets, there is no frame of reference.

The TooFatLardies Summer Special 2015 therefore contained an article, written by me, detailing a rudimentary points system for Q13. The article references a spreadsheet that can be used to easily calculate the points values for any Q13 unit. You can download the spreadsheet by clicking on the Q13 logo that can be found here.

Q13: Chuhuac APCs

I am now on a quest to finish all my Chuhuac figures. Most of the army is done: only the special ops unit and a few Big Men to finish.

Next off the production line are three Sirrus APCs. I now realise, of course, that I should have bought four of the little beauties: that way I could totally mechanise one of the Chuhuac platoons. Ah well:  one more thing to buy...and I may as well pick up four more for the second platoon as well! 

The eagle-eyed among you will also have spotted that I have added a GZG self-propelled rotary cannon as well. Always good to give your little dinos a bit of extra firepower!

Q13: Daemonscape

I have added another 15mm sci-fi figure manufacturer to the list in the Quadrant 13 section of the site: Daemonscape.

They produce a small-but-growing range of scenery and figures in a number of scales, including a number of excellent-looking 15mm dropships such as the one pictured below.

The Big Rig

I have already ordered the 'Big Rig' for my Ursids and will report back on what it's like once it arrives and gets painted.

Onslaught Miniatures

And in other news, Onslaught Miniatures have now released their first two 15mm sets: one for the Sisterhood and one for the Tzacol.

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I won't be ordering just yet: I'm going to wait until there are a few sets available for each, then do one big order...I have enough 'single units' to keep me going for a while and really need to concentrate on finishing the huge numbers of sci-fi armies that I already have.

When is a Walker not a Walker...

Fascinating discussion recently on the TFL Yahoo Group that I thought I'd share here: what would the word or words be in Russian for what we would call a Walker or a Mech i.e. the giant, often anthropomorphic fighting machines like the one in the picture below.

Paint It Pink's Ashley Pollard posed the question, saying that Google translate had given her Progulki Boyevaya Platforma as a starting point.

A friend of her's had suggested that Progulki Voyevaya Platforma might be a better representation of how the Russian root word бой, meaning 'to do with struggle or combat', would appear, and she had herself used another translation site to generate Gulyayushchaya Platforma Boya.

Now I have a friend who is Russian (graphic artist Sibirian Blue who does all the illustrations for my IABSM scenario packs and for Q13) and she told me that gulyayushchaya means walking in the sense of a stroll, and that the expression Gulyayushchaya Platforma Boya therefore meant something more like "taking the combat platform for walkies" which, whilst rather sweet, is probably not what Ashley had in mind!

Her suggestion was Мобильная Боевая Платформа, or Mobilnaya Boyevaya Platforma, which translates as Mobile Combat Platform. She also checked out some Russian toy shops and sci-fi sites, to see how they described things like Transformers, but discovered that most just cyrillicise (if that's a word) the English.

The problem with 'mobile combat platform', of course, is that it could apply to anything that fights and moves: a tank, a warship etc. There's no specific suggestion of the walker bit. Back to the drawing board!

Ashley then produced another Russian-speaking friend, one who is quite into military stuff, who suggested Shagayushaya Boevaya Platforma (Шагающая Боевая Платформа), which apparently literally means walking fighting platform.

According to my friend, however, shagayushchaya  literally means "takes step by step", so that although Ashley's friend was right in trying to get a sense of walking into the Russian, the actual wording wasn't quite right.

Now keen to solve this puzzle, Sibirian suggested that what was needed was to get the Russian sound 'hod' into the first word, as that is the root for all things walking or stepping.

one of ashley's own walkers

She therefore suggested Pohodnaya Boevaya Platforma (Походная Боевая Платформа) which literally means something like "Hiking Fighting Platform". It also neatly works as PBP as an acronym, or 'Hod' as a sound-alike as it's pronounced po-hod-nya, with the emphasis on the 'hod'. 

I quite liked this, as I could see people saying things like "We have two Hods incoming on vector six"!

James Sterrett, on the Yahoo group, agreed, pointing out that Pokhodnaya was a good choice, as pokhod also means "march", in both the sense of military marching and 'things used while on the march'. So you get Russian words like pokhodnaya forma meaning "field uniform", and pokhodnaya kukhnya meaning a "field kitchen" etc. His view was that you could get away with translating it as Marching or Field Fighting Platform.

He did, however, suggest changing the platforma bit to ustanovka i.e. making the phrase Pohodnaya Boevaya Ustanovka: his rationale being that this was very much in line with the self-propelled artillery designation SU, or Samokhodnaya Ustanovka, as in the WW2 vehicle the SU-85. He used the more modern SAU or Samokhodnaya Artilleriskaya Ustanovka, but its the same difference. Here ustanovka translates oddly:  apparently the literal best fit is something like "installation" or "piece" but here it is used to indicate a platform or (gun) carriage.

Ashley has, I believe, decided to stick with Pohodnaya Boevaya Platforma for the moment.

A fascinating discussion indeed!

