This is definitely going to be a post of rather specialist appeal, but if you like this sort of thing then you may like it.
Here is my enhanced collection of gabions, now painted, and ready for - well, whatever it is that I might need gabions to do...
Some of these are bit oversize, but that's OK, and they will be harder to lose in the field. The small objects on the right look rather like Minifigs 5mm troop blocks, but are officially wooden chevaux de frises [I mention these with some trepidation, since last time 5mm troop blocks came up here some idiot had a conniption, for reasons which still mystify me]. Now that I have some chevaux de frises, I need to think how they might feature in the game - Chris Duffy doesn't mention them in the Sandhurst rules...
Next job is to start experimenting with designs for flat glacis plates - a future post may feature some of this.
Oooh lovely - dirty siege work pictures. You can't have too many gabions. Very nicely painted they are. Duffy may not have mentioned them but the chevaux de frise will look good when a breach has to be defended - possibly only as decoration as your rules may not need an additional obstacle for troops storming a breach. I know you are not keen on them, but for reference Vauban's Wars rules mention them on P 75 Create Barriers. I look forward to your next instalment.
ReplyDeleteHi Jim - I'm definitely going to mug up on the VB rules about barriers. The CdF's would probably look more convincing in a proper wrecked model wall section, and I don't have any for Vauban. I'll come up with something...
DeleteHi again Jim - yes, a cheval de frises would have to be put in position by sappers during a siege turn, but would only have an effect during a tactical turn, during hand-to-hand unpleasantness in a storm (or whatever). OK. In the tactical bit of my siege game there is only hard cover (fortifications, entrenchments, churches, all that) and soft (which is hedges, domestic buildings). Chevaux de frises will provide soft cover to defenders, I think.
DeleteHello there Tony! You can never have enough gabions. In his books on siege warfare Duffy does explain how they were used (apart from being pre-fab earthworks for batteries). I'll dig out a relevant section for you, but basically they were filled and used when digging saps.
ReplyDeleteGabions are also one area of intersection between my wife's and my passions. I was surprised to hear her mention gabions on a walk not long ago, a proposal of some earth-retaining landscape works.
Thanks Chris - a gabion's work is never done. I got a surprise when I googled gabions and got a load of adverts for wire mesh cages for building roads. They would definitely be over-scale.
DeleteOver scale but very durable.
DeleteNice one Tony, I’ll be interested to see these in action.
DeleteHi JBM - next hobby sessions here will be playing with the Vauban fort pieces, to design some standard shapes for glacis tiles (for my hex table). I thought it would be dead easy to get a small tin of household emulsion (a sample is good) in a "lawn green" shade which sat well with my house pea-soup base/tabletop colour and didn't look ridiculous. Not so easy - people obviously don't want to paint their living rooms grass green. I'll work on it.
Delete[Editor's note: first person who writes in and suggests I mix my own green paint shade for this job will not win this week's prize. The downside of self-mixed paints is that they are never the same colour once.]
I have just been mowing the lawn which always sports its most pleasant colour in October. With that in mind, would not glacis (if that is the plural) have more recently sown, differently drained grass of perhaps a slightly varying colour. It does seem to me that any slopes newly built by the attackers for their parallels and saps should not be green unless we think that the attackers would have been diligent about reseeding.
DeletePsalamazar - I had ideas about the glacis being like a lawn area - in fact the town is likely to have been grazing domestic animals on it until the enemy arrived. My baseboard is pea-soup green, just because it is, and there is a green tinge to some of my earthworks because that is how they were made. A nice lawn colour would be fine for the glacis, if I can find one, but not if it makes people snort.
DeleteHandy things gabions, and as has been said you can't have too many of them. I was reading up on chevaux de frises myself last weekend, used in the Great Norther War a fair bit it seemed. It may be the dirty end of the equipment but important non the less.
ReplyDeleteI've had these CdF waiting to be painted for a few years. I got them from Magister Militum - I could only get 15mm scale, but that looks OK with my 1/76 soldiers, and my buildings are always 15mm anyway (partly because I'm a cheapskate). I had a read before I painted them up, and noted with alarm that the spiky bits might be sword blades, but that must be a Sunday de-luxe version - common-all-garden type were just square-section wooden beams with holes bored through them, and sharpened branches hammered through. I used an Airfix acrylic "wood" shade (why on earth don't Airfix put the shade name as well as the number on the label?) which looks more like leather - so I washed them with a darker colour, and they'll do.
DeleteAnd very nice they look too!
ReplyDeleteThank you Ray - beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I think they also say "function is beauty", but I'm less sure of that one!
DeleteNice start, but you're going to have to fill that tray to have enough for a siege.
ReplyDeleteWell you may be correct, but experience thus far suggests this amount should be OK. Yes, a real siege would require more than this represents, but in my game the gabions which go into the construction of trenches and batteries disappear under the earthworks, and they are re-used.
DeleteI do have a ridiculous yardage of trenches and batteries available, so I think my estimates should be all right. In the bigger sieges I've tried thus far (not very many!), I wasn't short of gabions, and I've added quite a lot more this week. My games normally only represent a "slice" of the siege (albeit the slice where the key action takes place, unless I've done it wrong). If I need more of these things, I'll crack on with them, but we'll see.
Next critical-path thing to sort out is the production of flat glacis plates - I hope to have a post on that in a few days. I may find this is not the great solution I'm hoping for, but the only way forward is to try some; I've attempted to work out different fort designs on paper, but I just got a very sore head, so laying out the fort sections, hands on toys, and seeing how it looks is the way to go!