A planned Salute addition to our Small Scale Scenery range is this fine edifice, the City Hall. It’s based loosely on Berlin’s Altes Stadhaus but I’ve played with the dimensions a bit so that it’s exactly 80mm square, and fits in nicely with the 40x40mm block size of our other City buildings. It’ll be a two piece resin casting with the domed tower as a separate piece (it’s seen here fitted to a base for casting which is why I can’t photograph it assembled).
This week I’ve mostly been occupied with casting up dozens and dozens of 15mm Slammers vehicles and 6mm buildings for Scale Creep Miniatures to stock in the US. Add that to more work on preparing Salute releases and I haven’t been left with time for much else, so there’s no new items as such today. However, I have been slowly bevearing away on new Hammer’s Slammers packs for the website, to make it easy to buy an entire detachment at one go without having to pore through our website working out exactly which models to buy. This week I’ve added the three different types of Hiroseki National Army detachment; Heavy Armour, Mechanised Infantry and Planetary Warfare. I’ve also made two variants on the Heavy Armour and Planetary Warfare packs with different vehicle options. The Hiroseki use our Mercenary Brigade models designed by Zac Braham and Kirk Alderfer, along with PLA infantry figures. Each pack also includes resin infantry bases, packs of stowage and radars, aerials or radomes as appropriate for command vehicles – and all at a discount over the price of buying the models separately.
HSD15-1501 – Hiroseki Heavy Mechanised Detachment – £90.00
HSD15-1501a – Hiroseki Heavy Mechanised Detachment – £90.00
HSD15-1502 – Hiroseki Planetary Warfare Detachment – £75.00
HSD15-1502a – Hiroseki Planetary Warfare Detachment – £63.00
HSD15-1503 – Hiroseki Mechanised Infantry Detachment – £46.00
I’ll add more packs as and when I have time.
As always, we’ll be bringing lots of new releases to Salute this year across many of our ranges. Obviously Hammer’s Slammers will be big part of this and today we’re starting off with some previews of the first casts of a number of new 15mm models. Our aim is to provide new versions of some vehicles that feature in several detachment lists, and make it easier to field several forces that use them.
The Centurion family of armoured transporters is based on a modular chassis with multiple ‘segments’ per vehicle that can result in anywhere between 4 and 10 pairs of wheels, the largest of these being the articulated howitzer and mortar carrying 4H6 and 4M6 used by the Poplar Regiment, Bushmasters and Heliodorus Regiment. Other forces to deploy the Centurion include Foster’s Mercenaries, Guardforce O’Higgins, Greenwood’s Archers and the Thunderbolt Division.
Centurion 4M6 Mortar Carrier
Centurion 204 Mortar
Centurion 4H6 Artillery Hog
Centurion 202 Calliope
The Broadsword is a heavy 8-wheeler multi-role armoured fighting vehicle, used as a missile launcher, artillery vehicle, infantry carrier and many other roles. This particular version is a tank destroyer deployed by the Apex Dragoons. The Broadsword is used in over a dozen other configurations by the Han Black Banner, Hindi Army, Hashemite Nation, Bartels Armour and the Firelords.
Broadsword Tank Destroyer
The Odyssey is a smaller 6×6 APC which can be fitted with several turret or pintel weapon options. The versions show here have a gatling remote turret and crew-served tribarrel. The main users of the Odyssey are the Apex Dragoons, but they’re also fielded by the Hashemites.
Odyssey Gatling
Odyssey Tribarrel
Finally for now, this is a hybrid tank unofficially known as the Barzon. One of John Treadaway’s brainwaves, it combines the turret of the Neo-Soviet Bizon tank with the hull of the Bars MBT. I took John’s idea a step further, fitted it with the 9cm railgun and gatling remote turret of the Lightning Division’s M2A7 Kurt blower tank (after a bit of fettling and filing to make the gun mantlet fit the turret) and it became a new version of the LD’s Kraus tracked tank.
