Artillery Wheels

Gentlemen - if you please, a small request for some guidance....?

Nice illustration of Vallière-system 24pdr from the 18th Century, which would
not have been wildly out of place at Zaragossa or Ciudad Rodrigo 80 years
later - picture by Christian Rogge, used without permission.

Now that I have a pile of new siege equipment, and am therefore running out of excuses, I hope to make rather better progress with my proposed French Napoleonic siege train. My scale requirements are what I like to think of as 20mm, but in fact they are really old-fashioned "true 25mm" - i.e. men about 21-22mm to the eye - which is, as near as you like, 1/72 scale in scientific money. No-one makes anything like a proper French siege gun in this scale, as far as I know, so I have been doing a little poking around. I fancied the idea of an overscale 12pdr cannon mounted on my size of wheels - I have purchased a test casting of a cannon which is actually made in 28mm scale, but it would pass for a Napoleonic 24pdr if I could get some better sized wheels.

Most of the French siege guns in the Peninsula, for example, were pre-Gribeauval - old Vallière pattern guns. My test casting would pass for one of these, but it came with 30mm, 12-spoke wheels - far too big, man.

According to the information I have to hand, the diameter of the wheels on the French 24pdr should be either 58" or 60", and the discrepancy may be due to the confusion caused by the pesky "Paris foot" measurement used by the French - 1 Paris foot is/was equal to 325mm. I reckon that at 1/72 scale I am looking for wheels of 22 or 23mm diameter, 12-spoke, pretty chunky build. Thoughts of Lamming come to mind, but I'm not sure of the size of Lamming wheels.

I still have some more research to do, obviously - does anyone know of a firm who sell suitable artillery wheels in white metal? If I could get my hands on an odd wheel of the right size (out of copyright, of course), I could probably commission a small supply for my French siege guns. It does seem to me, though, that a wheel casting is an obvious spare part for someone, somewhere to have in production as a stock item. Haven't found anyone yet, but I'd be delighted to get some ideas.

Siege Testing - (5) Afterthoughts

The Siege Test was a success – there were a few things I now understand better, a few things I won’t bother with again, and a few things I didn’t get to try out properly – specifically mining and the little matter of provisions. These last bits I’ll look at again; for the moment, the chief success is that I played through a siege and it worked. It would have been awful if I had collected all these houses and fortress parts and trenches and gone to all this trouble and then the game had been a complete washout. So I’m very pleased with that.

Another valuable lesson was that it reminded me, once again, why I play wargames in the way I do, and what does or does not work for me. What (in short) I get out of it.

Well, I mostly play solo, for a number of reasons, and one reason that this is good for me is that I regard myself to some extent as a privileged witness to a bit of fake history. I’ve written this here before, and, yes, I am the presenter and the facilitator, and the fake history is more or less compromised by my own understanding and preferences (and bias, however unconscious), but the reason I still get a buzz from it, after all these years, is because I want to see what happens. It’s fun, it’s kind of educational, and in a solo setting I can attempt things which would not necessarily make an attractively balanced social game. So I can have campaigns which have heavily one-sided fights, I can even attempt a siege, for goodness sake. The concepts of victory and defeat – even the idea of the points value of an army – I understand what these are, but they are not things I normally consider as a priority.

One thing that I have learned in the past is that, in this kind of solo setting, a re-enactment, or any kind of walkthrough, doesn’t work. If I know what is going to happen then grinding through it is not worthwhile – no point – only passing moments of interest – no surprises. Nothing to learn, except about myself. Just a little fiddling around before it’s time to tidy the toys away. On the face of it, a siege might just be a perfect example of a procedural activity which doesn’t entertain for exactly that reason. Well, it was OK. In fact, I think I have demonstrated that a solo attempt at a siege has certain advantages.

