What you get in one pack of Old Glory artillery.
Enough for six batteries in Napoleon's Battles plus six spare crew.
Just look at that finger!
I'd thought trying to file the digit down,
but in 15mm it's a tad fiddly.
Reminds me of the Fickle Finger of Fate
As with the recently completed Austrians, the excessive number of photos I took of these chaps indicates how happy I was with how they turned out.
Very nice Mark - the fickle finger of fate indeed mate, especially with your recent rolling of dice by the sounds of it!
ReplyDeleteThanks Carlo.
DeleteAs the rest of the figure is pretty good I'm now thinking that he's got one of those finger protectors that they wore in the course of servicing the guns. That makes him a ventsman. Now I'll have to research what colour Russian finger protectors should be. I'm going with beige for now, although I imagine they got a bit burnt.
Very nice!
ReplyDeleteThanks Phil.
DeleteNice work! Didn't the ventsman wear the protection on his thumb?
ReplyDeleteThanks.
DeleteA bit more research confirms that it would seem to be his thumb that the lucky chap got to place over the vent to avoid premature explosions. There is a drawing of one in plate H of Osprey Men-at-Arms 96. I guess a padded finger would work as well, especially if the thumb had been worn down during length of service? Otherwise made he is holding a firing tube and using that to point with? Whatever, it looks dramatic. Perhaps an early example of "giving the finger"?
Not trying to be critical here but aren’t the bases a little small? Maybe just because I’m used to artillery being based with gun barrel toward the short end.
ReplyDeleteA simple answer is yes. For modern 15mm figures the Napoleon's Battles bases are a little tight.
DeleteThe front for the battery is 150 yards and 100 yards deep. The battery represents 4 to 8 guns (mostly 6). In the rules only heavy artillery, Corps level, along with horse artillery are represented. The big Russian batteries often appear as two while some half batteries are represented as a reduced battery (a -3 on the fire factor).
In terms of ground scale, a quick bit of research says that 10-20 yards per gun is about right, so if anything the NB base is a bit big (and why I don't use the optional spread basing). Depth is probably okay to for the teams and there would appear to be plenty of space for interpenetration.
The 15mm ground scale for NB, 1" equals 100 yards, allows most Napoleonic battles to be fought on a 9x5 table. Only Leipzig and Wagram require a lot more table space. Some battles are very congested, Borodino springs to mind, and part of that is due to the massive number of batteries present.
The frontage also supports your statement of the short end being the front.
A lot of fiddliness in games comes about trying to fit everything in to maximise guns firing, men attacking etc. Ca la vie.