Barzon
Following on from the 6mm Slammers bits on Tuesday, today we have a miscellany of 15mm items. The most important of these is probably the release (at last !) of the 15mm A21M Mortar Jeep, which fits in the ToE of several forces besides the Slammers themselves. It consists of the standard resin jeep model with an extra metal sprue of pieces including the mortar, two ammo cases and a small radome (which very handily hides the mounting hole for the tri-barrel).
Next to the jeep is an M9A3 Combat Car of Harris’ Commando – this is identical to the standard M9A1 used by the Slammers, except for the armament; instead of three tri-barrels, the M9A3 has two gatling railguns on the flanks and a light laser forward. The model includes crew figures and an etched brass splinter screen. This is something you could have made by buying the basic M9A1 plus some accessory packs from us, but we’ve made it easier by doing it for you.
Speaking of tri-barrels, we’ve remastered the standard 2cm weapons fitted to most Slammers vehicles. All models will now have these included instead of the old version and we’ve made a separate pack of nine available in our 15mm Accessories range. And on the subject of etched brass (and Accessories), there’s also a pack of stowage baskets to fit any vehicle in need of a bit more storage room. Lastly, the two cranes from the E8 Wrecker are available separately in case you’d like to create your own recovery vehicle.
HS15-113a – A21M Mortar Jeep – £3.00
HS15-112e – M9A3 Harris Combat Car – £5.00
SF15-930 – Etched Brass Turret Baskets (x3) – £2.50
SF15-931 – Tribarrel Powerguns (x9) – £1.50
SF15-932 – Cranes (x2) – £3.00
Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
I love the English weather. In the space of 48 hours we’ve gone from sub-zero temperatures and mounds of snow to ten degrees and watery sunshine – and this being England, it has of course rained a bit as well (which fortunately has washed away the slush).
I’ve been beavering away at the workshop and have shifted a good chunk of the order backlog which built up while I was snowbound – another solid day’s work tomorrow and it’ll be cleared completely.
Phil was also snowed in for a few days so has been ploughing through moulds like there’s no tomorrow – so in celebration of our hard work, here’s some new stuff.
In 6mm we have more options for other Hammer’s Slammers:The Crucible mercenary units. The Lightning Division get the M9A16 Calliope version of the combat car, while the Waldheim Dragoons finally come to 6mm in the form of the M2A2 and M2A5 tank and command versions of the Icarus blower tank.
HS6-1712a – M9A16 Calliope Car – £1.00
HS6-1911 – M2A2 Blower Tank – £1.50
HS6-1911a – M2A5 Command Tank – £1.50
The weather is still pretty grim here – we’ve had more snow with another bout forecast for this afternoon. I haven’t ventured to the workshop at all since Monday, although main roads are clear the back routes are still tricky to negotiate. So, if you have an outstanding order with us (anything placed since last Sunday) then there will be a bit of a delay. The forecast is for a bit of a thaw from Sunday – the temperatures should at least climb above freezing – so I’ll get back to the workshop on Monday and should have the backlog cleared in a couple of days.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to postpone this week’s new release until I’ve cleared the order queue. Phil has also been off work for part of this week as his office was closed, so he’s taken the chance to get ahead with mould production so we have more new stuff ready to release.
I haven’t been idle – apart from walking the dog in the snow (which she loved, as you can see) I’ve been painting some new bits – I’ve now finished all of our new releases for the next four weeks. And looking further ahead, Salute is now just six weeks away. As regular readers of our blog will know, we like to have lots of shiny new releases to tempt you with at the show (and to make our overseas customers envious). This year’s focus is firmly on 15mm Sci-Fi and in particular Hammer’s Slammers – if all goes well we could have as many as a dozen new vehicles in lots of variants. We’re working on some important vehicle types that feature in a number of the detachment lists with the aim of making it possible to create those detachments again. The design work for these is mostly done, and we already have the masters for many of them cleaned up and prepped for moulding (a couple have already been moulded in fact). And the hope is that we’ll get as many of these vehicles as possible available in 6mm as well.
It won’t be all Slammers though – there are half-a-dozen spaceship masters on my workbench, some Aeronef in the works and today I’m working on new 2mm scale buildings. Oh, and we’ve commissioned some new (and unusual) 28mm Great War figures – Dib Dib Dib!