I have read a lot of the better-known sources on how to make a siege into a game. The most useful, I think, is the famous Sandhurst game described very concisely in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone (David & Charles, 1975) – this sets out the important concept of accelerated time for the boring bits and the spadework, and dovetails this with a (Charge-based) tactical game to handle the exciting bits. It also sets out the pitfalls to be avoided and the need for a simple approach – I can’t recommend this too highly as a starting point. The snags are that the Sandhurst game uses simultaneous moves (and thus written orders) and – that’s right – an umpire. Ah. You can do anything with an umpire, I think.

The Duffy game is expanded a bit in Part XII of Henry Hyde’s The Wars of the Faltenian Succession, which appeared in Battlegames magazine a few years ago. This applies an alternate-move structure, and gets into more details about orders, event cards and Old School ideas like shell-burst templates and all that. It is a more detailed game, but it is still fundamentally the Duffy/Charge concept.

I also have the Perfect Captain’s Siege component of their Spanish Fury game (which is a free download from their excellent website). Like all the Perfect Captain games (and I’m sure they are very good), this relies on data cards for units, and some of the concepts are getting towards role-playing. That  excellent fellow Nundanket kindly loaned me the König Krieg documentation, which includes the famed (but rarely seen) siege game Festung Krieg – again, a source of good ideas, but to me it lacks the simple appeal of Duffy’s game.

One thing to avoid, I think, is stuffing as many tactical sequences as possible into a siege – for the leaguer of a fortified house that might be just the thing, but in a large siege it is also a means of avoiding the fact that it is a siege as far as possible. I tried to meet this head-on, rather than fudge the game into something more familiar.

Gary asked a very good question in response to my previous post – why, he asked, was there no attempt to put a secondary barrier inside the breach at Middlehampton?

I gave this some thought at the time, though, to be honest, in the absence of a sensible reason to fight on, my own Resolve was beginning to droop! In Chester, in the ECW siege, they marshalled gangs of civilians to pile earth (and dung, apparently) in all the gates and behind the stone walls. In my test, Lord Bloat was handicapped in this, since the townspeople's Loyalty had slipped further to zero, at which point they are not a valid workforce, and his two remaining infantry units were all he had available to do any kind of work of this type (cavalry, dear boy, never dig). On average, at 2-hex range in my rules, a siege gun has a 5/12 chance of damaging the wall during a strategic (1 day) turn, so I reckon (and Lord Bloat may have reckoned) that two cannons might take best part of a week to generate 5 gravelsworth of damage and effect a viable breach - so there was maybe time to do something - one possibility was demolishing the buildings near the wall and piling up the rubble, but maybe he felt (? - we'll never know) that surrender to the Scots would be the less disastrous of the options - certainly their reputation at Newcastle and York was not too awful - they were ravenous and tended to nick stuff, but slaughter, rape and ransacking were off-limits to the Presbyterians. I think the 5-chips collapse rating is maybe too high (though this might have been an exceptionally strong wall) - from memory, I think the breach at Chester (the one above the Roman Garden!) came down within a day, once the Parlies got a few big guns inside the earthwork defences and set about it, and I think that particular bit of wall had a bank erected inside it, but it was soft, Bunter sandstone (never accept the job of Governor of a red stone fort). Methinks 5 chips is too high...

Big lesson for me from these few days is that it is very important to put more effort into a thorough context and scenario narrative. There should have been better reasons for doing things, there should have been clearer time constraints, the supply issue should have been more central and there should have been some threat of Mad Prince Rupert appearing from somewhere to give the Jocks a jolly good bashing.

I enjoyed my few days at Middlehampton very much - it had the rather academic resonance which is common to many solo games, but it looked and felt like a game. I need to re-examine some of these numbers in the rules - the old walls were too tough, the digging was very straightforward (especially since the garrison did very little to interfere) and mostly procedural. The Sconce didn't last long, but was a threat while it lasted - the Sconce, by the way, could have been used as two half-sconces, and placed against the walls as hornworks, but that would have brought the siege closer to the town more quickly (which, in the absence of a sensible storyline, maybe doesn't make a lot of difference).

