Slammers detachments are like buses – you wait ages for one, then two turn up at once. After last week’s 111-wheel painting and assembly marathon with the unit of Foster’s Mercenaries, this one is a rather more straightforward build.
The Slammers regiment aren’t the only users of the M9 combat car; besides the Lightning Division and their fully enclosed crew cars, Harris Commando use the M9A3 variant. This is identical to the Slammers’ version except for the armament; the Harris cars have a heavy laser and two gatlings in place of the tribarrels.
I chose to put together an armoured detachment of three combat cars and three M9A10 cargo cars; one of these tows an anti-tank gun while the others each carry two infantry teams for a total of 10 TUs (the gun and towing vehicle count as a single TU). The plan was to also paint an extra cargo car and infantry so I could also reconfigure them into an Infantry Detachment – I painted the extra infantry, but forgot the additional cargo car ! I’ll have to go back and do that another day.
This was a simple and quick build – the cargo cars are one piece castings, while the combat cars have the three metal guns, crew figures plus of course the etched brass splinter screen. I attached the guns and crew (space is limited in the car’s interior so I don’t always put all three crew figures in) but left the screens off until the very end. All of the cars received stowage, jerricans, fuel drums, stowage boxes etc. The etched brass sheet for the screen also has a stowage basket so I attached one or two of those. I stuck an infantry figure with binoculars in the back of one cargo car after removing his base.
The vehicles were all primed with Halfords’ grey automotive primer, then drybrushed a lighter grey. I airbrushed orange-brown camouflage stripes, carefully drybrushed those pale orange and, apart from picking out the stowage and the odd detail here and there, that was just about it. Once the combat car crew and guns were painted I superglued the splinter screens on. They then received a brushed-on coat of Army Painter Strong Tone Quickshade. As with the Fosters vehicles we don’t yet have any official decals* so I’d already printed up some onto decal paper. The decal paper is thicker than normal decal film and won’t take too well to heavily curved surfaces, but they seemed to be OK over the slight curve of the bow slope. After that, it was a final airbrushed coat of Tamiya Flat Clear.
*Update – since this post was written, we’ve released a sheet of Harris decals – link.
The towed gun crew are fixed to one of our resin fireteam bases – I used a cutting tool in a Dremel to make holes for their bases then filled any gaps with PVA and sand. The gun isn’t glued down so it can be removed from the base when it’s being towed. The rest of the infantry were glued to M8 washers and the bases textured with PVA and sand. They were sprayed dark green over their primer coat, drybrushed and washed with Citadel Athonian Camoshade. Boots were painted brown, guns grey, faces in various flesh shades and webbing sand-brown, all washed in appropriate colours from the Citadel shades range. The bases were painted with Tamiya Flat Earth and drybrushed. I painted the fireteam bases in the same colours with a darker brown edge, then flocked with Citadel grass once everything had been varnished.
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Anti-tank gun and towing vehicle
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Combat cars advance
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Anti-tank gun fires from cover
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Infantry with gatling support weapon
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Three M9A3 combat cars
The two Harris packs are now available from the website if you feel like leading a detachment of blowers into battle.
HSD15-3201 – Harris Commando Armoured Detachment – £38.00
HSD15-3202 – Harris Commando Infantry Detachment – £31.50
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