Vornid/Horrid Artillery Toads

Last bit of painting from my latest delivery from Ravenstar: some rather fun figures that I have christened "artillery toads".

The Vornid already have some stolen artillery manned by Fungoid mushroom men, but these are like giant, well, toads, with a hinged armour plate on their back under which is a rather useful looking howitzer. Fits in very nicely with the whole Horrid bio-weapon look.

Here they are:

Gitungi and Nova Respublik Lists Updated

A couple of updates to the Q13 Army Lists.

First up, I've rationalised the Gitungi list: making their support drones into mini-vehicles instead of crewed support weapons. It fits the figures better. Click on the pic to see the list.

A squad of gitungi veteran infantry from Micropanzer

Secondly, I've almost totally revamped the Nova Respublik list. This involves allowing a split into half-squads of seven instead of the original, very inflexible squads of fourteen; adding stats for Militia/Penal and Guards units; and adding the new NR releases from Khurasan: the Drakon tanks and Grifon APCs. It's a rather nice, rounded army...one I rather fancy getting for myself. Click on the pic to see the list.

Nova Respublik Command Set from Khurasan

Vornid/Horrid Minelayers

Another unit of Horrid APCs finished at the weekend.

These rather turd-like tanks from Ravenstar's Horrid range are actually minelayers: the flaps just behind their 'heads' can disgorge patches of larvae that, with Chrome, I have defined as being the equivalent of mines i.e. they attack any enemy men or machines that enter their ambit.

I haven't painted up the 'mines' themselves yet, but you do get a rather pleasing number of them with your tanks. I've also defined the horn thing on the front as a sort of natural mortar that can also lay down the equivalent of smoke.

All in all a very useful squad of vehicles, despite their appearance!

Q13 AAR: Down on the Farm (An Invasion Earth! Scenario)

Great game of Q13 on Saturday night against long-time opponent Neil.

We used a variation of the 'Down on the Farm' scenario from the Five Planets campaign pack: moving the action from the planet Three to Earth as part of a series of Invasion Earth games that we are fighting.

Click here or on the picture below to see the full report.

Q13 Army Lists: Updates

A couple of updates for the Q13 Army Lists.

First up, I've added stats for the Mudskipper Medium Jump Walkers to the US Weird World War III list. Gives the Airborne force a real punch!

Secondly, I've added a brand new army list: Dwarves in Space. Forgive the slightly clumsy title, but one has to think about copyright. At the moment the list covers the Thrainites from Khurasan (a nice mix of infantry and vehicles) and the Sons of Thunder from Rebel Minis. I'll add more as and when manufacturers release more 'dwarf' models.

You can see all the Q13 lists by using the navbar, above, or by clicking here.

Khurasan's Thrainite Troopers

US Weird World War 2: Mudskipper Medium Jump Walkers

Now I know I'm supposed to be painting my Airborne infantry platoon, but just before I do, a little diversion...

I seem to remember complaining that Clockwork Goblin had promised some medium jump walkers to go with the Hyena Light Jump Walkers, but that there was no sign of them as of yet.

Well, under the radar, as any good Airborne force should be, they have released them, and very nice they are too.

Here is the platoon of Mudskipper Medium Jump Walkers all ready to go into action with the rest of the Airborne force...once I've painted them, that is!

Oh, and as it seemed to work last time, can we have the Firefly Jump Infantry now please. And can they have wings not rocket packs please!

Quar: Crusader Heavy Weapons Section

I took advantage of the Zombiesmith Winter Sale (15% off) to fill some of the gaps in my Quar forces. 

First up is the Crusader Heavy Weapons Section: three Model 6 Heavy Semi-Automatic Shotgun teams. These are the equivalent of MMGs for the Crusaders, and are a great demonstration of how detailed the "fluff" surrounding these loveable anthropomorphic anteaters is: there's a whole section in the This Quar's War book devoted to the Model 6's, describing how they are used, what round they fire, their crew and functions etc. More information than you get in most non-sci fi games!

Not a very good picture, but the section comprises three guns, each with a crew of six.

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See more of the Quar by visiting their gallery here, or at the Zombiesmith site itself

Weedl Scout Flyer

I've mentioned before how much I like Zombiesmith's Quar: WW1 era anteater types with suitably Heath Robinson vehicles.

One of their latest releases is the first of the 'aerocraft': the Weedl Scout Kite. This is a lovely model that is easy to put together and paint. It even comes with a propeller in thin brass.

Here's my attempt at painting one of them:

More Garn, more Quar

Just filling in a few gaps in my Garn and Quar armies.

First up, the command and FOO teams for the Garn. These are the "new look" Garn just released by Khurasan: less T-Rex with guns, more sci-fi lizard- or dragon-men.

Here we have a couple of commanders, and a couple of FOO who are presumably calling in fire from their "Distant Tooth" satellites.

Then we have a few more Quar Coftyrans:  three Big Men and the howitzer from the Heavy Weapons section:

Clicking on the photos will take you to the full gallery page for each army.