If I had been Bloat, I think I might have agreed with the townspeople's guild that the best strategy would be to meet that nice Lord Leven and his pals on the lawn with a tray of drinks, and discuss terms right at the start. Mind you, my mindset, my library of books and (importantly) my religious views are not likely to coincide with theirs.

An interesting few evenings - time to tidy up now! I’ll set out my thoughts on mining and supply in a week or two. As ever, my humble thanks to anyone who took the time to read about the test game – I am still delighted but rather surprised to hear from readers.

Next test siege I run will be a Napoleonic one, with the Vauban fortress bits.

Siege Testing – (3) Scales, Artillery Ranges, Saps

Things are getting a little busier, as you see. The game is hex-based – I am confident it could be played without hexes, if you really like measuring things.

My hexes are 7” across the flats, and the game scale equates one hex to 200 paces across (or 100 toises, if you prefer the classic terminology). That fits with the size and theory of the (15mm scale) fortress pieces. A lot of the logic of the game is related to artillery ranges, so let’s get to that now. Since this is a little section on artillery, I’ll go into a little more detail than this discussion really needs – if the mechanisms strike you as reminiscent of Charge!, or the closely-related Sandhurst siege game rules in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone book, then I can only plead that this is not a bad source. I propose to use Commands & Colors style rules for melées and movement (though not the Command Cards), but I’ll stick with Chris Duffy for the artillery.

In the Tactical game, the maximum effective ranges for roundshot are:

Light guns      -           4 hexes

Medium guns -           5 hexes

Heavy guns    -           6 hexes

Subject to the range limitations of a particular piece, the effect of a shot is calculated by throwing two dice; one of these is the Accuracy Die (which is a black D6) – this has to turn up a number greater than or equal to the range in hexes for a hit. If it is a hit, a second (red) die gives the Effect; this die is a D6 if the target is close-order foot in the open, a D4 for horse, artillery, engineers or open-order foot in the open, or for close-order foot in soft cover (hedges, trees, temporary gabions), and it’s a D3 for anyone in hard cover (earthworks, stone walls). This score gives the number of figures lost. If, like me, you prefer your casualties to occur in whole sub-unit bases or not at all, then you have one more step – the owner of the target unit makes a Saving Throw (you may now groan). It works like this – we need to round odd hits up or down to a number of whole bases – if the unit suffering loss is organised with n figures per base, roll a Dn – an n-sided die; if the roll exceeds the number of odd hits, forget the odd hits; if it doesn’t, you lose a complete base.

Example: a medium cannon fires at a range of 5 hexes (its maximum) at an enemy unit of horse (and my horse is organised in bases of 3 figures). The horse are in the open.

(1) Roll the black D6 for Accuracy – at range 5 we need 5+ for a hit. Comes up 5 – good enough – a hit.

(2) Horse in the open are a middling sort of target, as discussed above – roll a D4 for casualties – comes up 2 – OK – 2 figures lost.

(3) Additional step because I want my losses to be counted in bases. At 3 figs/base, 2 figures is zero bases plus 2 odd figures. The Saving Throw has to be a D3, to match the base organisation – must roll a 3 (“beat the 2”) to save them. Throw is a 2 – tough – the horse lose a complete base.

Siege cannons (i.e. nominated wall-battering guns) and siege mortars have no tactical function at all, since they are too ponderous to move and too slow to load and fire in a tactical context (though they may be overrun during such a phase, of course).

The Strategic artillery system is basically the same, though there are additional rules for siege cannons and mortars in the Strategic game. If it seems odd that a 24-hour Strategic turn should produce similar casualty levels to a 30-minute Tactical turn then I can’t disagree – however, the arguments in favour of this oddity are thus:

(1) During a Strategic turn, rates of fire are deliberately slow (to avoid overheating the guns) and the troops would stay in cover and keep their heads down. A Tactical turn is a much more intense period of action.

