How big is that ballista again?

On a recent gaming trip to Scotland, Dave ("from the podcast") and I dropped into the Roman Army Museum, which is near the Vindolanda fort and is part of the same group of museums allowing entry with a single ticket.

There's a fair bit of stuff to go through from this trip, most if not all of which will make it to this site eventually - but I thought these reconstructued ballistae were pretty interesting in wargaming terms, mainly due to their (small) size.

The one on the left is apparently a millimeter-perfect reconstruction based on an actual ballista frame discovered at Xanten-Wardt in North West Germany in 1999 - and it is very clearly man-portable and designed to fold up, to the extent that you could almost imagine Roman soldiers using it in pairs with one offering his shoudler as a tripod as if they were a WW2 German MG34 team! 

OK, that may be pushing it a bit, but bottom line is this is a pretty small weapon, which got me thinking as to whether we wargamers have been somehow hypnotized into thinking ballistae were all much bigger than this simply because the many small-scale metal castings we own of ballistae are, well, 'bigger' than this too.

Looking at how small and delicate the real thing looks however, I started to wonder if a 15mm sculptor and caster might struggle to make something with these proportions - the legs look almost too spindly to confidently reproduce in metal at that scale for starters - so instead might end up designing and casting a bigger, cruder version that actually works on the tabletop without breaking at first contact with a wargamers thumb and forefinger. 

So, taking this train of thought further, are our wargamers mental images of tactical ballistae are in fact much bigger than they actually were because of the technical limits of 20th Century spin-casting technology - not the limits of 1st Century wood and metalworking?   

Looking at such a small and portable device it was also very easy to imagine a Roman legion or auxiliary unit setting up a few of these and pinging off a sustained barrage of bolts at a distant enemy, either encamped or even just gesticulating angrily at them from the top of a nearby hill. 

In terms of a "mass battle" of many thousands that we wargamers often simulate the effect of this still may not have been all that significant, but walking through the countryside near Hadrians Wall, and seeing the size of the garrison at Vindolanda you can easily imagine that the norm would have been much smaller actions - where a sustained volley of well-aimed long range bolts may indeed have had a quite dramatic effect on the morale of a tribal warband numbering in the dozens, rather than the tens of thousands.

So, some idle speculation to accompany these pictures of torsion artillery - but, even if its nonsense it did make me think, and make me also realise that no matter how well read you may be, it's still always useful to get out there and walk the course occasionally!

And now for something a smidge different : The Battle of Trebbia

 This website is unashamedly a bit competition-gaming orientated (no sh-- Sherlock!) but occasionally I do play other sorts of games, and with Dan H from the US putting out a series of Punic Wars scenarios on the ADLG Facebook group using pretty standard sized armies, the opportunity to do a club-night refight using some little-seen classic Roman figures was too good to miss out on.

Just to prove it happened as much as anything else, I also brought along my camera and took a load of photos to cook up a battle report as well.

The battle features a Roman army with lacklustre leadership and questionable morale against Hannibal, who has the advantage of choosing his ground, laying an ambush, and having a full head of thick luxurious hair (resulting in a post-match analysis from him delivered in the style of a Pulp Fiction era Samuel L Jackson).

In this game I commanded the inexperienced, wet and tired Roman legions in a game where setup was entirely pre-scripted and the first turn saw both sides pictched straight into battle - meaning I was hoping from the off that the martial skills of the Legions would help me change history and confound Hannibals cunning plan!

Read on for the report 

3D printed Knights

 My adventures in 3D printing continue to slowly gather pace, although not by any stretch of the imagination at a pace which will see me take up 3D printing as a hobby anytime soon!

No, instead of that I've just gone onto eBay and bought some 3D printed "15mm" Knights designed by Eskice Miniatures and sold on eBay UK by Hoplite Miniatures. 

I did sort of want some of these Knights (full armour, no horse barding) but the purchase was as much to see what 3D printing could deliver today, a year after buying some very definately "scaled up 10mm" dollies for an Etruscan army. And, also, these were very cheap indeed at just £12+ P&P  for 24 cavalry figures.  

These are the figures that arrived in the post shortly afterwards - the pictures are taken on a half-inch grid (that's not because I'm an old Imperial-measurementalist, its just that the metric side of this double-sides cutting board is by now totally f---ed).  

They are big chunky models, and are (as scaled by Hoplite Miniatures) pretty big for "15mm", being a chunky 18mm if you are generous, or a fat 19mm if you are not so inclined. 

There were 7 different knights in a few different poses, and as you can see they are pretty clean with only a few little nubs of support still left on that I was easily able to snip off with sprue cutters. 

The horses though were very well-fed wolf-ish, and at this stage I was a little concerned that they might not really cut it, both in terms of style and scale against other 15mm metal and plastic figures I already have. 

But, painted up I think they have come out surprisingly well given that rather lumpy looking start.

 

With paint, shading and washes the horses have largely (but not entirely..) lost that "giant racing lemming" look, with the detail really picking up the Army Painter wash (and in some cases GW Contrast Paint main colour) quite well.  

