The nearly impervious Char B1

The Char B1 Heavy Tank, the most powerful tank of the early part of ww2, with a forward hull mounted 75mm gun, at turreted 45mm gun, a Coaxial MG and armor that in some places reached a thickness of 65mm. At the beginning of the war the German's didn't even have a anti-tank gun that could pierce the armor except when a direct hit to the main vent was achieved. Of course they could be taken out by repeated hits, they could be slowly pounded into non-functionality. I'd imagine that repeated direct hits would have quite a negative effect on the crew morale.

Enough history though, I've recently finished painting six of these monsters. I painted three in a camo scheme and three a basic green paint job. This is the first real camo job I've tried on an AFV and I'm relatively pleased with it.

A battle report of sorts.

Well, I played in a really fun Span-Am war naval game last night. I had intended to write a bit of a battle report about it, but have found my memory is some what lacking when it comes to details.
I was a spanish play along with three of my fellow gamers (Jack, Rob, and Woody), We had seven spanish ships, For capitol ships and three torpedo destroyers. Out objective was to escape off the opposite side of the board, while dealing as much destruction as we could. We found out later that sinking a single American ship would have one us the game.

On the First turn our four capital ship advanced towards the opposite table edge, at full bore. While Jack took the Torpedo Destroyers (they didn't count for Victory Points if they got off the edge) straight for the American Fleet, in attempt to slow down the Americans while we headed for our objective, taking potshots at the yanks as we went. This had moderate success in the first turn, while we inflicted some damage on the American ships, Billy Ray and has boxcars caused a catastrophic critical hit on Rob's ship the Vizcayo and sunk it befor the turn was out. The second turn proceeded about the same way. We inflicted some more damage on the Texas and the Brooklyn and advanced forward. The third turn rolled around at full steam and we inflicted even more damage on the Texas and the Brooklyn, but a withering hail of fire from Billy Ray's ship sent my ship the Cristobolo Colon straight to the bottom of the sea. In the fourth turn, we dealt yet more damage to the Texas and Jack successfully rammed the Texas with one of his torpedo destroyers while taking only minimal damage himself, the Texas was listing to port and her bilge pumps were going full bore. The game went on for a few turns after this with Mr. John's Texas pulling back and the Brooklyn taking quite a beating trying to cover the Texas' retreat. In the end all our ships were sunk and the Texas had one hull point left, the Brooklyn had 2. So it was a victory for the Yanks, but we sure gave them hell.

Early World War II French Armor

Ahhhh..... the Early War French army. The Early part of the War holds great interest for me, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about 1940 France, 1939 Poland, and even the Winter War between the Finns and the Russians, I've been picking up miniatures for pretty much all the above as well. The French however are the closest to being done. I've uploaded some pictures of some recently completed French armor here.

They are all RAFM models, there are 4 Renault R35s, 2 Hotchkiss H35s and 2 Lorraine APCs.

I'm pretty pleased with how they came out. While the french had some great armor camo schemes it's my understanding (and in this case I'm going to stick by that understanding no matter how wrong it turns out to be) that a quite a few French tanks of the period didn't get the camo treatment, so for these models I decided not to go the way of camo. That is of course just a lame excuse, because I hate painting camo and I'm not very good at it either.

The beginning..... and abit about things to come

I've started this blog with the intention of recording the progress of all the current wargaming/modeling projects I'm currently working on. I suffer from project/period A.D.D. so I've always got several different projects going at once. I'm currently working on Early World War 2 French in "20mm", Boxer Rebellion, and updating some of my 40K armies. Well I guess that's about it for my first post.