Santa Claus is Coming to Town...

It seems that Santa decided that I was a good boy this year... He brought me a long waited airbrush with couple of things. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me how to use it... Well I have to figure it out myself.

I tried the airbrush out with the Panthers that I am currently assembling. You can see the final effect below. Well, there is still plenty to learn, nevertheless I think they look better if I hand painted the cammo myself :)

Thank you Santa!

Meet my army: Part V - Heavy SS-Panzerspäh Platoon

Actually, I should write about my panzerpionier platoon to make it in the proper order, but couple of additional half-tracks are still waiting to be painted, so I feel justified to skip them for a second ;)

So today, I would like to present the platoon that I recently painted - Heavy SS-Panzerspäh Platoon. It consists of SdKfz 231 8-rad vehicles.

Although the platoon is denoted as "heavy" it is a little bit misleading if you consider the late war period ;) To be honest the SdKfz 231 8-rad is pretty useless in engagement against most of the armored vehicles (OK maybe you can try to knock out half-tracks or mobile AA guns). However, it was not intended to be used for this purpose. I recall the words said by some german veteran who stated that the best recon patrols could be recognized by looking at the muzzles of their vehicles - the one that has no signs of gun powder or soot is the best :) Panzerspäh just should avoid going into combat. It is more important to remain undetected than to burn couple of trucks...

Personally, I plan to use them to support my infantry in assault against other infantry units. They will sneak near the enemy and reveal their position with the "eyes and ears" special rule. They can also provide fire support with their MGs and 2cm gun (ROF 3 and FP 5+ makes them more effective against dugged-in infantry than MGs). I also plan to use them to engage enemy artillery - of course mainly the one that can't fire back ;)

I had an opportunity to try them once against Finns. They were engaging BT-42 with a doubtful success ;) FP 5+ makes it hard to knock out any armored vehicle. Still I like them and I definitely give'em a try :)

Gallery

The SdKfz 231 8-rad models you can see below were produced by Battlefront. They are really nice models, however, the plate at the front of the vehicle is missing two parts between the plate and vehicle's frontal armor. I made them from the blister cover.

I tried to whether them by adding many small scratches to their armor to reflect the damage that would normally be done by the difficult terrain they have to go through. I also added some foliage camouflage - not much to not spoil the model.

German universal unit markers

I've not been posting recently much, but I am back today with a new sheet of unit markers for Germans. As maybe some of you remember I have small markers attached to bases of my infantry teams to inform about their type and platoon they belong to. If you haven't seen them yet, you can find my previous markers [here].

Unfortunately, the markers were limited to 2nd and 12th SS only. Because of the new books that will be published in few days by BF (covering also SS-units at Eastern Front), I've decided to prepare a new set of markers that are not bound to a specific division. I also introduced couple of changes to them. First of all I removed officer insignia - I think people were not able to see them from the distance, and honestly there are probably few people that could recognize them. I also decreased the size of the marker and tried to emphasize the most important information - the type of team (the icons were not always self-explanatory for the people who were playing with me for the first time).

If you like them feel free to use them in your own forces. You can download markers from [here].