(2) It is very convenient to make this assumption.

(3) Chris Duffy recommends it – if it was good enough for Sandhurst...

In the Strategic game, I had thought of giving siege cannons some extra range – maybe 8 hexes – but on the grounds that 6 hexes is already 1200 paces, the guns were pretty inaccurate and you can only fire at what you can see, I kept it at 6 hexes, like the other heavy guns – siege cannons, however, can break down walls. Fire on a section of wall is like other fire – the black Accuracy die tells you whether you hit the right place, and a D6 Effect die needs to score 4+ to do damage to an old-fashioned stone curtain wall, 5+ for a low Vauban wall with earth backing, and whatever else you fancy. A single, damaging hit to a wall is denoted by a piece of gravel placed below the target area (classy, eh?) – in my game, I have been working with the assumption that 5 such gravel-generating hits on the same section will produce a breach in the medieval walls of Middlehampton.

The common all-garden damage markers I borrowed from our driveway - this is
good whinstone, but it's a bit dark to match the walls - do you think I could get a
sample of some rather paler Cotswold stuff from my local garden centre?

Mortars also feature in the Strategic game – the range is up to 6 hexes, like heavy cannons, but the target need not be in direct sight and the effect of cover is negated. There are strict limits on the number of mortars (just one in my present game!).

Right – that was a fairly lengthy introduction to the idea that “artillery range”, broadly speaking, is 6 hexes, and this is relevant to the necessary task of Sapping Forward. In the last instalment, I mentioned that the digging of parallels and other general-purpose trenches requires infantry bases to match or better the day’s Digging Number. The procedures for such trenches mean that the position is first of all protected with gabions, to offer “soft” cover to the shovellers while work goes ahead, and then the main challenge is to score enough decent dice rolls to complete the work. Digging toward the fortress is a different deal altogether – in this situation, specialist sappers work towards the front (well, obliquely toward the front, to avoid the sap being enfiladed), and the particular challenge is staying protected from the enemy’s fire while working. In this, the challenge has less to do with the state of the ground, and more with the proximity to the enemy. Accordingly, digging a forward sap requires an engineering presence of some sort (I have sappers for my Napoleonic armies, but for the time being for the ECW I have to attach a designated “engineer” figure and imagine there are sappers present), and some infantry to follow up to widen the sap into a trench in the normal “Digging Number” way.

The current situation is a bit crude - the token "Engineer" is followed up by some
infantry, who will enlarge the sap to full trench proportions - in this form, without
any identifiable sappers, it looks a bit like a firing squad. I hope improved elegance
will follow soon.

The actual head of the sap is traced out, one hex at a time, using gabions, and the infantry follow up with the trench work. To advance the head of the sap is automatic until the sap gets within the 6-hex artillery range zone, and therafter success requires a roll of 2D6 – and at least one of these dice must come up equal to or less than the distance in hexes from the walls (or the covered way, if it is that kind of fortress). It gets slower and more fiddly the nearer you get.

Once the sap has reached the correct distance, digging a parallel and new gun positions is simply a question of doing the spadework with dice against the Digging Number. Since the Strategic game allows the besiegers to move troops to anywhere which is not forward of the heads of sap, some good dice can enable a complete parallel to be dug in a single day.

Enough nuts and bolts for the moment. In the Test Siege of Middlehampton, the attackers (Leven’s Covenanter army) were forced by the existence of the Duke’s Sconce (a modern outwork) to build their First Parallel further from the walls than they might have chosen. Once they had taken the outwork, they sapped forward without incident and constructed the Second Parallel just outside artillery range of the walls. Leven opted not to advance this first sap any further, for fear of some form of sally on the part of the defenders.

