More Plastic Medievals - this time some cavalry

 In my continuing quest to buy up what seems like the entire Corvus Belli medieval 100YW range in Siocast, the third installment was a pack of mounted sergeants that I actually paid full price for (!!) at Warfare last year (unlike the bring and buy bargain that made up the initial purchase). 

This gave me 18 mounted figures to act as the lance-armed cavalry who support the proper Knights in a host of Medieval armies, these guys being sufficiently generic (for me...!) to work in almost any western -ish (I say that because I might try them as Hussite cavalry one day) European Medieval army.

These guys seemed to be made with plastic that was a smidge harder (aka less "Airfix 1/72nd scale"-style) than the other Siocast figures I picked up and painted earlier in the year. 

I've not seen anything from PSC to say they are now using a newer version of the Siocast resin, but on the basis that Warlord Games have made exactly such an announcement recently it's not an unreasonable guess that PSC have also migrated (or been migrated by the Siocast people?) to a new formulation too.

I used a black spray undercoat on these, in order to give me the sort of deep shadows that make the padded leather jerkins really pop - the best thing about these figures IMO, and well worth making the effort to paint them carefully so they stand out. 

To get some colour into them I did 2 bases with blue jerkins, 2 with red, one with green and one in a more plain brown leather. 

The white bit is a set of diagonal stripes, which were cleanly cast onto the models and pretty easy to pick out with a small brush

I also continued my run of doing 4-spot faces on these guys too - some of them had pretty small faces under those helmets but at wargaming distances they look OK IMO. 

 

From the back the striped, blacklined effect on the jerkins comes out really clearly

You'll note that these two sets of guys in red do have slightly different coloured reins - again allowing me to differentiate these as separate units or drop them itno different commands in an ADLG army if needed, or to keep them together as well.

 

Some of the spears were bent, and some others seemed to bend out of shape quite markedly after I undercoated them - which was weird - but they do seem mostly to have bent back into shape with just a little manual encouragement with no need to heat them in hot water or anything. They can't be made dead straight, but they are break-proof so swings and roundabouts there I guess. 

I did try and drill out one chaps hand to take a plastic broom bristle spear, but much to my surprise I found it really tricky to do. 

This was because the arm of the figure wobbled alarmingly (being plastic rather than metal of course) when I was drilling into the hand/gauntlet, meaning I ended up with a pretty ragged and messy hole even when using my Dremel with the uppy-downey lever thing contraption. As a result I basically gave up on drilling any more and left them as they were.  

 

One thing I did find was that the riders sat a little "wide" on the horses, and being plastic its simply not possible to squeeze the riders legs together to grip their mounts more tightly as you can do with metal figures. 

That means you are relying entirely on the glue to make a good bond between buttock and saddle, as the riders legs are permanently set a bit wider than the horse's backs. 

All in all I'm very pleased by how they have come out, and now I'm frantically flicking through army list books to find an excuse to use them!

Corvus Belli 15mm Knights

 As well as the Pavise infantry that I posted a few days ago, the main reason for buying the PSC Corvus Belli stuff was to get a new refreshed set of knights for the 100YW period, as my existing set of knights were starting to look rather tired and jaded. 

I'd also seen some of what I think were Corvus Belli castings in Chris Tofalos' army at the Northern League event in Manchester at the end of last year, and really liked the bold and simple painting style, so wanted to see if I could emulate it.

The really weird thing was being able to paint the figures "on the sprue" - not something I'd really done in years, and of course not with 15mm Ancients. The sprue seemed to be cast and connected in "invisible" places on the figure, so that was a good start.

And here they are assembled and based, waiting final touching up (after I spotted the details I'd missed in this photo!)

And here are the finished figures - I've gone for bold, generally single colour quarters for the horse barding, and (slightly counter-intuitively) have chosen not to co-ordinate the shield patterns with the barding. Sharp-eyed viewers will also note the reins are sometimes in colours that clash with the rest of the barding.