I deliberately did the shields in simple geometric designs to keep them in the style of the Corvus Belli 100YW knights I painted earlier this year,  ducking the opportunity to add papper printed designs to them. Some of the shields (the round ones) wouldn't take a sticker anyway, but I do wonder if more detailed shields wouldlift these guys even more? 

The lances are surprisingly flexible, with quite a lot of "give" in them, making these much more robust  for such narrow bits of printing than some of the other printed resins I've seen, so from that I suspect materials technology is moving on apace in the 3D printing world.

Having said all that, I did manage to snap two of the lances off when I was taking these photos having done no damage to any of them at all in the preceeding painting and basing stages - they did however glue back on pretty easily with superglue, as the breaks were very clean. 

I only did barber pole stripes on a few of them, not wanting the units to look like a fairground ride with too many striped poles. 

The running horses are actually too long (when printed at this scale) to fit on a 30mm deep base, but I did manage to find some 35mm deep bases I had lying around and they managed to fit pretty well on those. 

So, all in all these are very nice, while also not really being all that close to the standards of good 15mm metal-cast figures from established sculptors. they are however leaps and bounds better than the "Playmobil" figures I bought last year, and are more than perfectly servicable for one-table usage.

The oversized impression from the raw prints seemed to be greatly mitigated by a count of paint and standardized basing - and I imagine that it would in any case be perfectly possible to print them slightly smaller just by changing some settings on the machine anyway.

So, the 3D future is almost here - not quite, but certainly getting closer every day. It will just take a few more folks to pick up their mouse (?) and noodle away at designing figure ranges, presumably just like whoever is designing stuff under the Eskice brand banner and suddenly there will be enough interest and enough competition for design to reach that next level - and if (OK, "when") that is matched with advances in materials tech too it'll not be too long until the choice between printed and cast ranges is a very difficult one to call indeed. 

I plan to take some size comparison photos and post them up in the next few days as well.

(Here's an affiliate link to Hoplite MIniatures eBay store: https://ebay.us/NbWnTW)

. 

The Gauls at Roll Call - 5 new ADLG match reports

 Having wheeled out (see what I did there..?) the Assyrians in a 25mm period at last year's Roll Call tournament, this time around I had resolved to dive into the somewhat deeper and more murky 15mm pool to give yet another rarely-seen army a proper outing post-Covid.

The theme was a somewhat intriguing "Roman Pond" - armies who might have been able to go paddling in the Med in the timeline encompassed by any of the Roman Republic or Empire armies in the ADLG book, which cut off most of the Cataphract-heavy options from a more traditional Roman themed period, making players armychoices rather different (aka altering the "meta") as a result too. 

With that in mind, and a wish to continue to test some of the less fancied armies and new v4 rules, I settled eventually on the often overlooked but in theory quite popular Gauls.

The outcome was the following 5 extremely verbose battle reports full of the usual nonsense of speech bubbles, laboured metaphors, hyperbollix language and out of place references to local foodstuffs - but this time with post-game analysis from Asterix & Obelix (as well as Hannibal)!  

Pull up a baguette, put a pot of Magic Potion on the stove and get ready to read all 5 of these Gallic Battle Reports at your leisure !

The Last Almughavar

 Nope, it's not a new Spanish-language film to get history buffs excited, it is instead the final unit of Fireforge Games Almughavars which have finally been snipped from the sprue and added to my Medieval Spanish (& Feudal Spanish) armies. 

As with the others (unsurprisingly) these guys went together really easily, although for Almughavar purists you will see that I rather ran out of left arms and had to give a couple of the guys lurking at the back a shield in order to round out the unit.

The big innovation here was to add in a morning star from the Fireforge Crusading Knights box set, thus giving the lead dude a pretty cool and unusual choice of anachronistic weaponry to lead the line with.

I originally did this by gluing on an army from the box of Knights, which meant his right arm was fully mailed while his left was in Barcelona-summertime attire of short sleeves - something I sort of justified to myself on health and safety grounds to do with using a flailing set of spiked balls as a weapon.

After basing the unit though I realised this actually just looked weird, so I snipped the offending mailed arm off at the shoulder (it came off cleanly as this was where the join was located) and then added a new short-sleeved one which had originally been holding a spear.  

The spear I cut off cleanly just above the fist, and then using plastic cement (airfix glue in old money) carefully attached the handle (?) of the morning star, having also snipped that off cleanly just above the mailed fist that was holding it.

This all pretty much worked OK, as airfix glue melds the two bits together making a very strong join - but just to be belt and braces I also had positioned the morning stars such that I could superglue one of them to the top of the owners helmet for that "second point of contact" to make the joint more stable.  

So, here they are ready to go, with the newly upgraded arm in pride of place. 

(I won't mention that there is a chap in the second rank with a fully armoured right arm holding a mace, who I couldn't quite reach after fixing the figures to the base!)