Now within range of the town’s heavier guns, further sapping was rather slower, and an engineer was among the (few) casualties, but it brought the Third Parallel within 4 hexes (800 paces) of the walls, and a position was constructed for the giant mortar (Auld Aggie). This mortar, along with the two heavy guns captured in the Sconce, now produced a steady fire on the town which mostly served to frighten the inhabitants. There were a few casualties on both sides, but the Loyalty of the townspeople had now slid to 1 (“indifferent to the garrison, but not yet a threat to them”), as a result of the Governor’s unpopular demolition of the northern suburbs and the harrowing effects of night bombardment by the Scots.

Still the forward saps continued – still there was no action on the part of Lord Bloat to disrupt the approach work with any kind of sally. By the end of the 13^th day of the siege, a Fourth Parallel was ready, and the mighty siege cannons were in place opposite the section of the curtain wall which had no earthwork protection.

Not looking good for the Royalist town of Middlehampton?

Siege cannons in place to start bombarding the old North Wall

The Scots' works, with the Second Parallel in the foreground

Lord Bloat (mounted, with red plume) must surely be thinking of asking for terms.
We have to assume that he has faithfully promised the line of red-coated musketeers
manning the earthwork outside the walls that he will open the Stockgate to let
them in pretty smartish when the time comes 

I'm not sure who this little drummer is, nor why he's involved - I guess I must
have accidentally included him as one of the singly-based engineers. He has
a certain plucky quality - I like him - he's a sort of talisman for the Resolve
Number of the garrison, but I fear his time is running out

That’s as far as I’ve got – thus far I have to say that the sapping is slow and would not necessarily be a lot of fun in a competitive game, though it is fine for a solo effort. The artillery is not as effective as I expected, which is probably historically correct – I could have done more with sallies if the garrison had been stronger.

Next steps will be the start of the bombardment of the curtain wall, and I might say a bit about food supply – let’s see how it goes!

Siege Testing – (2) Getting Started

Just baby steps to start off.

Today’s main priority for me was scarifying the South Lawn before the rain came, so the siege was delayed until late on. There was a lot of trying things which didn’t work too well, and then trying them again. My developing siege game is played in two modes – strategic and tactical. A strategic siege turn represents a complete day elapsed. At any point in a strategic turn, either side can declare a switch to tactical – a tactical turn represents about half an hour of more detailed action, and the game becomes simplified, up-and-down-the-table Commands & Colors until the tactical spell is over.

Middlehampton, ready for the siege

Thus a sally, or a storm, or anything outside the scope of the normal day of bombardment, digging and attrition requires a tactical switch.

Each army has a number (range 1-3) for each of the following indicators: Resolve, Vigour and Leadership. These affect the troops’ fighting effectiveness, and also their ability to carry out digging and other labouring tasks. I have a sketchy mechanism for controlling rations, and reduced rations can have an effect on Resolve and Vigour. There should be some system for Plague, but I haven’t worked that in yet. The fortress defenders also have the mixed blessing of a civilian population – these have a number of interesting attributes, but in particular they have a Loyalty Number, which can range from +3 (fiercely supportive of the garrison, will fight alongside them, if required) to -3 (hostile, require constant policing, prepared to revolt or collaborate with the enemy). Thus the townspeople can be a valuable source of labour, or they can be a major nuisance and distraction, and this has a knock-on to the Resolve and the effectiveness of the garrison.

At the start of each day, the Digging Number for the day is set. Initially, this is set by rolling 2D6 and taking the lower; in subsequent turns, roll a die at the start of the day – if it is higher than the Digging Number, increase the Digging Number by 1; if it is lower, reduce the DN by 1. The DN must be in the range 1 to 6, and is the score which must be achieved by diggers to complete a section of work on that day – it is, if you like, a simple, rather bovine abstraction of weather and other imponderables which make shovelling earth more or less difficult. It is possible, for example, for the DN to get so high that it becomes almost impossible for the besieger to make any progress.

Never had a use for the Giant Die before - here's today's Digging Number - seems clear enough...

