Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Saturday 26 July 2014

Background Artillery Project - More Siege Guns

Just the thing to rattle the roof-tiles - the brown bases are my house standard for
siege equipment and engineers. I can't remember why, but it's a standard, isn't it?
A little more progress - the British 10-inch howitzers mentioned here back in February have now been painted and have met up with some gunners. The howitzers themselves are from the old Hinchliffe 20mm range, the gunners are mostly by NapoleoN, with a couple of Falcata castings thrown in (including the officer in the bicorn, who might be Captain William "Beefy" Tonkiss of the Royal Artillery).

This little lot represents 2 x 6-gun batteries, which is rather more 10-inch howitzers than the British had available in the Peninsula, but they look nice. The real things were given up as a bad job after the gunners ignored a "maximum elevation" instruction and wrecked the gun carriages at the First Siege of Badajoz - as far as we know, they went into storage until the Crimean War…

A small, sadly routine tale of dommage from the preparation of these: the howitzers are on hybrid carriages, which have little garrison wheels at the rear. One of these little wheels escaped while I was gluing things together, fell on the carpet and disappeared without trace. Remarkable. After the necessary amount of swearing, I cut my losses and assembled the batteries with a gunner standing right in front of the missing wheel, so you can't see that it is not present. I know it's not there, and the gunners probably know, but we won't tell anyone else, will we?

Another step towards getting the fortress out for another siege game; still need a better set of trench sections and a revamp of the rules. I've been sort of hoping that the Picquet-related "Vauban's War" would have appeared by now, but no sign of it yet. I shall hash on with my own ex-Chris Duffy efforts.


1 comment:

  1. Nice artillery! Missing wheel? I see no missing wheel. I had a similar calamity befall me. I have nifty Trojan chariot and crew to work on. When I began painting the figures, the spearman's shield was missing. Cannot find the darn thing anywhere.

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