Many of the riders and horses are sort of tied together colour-wise, but by mixing it up a bit it I was able to introduce a bit more variety and colour into the unit - sometimes a same-colour shield, barding and tabard combination can look a bit of a wall of a single colour, especially on such small scale figures as these.

 

A couple of the lances were a bit bendy, but I didn't bother with the "straighten them in hot water" thing as frankly any metal lance will bend a bit anyway and none of these were too far off the mark to make trying something as faffy-abouty as straighteneing them in hot water worth even  trying IMO. 

I did use a couple of waterslide transfers I had kicking around in the spares box on some of them - but only on panels that are visible when the unit is together. The horse at the rear here doesn't have a corresponding transfer on its front right panel for example.

They have - as with the spearmen - come out identical to metal figures, with the only takeaway from putting these figures together being that in retrospect I wish I'd based them all a little closer together on each base, such that I could then have glued the three adjacent knight models together into a solid mutually supporting block. 

This is because they do bend and flex quite unnervingly when you pick them up, especially the horses that are only attached to the base by one or two hooves, so I have a slight concern that this may lead to paint flaking or possibly some of the legs breaking off over time. 

That may be unfounded worry on my part, but if all three Knights on each base were glued together it would make it more of a solid lump to pick up and use on the tabletop without any detrimental visual effect as they are pretty closely packed already. 

So, I now have 7 bases of brightly coloured knights looking for a chance to hit the table!

Corvus Belli / Plastic Soldier Medieval Infantry

At SELWG last year I picked up a box set of PSC's plastic re-casts of Corvus Belli's Medieval range - a set of figures I'd long admired but which had been OOP for quite some time. 

My main interest was in the mounted knights, but the box set on the Bring & Buy I saw was nominally a full 100YW French army, but the composition was a bit limited being about 20 mounted knights, 20-odd foot knights and the rest being a mix of pavise-holding spearmen and a LOT of crossbwmen - which I already had far too many of in metals. 

Whoever had originally owned them clearly didn't fancy the Siocast figures all that much once they'd opened the box though, as this £45 RRP set was on offer for just a tenner - so at that price I snapped it up as I could just use even a few of the knights and get decent value from it!  

Of course, once I got started I decided to have a dabble at painting up some (but not all) of the others too, starting with these Pavise/Spear/Crossbow infantry units.

And here they are finished, in a pavise pattern inspired by the 28mm figures of Tony Rodwell that I faced at the PAW competition in January 2023. 

Once painted they (of course...) look no different to metal figures. These have always been a nice range IMO, and I'm happy to finally have gotten hold of some. 

The Siocast debate does chunter on though, and having painted some up now I am starting to think that it might well be a case of over-selling the features and benefits of the material rather than anything else. 

Flash is the thing that does keep being mentioned, and there was a little bit of flash on these figures, but there is on metals too - because this is a soft (actually surprisingly soft - almost Airfix-esque) material it is a little more tricky to scrape off any flash, especially in hard to reach areas as you are walking a bit of a tightrope between scraping the flash and cutting into the soft material of the figure. 

However on reflection I suspect there's a different technique for removing flash from soft plastic figures to the one for scraping it off metals, so it may be "user error" here as much as anything else - again if this was made clearer then perhaps it's not a "mistake" I'd have made?   

I also primed them in black before painting - I have seen suggestions you can get away without doing so, but honestly why would you want to (or more to the point, why would anyone suggest that this is a selling point of the material)?   

You can of course paint metals with no primer too - it'll work, the paint will almost always stick onto the figure, but a primer coat is just, well, better - for paint adhesion, and for giving a base colour as well, and that's going to be as true for these guys as it is for any metal or resin range. 

Here are some foot knights, again a figure range I have wanted to have in my collection for a while. All these figures have fairly short spears and I didn't seen any of the bendy spear stuff I have read about elsewhere as a result. 