In the Test Siege of Middlehampton (for such this is), the initial Digging No came up as a 3. The population is between 4 and 5 thousand, the soldiers placed there for defence include 3 companies of musketeers from the county trained bands, plus 2 full regiments of foot, 2 regts of horse and a total of 7 guns, of which only 3 are heavy. The townspeople – strong supporters of the King – have a Loyalty Number of 2 – they will gladly work to help the garrison, but will not fight. The initial scenario tests also revealed that there were 6 days available before the attacker (those Covenanters again) would appear.

Very neat job - no trace of the old suburb, and a nice new earthwork - these
boys are good - they will give you a competitive quotation for raised flower beds

The Military Governor of the Town, Sir Edward Bloat, took advantage of the available time, the easy Digging Number and the sunny disposition of the citizens to demolish the suburb of ramshackle sheds and farm buildings outside the town’s Stockgate, and – under the direction of his German chief engineer, Captain Von Schuwel – to erect an earthwork embankment in front of the section of the curtain wall west of the Stockgate, complete with a “mount” – an entrenched artillery position. This would give valuable protection for the old masonry wall footings, eliminate the risk of the suburb buildings providing shelter for the enemy, and add to his available firepower. The walkways and most of the towers of the old walls were unsuitable for artillery.

Man the Sconce

The rest of the town garrison are kept off the table for the moment - if I had little
houses with detachable roofs, I could put them inside the buildings, and maybe
they could all have cups of tea and sandwiches

He had also considered the alternative of building earthwork walls right around the suburb, and leaving it in place, but there was insufficient time to complete the work. He installed 2 of his heavy guns, plus Bertram’s company of the musketeers, in the Duke’s Sconce, a modern addition to the town’s defences, and waited for the visitors.

Lord Leven’s boys duly arrived, and got busy setting up a first parallel, placing the two heaviest cannon and an enormous mortar in emplacements to bombard the Sconce, which was seen as a major obstacle to an otherwise systematic operation to approach the walls of the town.

A regiment of foot (of 3 bases, in full Vigour) gets to throw 3D6 – that becomes 4D6 if they have an engineer attached. To build a section of trench, one of the dice must be equal to or greater than the Digging No. To build a gun emplacement, 2 dice must meet the number. If the work is not completed, the position of what is planned is denoted by gabions, and until such time as the earthwork is finished the diggers get reduced cover. I haven’t done any forward sapping yet – the plan is that the engineers will be more important in this.

One of the gun emplacements isn't finished - just a few gabions, which will give
the diggers very little protection in the meantime

Good view here of the new earthworks pieces from Fat Frank - I rather like them

It became obvious very quickly that the Scots’ heavy guns were going to make little impression on Von Schuvel’s fine Sconce, so, concerned about the time in which the town was to be taken, Leven ordered an assault on the Sconce, to attempt to take it by escalade. So the call went up - "Tactical"! The advancing foot were hit by a storm of iron from the artillery, and two regiments were stopped with heavy losses, but the remaining 3 units in the assault pressed on, and captured the outwork very easily, in the end. The cannon were taken, and turned on the town, and the musketeer company, though it is said they asked for quarter, were cut down to a man.

This very serious mortar was Leven's original main hope for blasting the Royalists
out of the Sconce, which would be a better idea if it was less inaccurate - the mortar
has an additional disadvantage in that it is possible for the grenado (shell) to ignite
but not the propellant charge, which requires a lot of sprinting on the part of the
gunners, and usually wrecks the mortar

The besiegers' two Full Cannons are the main wall crushers, but they have to be
at close range to score consistent hits

That’s as far as I’ve got. I haven’t even started working with food supplies, and there’s a pile of stuff (not least the dreaded mining, for which I have a cunning scheme) which I shall get to. It is very easy to come up with draft rules which make it impossible to cause any casualties in certain situations. Tweakle, tweakle. Fix it and move on.

