Sieges: Digging and Fiddling About!

 I have the house to myself this afternoon, so I can spread out and make a bit of a mess. Good opportunity to play around with trenches and glacis slopes [flat glacis slopes...].

First off, I did an audit of my trenches and battery emplacements. There are some cast resin pieces in there, but most of the stock is hand-made by Fat Frank, of whose work I am very fond.

 

Here's the full stock - the straight trench pieces are 150mm (6 inches in old money). It becomes obvious why real besieging armies dug their earthworks on-site, rather than arriving with them ready-made...

 

Fat Frank must have made many thousands of these, but the general build quality is very nice - I ordered mine without modern sandbags

 

 

Then I played around with my Vauban fort, to see what could be done with glacis "plates"

 

This is the basic fort, as supplied by Terrain Warehouse (years ago) - all this is made in expanded resin foam - see how pleasingly the glacis slope fits with the walls and bastions. This is all fine, but attempting to vary the layout (add a gate, for example) is complicated by the implications for the glacis, and digging trenches across the glacis is always a bit of a balancing act. Bear in mind that the vertical scale (15mm, or 1/100, for my buildings) is about 10 times the horizontal scale (1mm represents a metre), so the slope of the glacis is very much exaggerated 

 

Here's a drone shot of this same basic fort - note that the brown areas are the terreplein, behind the parapet, and covered way, not the moat/ditch - the ditch is green

 

So I removed the moulded glacis pieces, nudged the ravelins out a little, and laid out some hex tiles for the glacis, just to see what happens. I've used unpainted mdf tiles for the moment, just for visibility; the idea is that a working version would have the glacis painted a grass green shade which would contrast a little with the baseboard colour. The glacis slope is about 200 paces deep, which is sensible

 

 

And here is the adjustment if we remove the ravelins - it's still looking all right. In fact it could be used like this, but there are some things to remember: (1) however it may look, the wall behind is sheltered by the glacis; (2) the edge of the glacis nearest the fort is the covered way, with a firing platform. Troops behind the edge of the glacis are hidden/protected. It would please me to add a simple trench element at the edge of the glacis, to remind me of these properties, but I would have to remember that any trench pieces in this position would not be a valid target, since they don't really stand above the glacis...

I'm having a think about the paint colour, and also about possible terrain pieces to represent the covered way. Some numbers: my hexes are 7 inches across the flats, which is near enough 180mm. A 7 inch hex has sides which are 4 inches long (close enough for jazz), so I'm considering getting some custom trench-type pieces 90mm long, with rounded ends and a pretty low, flat profile to represent the covered way. I've sounded out Adrian at Fat Frank, to see if he would consider doing some made-to-order trench pieces; that's as far as I've got today, but nothing is scary yet.