So, all in all once painted (sensibly, with a primer) they end up looking the same as metals - which is no real surprise I guess. 

But perhaps that's the issue - they are "the same" models, but because they are made in a different material we somehow expect them to be "different" (or have at least been led to believe this by some over-enthusiastic marketing). 

I'm very happy with how these guys came out, but there is still a small niggle in that I was surprised how soft the SioCast material actually was - and so for a material that feels "only a little more resilient than 1/72md scale Airfix" it's hard not to feel that they should somehow be on sale at a much cheaper price point than the current "pretty close to the price of metals", no matter how nonsensical that thought might be given the huge differences in production methods and sales volumes between a niche 15mm medieval figure range and a box of Airfix 8th Army.

 

Airfix Time for the LVT

 Having just realised that it's been quite a while since I posted anything on my site, here's some shots of (gasps!) an Airfix kit build (!!) and some other WW2 bits and pieces. 

Yes, a classic Airfix kit picked up at the IPMS Avon show a couple of months ago which I bought and built for a bit of Chain of Command action with the USMC/Japanese island hopping campaign which I've just started playing with a clubmate. 

After a mildly taxing build (I suspect I'm better at building kits than when I was in my teens, but this is a pretty old kit, quite fiddly and also needed a bit of filling... which I'm blaming on the kit rather than my skills!), a spray with Army Painter Army Green, and a heavy dip with Army Painter Soft Tone finished with some drybrushing, this is the result:

Even the stapled together rubber tracks aren’t as obvious as they were last time I think I made this kit back when I was a teenager.!

I was particularly pleased with the Microsol/Microset finished transfers which have ended up with no visible transfer edging at all. 

Here's a shot of the LVT with some 20mm infantry from Plastic Soldier Comany, on "1p" multi-bases from Warbases.

I also bought (on eBay) a sort of tank-like LVT. This is a die-cast pre-paint model which was actually cheaper than the Airfix kit - and didn't need building!  

I again hit this with the Army Painter and then matt varnished it to finish. 

Finally, this is also a die-cast Stuart, resprayed with Army Painter green again, and with some bits-box transfers including the "SQUIRREL" name from the Victrix 1/144th scale Sherman tank set. 

Of course, as soon as it got on table the Airfix kit got shot at once, and then my opponent rolled enough hits to force it to fall back off table immediately! 

  

The only upside was that the Chain of Command rules are so (ahem) randomly organised that we weren't able to find the section that explained what happens in that situation, so I managed to get away without rolling a morale test for losing it!

Chain of Command 20mm Yanks

 Having languished in a drawer for many years since being bought and painted on a whim way back in 2013 with no real plan as to how they might be used, I've recently liberated a load of 20mm mostly-PSC WW2 Americans from deep storage and used them in some initial forays into Chain of Command.

The first couple of games quickly taught me that my single-based figures really needed to be deployed in teams, and also that I definately needed to make sure I had enough Garand teams (of 3), scout teams (of 2) and support weapons (5-6 guys). 

With a load of 3mm rare earth magnets already in hand, and the figures based on new 1p pieces, Warbases ended up getting a decent little order from me for their "1p" small group bases. With a few metal 20mm figures and a gun added from SHQ, the end result are these teams.

The 6pdr/57mm gun is also on a penny so it can be taken out of the tray, and the tray can be used for other weapons teams.

Some of the PSC HMG teams are too close to put each man on a separate penny, so a couple of the teams have 4 slots, and 3 guys on one slot. By the time the team is reduced to 2 guys it's dead anyway so it doesn't matter than much that they can't all be taken out individually. 

Likewise with this mortar team, where the mortar is attached to one of the team

And the same with this HMG - 5 people, one of whom has the gun. 

This is a 4-slot, 5 man team base

Bazooka team with PSC Sherman

The officer is from a Matchbox 1/76th range of GIs. Great little figure for a leader.