With the Sconce in Parliament’s hands, the spadework should proceed in a more standard manner. I say this, kind of hoping that it implies that I know what that should be – in fact I am learning a lot as I go along. Keep Chris Duffy's book open at the right page.

Good fun – chaotic, but good.

More soon.

Siege Testing - (1) Town Planning

I have a little spare time available, and today I received a shipment of what originally was intended to be an interim solution for the matter of trenches, but the interim solution seems so good that it may become a more permanent solution - I'll say more about this in a later episode...

Since all my reading and scribbling notes have only gone a little way toward developing a working ECW siege game, I think the time is right to set something up on the tabletop and try some ideas out. This is not really going to be a proper game, I hasten to add - merely an extended test of ideas - but I have a few days to work on it.

View over the formidable Bridgegate, looking west - the dodgy-looking suburb
outside the Stockgate is an immediate issue for a military governor, I would say
- it will have to be cleared - this is where trouble starts if the mayor owns
the land. Note the mighty Duke's Sconce defending the North Road.

Tonight I set out a fortified town - tomorrow I'll have to work out the population and the appropriate size and composition for a garrison, estimate what size of attacking force is needed and allocate engineers to the two sides.

It is not a real town - it has a couple of features I borrowed from Chester and Carlisle - it may develop a proper identity later on.

View of the North Wall, seen from the direction an enemy will approach! The
medieval walls, as you will see, have no earthworks to protect them (this is the
situation Newcastle was in in 1644 when the Scots arrived).

With a bit of luck, the backbone of an ECW siege game should be adaptable for Napoleonic sieges without too much grief. I have fiddled about with sieges for some years now, without managing to produce a best-selling siege game - that's why you have never heard of me.

View across the Market Cross, inside the Stockgate, with St Thomas' church in
the distance and the Old Barbican back left. A prosperous town? - I think it will
declare for the King...

More soon...

ECW - More Siege Artillery

Big ones, small ones - from siege cannons to a 2-man peashooter

Having worked on the oh-so-shiny gunners from the Mike & Whiskers Legacy Collection, and dug some appropriate guns out of the lead pile, I suddenly have a big dollop (I believe that is the correct military term) of extra artillery - specifically for sieges.

My ECW armies are already probably over-provided with field artillery, and I have a fine big mortar, but the approach of the siege project has highlighted a shortage of odd guns on small bases, to fit on tops of towers and in "mounts", not to mention actual wall-crushers.

A couple of very serious 'cannons of 8' - if these chaps (provisionally called Stan &
Olly) shoot at your town walls they will stay shot at, and don't forget it. Anyone who
observes that the ramrod would only reach halfway down the barrel is correct, of
course, but may spend the evening on the naughty step. Obviously they have a longer
one stashed somewhere, don't they? 

None of this is of particularly fine quality - the rehashed gunners are purely functional, for a start - but I have ticked another box for the list of things I need to do to prepare for sieges. Tick.

Only ECW artillery job still in my queue is to paint up a few more frame guns for the Scots - I have the gun castings, but am trying to think of how to provide suitable gunner figures in 20mm. Conversions coming up, methinks.

Next job is to slap some paint on some new hills (hexagonal, of course - MDF, of course) and start some tests to get a colour scheme for my forthcoming river system. These aren't siege jobs, but it would surely tidy things up a bit around here if I could store some of this MDF away in the scenery boxes.

Latest thought on a colour for rivers is - rather to my surprise - darkish blue-green. I was going to go for mud brown again, but somehow this doesn't seem right if the new river pieces may also form lakes and coastline. I'll get some sample pots from the hardware store and see how it looks.

Cue the Spares Box, plus a World of MDF

All a matter of balance - and special equipment...