Having waffled on about all the new stuff, it wouldn’t be fair to leave you without at least one or two pictures – so here we are…
Our corner of the UK has been hit a couple of times by what for us is quite heavy falls of snow (5″-6″ or so). In comparison to (say) North America or Scandinavia it’s probably only a piddling amount, but here it’s a once-in-a-decade event and so has brought travel to a halt because we’re just not equipped for it. I was able to get to the workshop on Monday to cast and fill orders, and yesterday walked them to the post office (although they told me that there would be no more collections until today at the earliest, so as far as I know they’re still sitting in the corner of the depot). The cold snap is due to last until the end of the week, with more snow forecast, so I’ll have to see how the weather unfolds over the next few days. The Brigade workshop is on a farm in the middle of the Kent countryside and my journey is via minor country roads, some of which aren’t even wide enough for two cars to pass, so can easily be made impassable by a bit of snow. If there are any delays in shipping orders then obviously we’ll post news on the blog and our various social media accounts. It’s also likely to delay our next planned release – there’s no point putting new items on the website if I can’t get to the workshop to produce them !
On another topic, one oversight from last Friday’s EuroFed spaceship release was not to take photos of the underside of the two carriers, showing the position of the fighters. The pictures below should hopefully rectify this. I had trouble taking clear photos (the fact that the fighters are the same colour as the carriers doesn’t help !) so I’ve mixed in some CG images of the 3D models to help.
Almost a year ago (the first models appeared at Salute 2017) we started on the redesign and relaunch of our European Federation spaceship fleet. Today, that task is finally complete as we release the last of the new designs.
First up are two rather unusual fighter carrier types, the Revanche and the Vaban. What makes them different is that both are parasite carriers, with their fighters carried in external racks on the underside of each vessel. The Revanche carries six of the new Moustique strikeboats, while the much smaller Vaban carries six Comete light interceptors. The Revanche is a resin casting with metal parts, while the Vaban is metal.
Which leads straight onto the new Moustique strikeboat – this is effectively a large fighter design (I haven’t quite worked out whether it should be depicted as a large fighter or a very small ship in Starmada).
For system defence we have the Montcalm monitor, a destroyer sized vessel without an FTL drive, which utilises the extra space to carry a heavy-than-normal armament. And to keep tabs on the enemy at long range is the Surveillante Early-Warning craft, reminiscent of a modern-day AWACS.
And finally, … something brand new, the Cormoran shuttle craft. Used for both courier and assault lander duties, the Cormoran is a common sight around EuroFed fleets.
SFS-412 – Revanche Strikeboat Carrier – £5.00
SFS-413 – Vaban Patrol Carrier – £1.75
SFS-462 – Moustique Strikeboat (x12) – £2.00
SFS-490 – Montcalm System Monitor – £1.50
SFS-492 – Surveillante AWACS – £0.75
SFS-493 – Cormoran Shuttle (x2) – £0.75
SFSP-403 – EuroFed Patrol Fleet – £22.00
We have something else new in the Small Scale Scenery range today. This is a set of six Walled Farms, cast in metal as single pieces on a base. I did try casting them in resin, which worked OK initially, but the pieces were so small and brittle they had a tendency to snap when getting them out of the moulds !
They’re listed under English buildings, but are equally suitable for any European setting
SSS-8106 – Walled Farms (x6) – £4.00
I think I deserve a pat on the back for getting these out today, since the mould only arrived at the workshop yesterday at 3pm…
Following on from ROBIN in Nottingham this last weekend, our next show is less than two weeks away – Cavalier in the Angel Centre, Tonbridge, is on Sunday 25th of February.
As always, we are taking pre-orders for any of our ranges – you can either place an order and pay in advance using the collect in person option on the website, or just drop us an email with a list and pay on the day. Pre-orders need to be with us by Tuesday next week at the latest (Feb 20th) in order for us to have a chance of getting them ready. We have a smaller stand at Cavalier, so can’t display everything although we still take as much stock as possible (it gets cramped behind the stand !). However, if there’s something you really, really want from us, it’s best to get it reserved in advance.
You must be logged in to post a comment.