I have received the first prototype Thing (not sure what it is – a buttress, a pedestal, a support…?) to enable garrison units to stand on a walkway on the walls that is narrower than the subunit bases. My ECW Foote are on 60mm x 60mm squares, but the walkways are about 20mm wide – you can see the problem. The prototype seems to work OK – Michael has produced a build-it yourself kit in 2mm MDF which glues together to give a block 50mm wide, 48mm high and 23mm deep, and I attach a piece of steel paper to the top. Since my unit bases are all finished with magnetic compound, this should be a big help. I have glued-up and painted the prototype in a delicate stone shade, as you see, so that it blends in a bit (i.e. looks less stupid than you would expect). It should even be possible to mount artillery on the walls if I use the Things two-deep. Now I need a supply of about 20, plus I need a good name for a Thing.

The Thing

Troops on The Thing

Call out the trusty Spares Box. It also occurred to me that it would be useful to have some musketeers mounted in single rank, on half-depth bases, specially for siege and fortress work. It seems a bit of a grunt to paint some up just for this role (and I’d begrudge the use of figures which could be made up into proper battlefield units), but the Spares Box came into its own. A while ago I bought some old painted ECW figures from Harry Pearson, and some of them are from the very earliest “Subscription” series which Les Higgins made before his more famous centrifugally-cast 20mm range (of which I use a great many). The early figures are interesting because they are seldom seen, but for me they are a bit puny in stature to mix comfortably with the later ones. However, for isolated special-purpose siege stands they could be just the thing, so I did some (minimal) touching-up and revarnishing, and mounted them up on 30mm-deep stands. They could never be accused of possessing actual beauty, but I expect they will do as they are told. In any case, given their age and history, it would be sad for them to live in the Spares Box forever.

Surprised to find themselves on special duties - "Subscription" Les Higgins ECW

They can do it without The Thing

While I was looking in the Spares Box, I was also reminded that the ex-Harry figures also include some of the later Higginses which are in good nick and – with a few supplementary figures painted to match, should provide me with 3 new units of foote – there are some red-coated fellows who will give me a decent double-sized unit for Francis Gamul’s City of Chester regiment – there’s that siege theme again…

I also have prototypes for some of the new MDF structures which will form the basis of my trench sections, but more of that on another occasion. I also have some MDF pieces which will provide a pretty radical solution to the placement of rivers on my hex-grid table. I’ll get some painted up – this week, I hope – and there will be some pictures (unless they are terrible, in which case I shall just change the subject – good heavens, is that an elephant in the garden…?).

The river system is that I paint up some 2mm-thick hexes to be water – good gloss varnish finish and all that – I’m still pondering the best colour for water, by the way – I tend towards mud rather than sky-blue, but I am open to ideas. Then I have a series of bags of extra parts laser-cut from 2mm MDF, painted in baseboard green, which sit on top of the water hexes, and are painted on both sides to give maximum flexibility. The bags are labelled “cheeks – straight”, “cheeks – inners” and “cheeks – outers” and that sort of describes the system – there are two different profiles for a straight (a bit wiggly, these are not canals) and two profiles for a curve. Each river piece connects at the edge, with a 2-inch wide river in the middle of a (4-inch) hex edge. Using the cheek-pieces in different combinations, it is possible to produce a wide range of river shapes, and you can even make estuaries, lakes or a coastline. Until I get more to fiddle about with, I do not know the full extent of what is possible, but it seems very promising. When I have a decent number of pieces painted up, I’ll try to put together a post to demonstrate this.

Not painted yet, but this quick mock-up gives an idea of the scope, with a
very small number of alternative shapes - does anyone else remember
Slartibartfast? It may have occurred to you that the cut-out bits which are
missing from this picture are - well, roads! - aha....

I’ve had problems with rivers since I started wargaming, and hexes are just a specific variation on that theme. The new rivers, by the way, will not be the slightest bit dioramic – these are to be flat, tidy, obvious rivers that you can stand a unit or a bridge on without everything falling over. Like an oversized version of Commands & Colors terrain tiles, in fact.