Thursday, October 10, 2013

Thoughts on Flags, ACW, Boer figures,Viking Swords and The War Game.

As you can see another post where I can't rein it in and go in depth into one topic. Perhaps I should spring for some ADD testing. My dad became convinced he has ADD, but he thought his doctor thought that he just wanted to be proscribed some kind of speed. But I digress.

Flags and or Banners

There are some great ones available on the internet, check out Ray's for example, but for some reason I have always balked because I'm not sure what size to make them. Well today I did something about it and printed out some flags from Warflag. In the printing section he gives some guides on how to print them out and scale them using various software, none of which I have of course. But what I came away with was we could take it that if 30mm is 1:60 and 25mm is 1:72 we can see that both figures give a size difference of 83%, or rather 1:72 is 83% the size of 1:60. (Hopefully this last sentence makes sense. I had a ten year old trying to get my attention the entire time I was try to write it.)

Original size and scaled with some measurement notes

Just wedged on to show scale, sorry for the anachronism.
 The space for wrapping around the banner pole is 3mm, which is fine for piano wire but I want to use tubing to slide over piano  wire so it needs to be more like 6 - 7mm. I think that will still work with the overall dimensions being 65mm across, both faces, and 24.5 mm high.

I was also bummed to see that the flags are gone from Dansk Figurspilsforening there were some good ones on there.

ACW

There's a new E-zine in town called ACW Gamer, I heard about it from Chris Stoesen here. I thought I'd give it a try. Looks good so far. I had already downloaded Pohick Church, now I have double incentive to get it ready and play it out using THW's Rifles and Rebels rule set. I'll be in touch Chris. I may also submit my two ancestors to the magazine. We'll see.

Boer figures

You ever have a set of figures you've been thinking about buying only to find that they are as rare as hens teeth now that you're ready to buy them? It was Sam in Cow-Boys Part 1 and Part 2 that showed how nice these figures work for the old west as well as colonial. But of course no one has them except this guy.

£5,000!? Not bloody likely!
Umm, you could have just said they were out of stock. FML.

Viking Swords

Watched the Nova special "Secrets of the Viking Sword" on Netflix the other day and it was pretty interesting. The PBS link is here if you want to buy it and I noticed that a few have put the whole thing up on youtube if you search for it. Aside from the guy who actually made one using what they thought were medieval techniques there were two things that interested me. First was that there were knock offs of these swords being produced and then there was an interesting demo by a swordsman who cut clean through a tatami mat, first with a samurai sword and then with an un-sharpened viking sword. Interesting. I did notice that he was cutting just the rolled up  mat, there was no dowel or bamboo in the center as there sometimes is. I wonder if that would have made a difference, I suspect so.

The War Game

I came across this game while looking at a site that carries Pegasus models and figures here in the US. You can see the game at Board Game Geek here. I think that someone said it was Axis & Allies on steroids. Has the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of World records as the largest board game ever.

14 comments:

  1. Excellent news. Can't wait to see what you submit.

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    1. Hi Chris, cool. I will contact you soon with some questions about what the troop designations mean in game terms since I am unfamiliar with the TFL rules. I'm unfamiliar with the particulars of Rifles & Rebels as well, just more in tune with the system since I already play some of their titles.

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  2. For my flags I don't really bother with proper scale, for instance all the NYW flags I've used are far too big. My infantry flags measure are approx 20mm x 20mm when if i did them to real scale they'd be approx 14 x 14, roughly the size of the cavalry flags.You'd end up losing all that detail on the flags so I uped the scale just for my own preference. If your making or printing your own Sean, do them whatever size you want, what you think looks best. You may get some toffee nosed git saying "Those flags are far to big, they should be......" Oh shut the feck up!!

    I guess you've bought 2 boxes of them Boers??

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    1. Oop forgot, Dansk flags are still there, look under Downloads.
      http://www.krigsspil.dk/

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    2. there is nothing more enjoyable than arguments with Nerds who are experts and want to beat you down with their expertise. Like you I am just going with what I like, I think Paul (of Bods) also makes flags that are not realistically to scale but look awfully nice. Since I'm primarily making Fantasy and Imagi-nation stuff, I'm the expert.

      As for the Dansk flags, when I go there it shows them all as file not found. I was able to locate them through archive.org however.

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  3. Like Ray, I tend to somewhat over-scaole flags, except wwhere I know the flags to be pretty big anyway (such as the Napoleonic British or Austrian). Warflags is my source of choice, too, though its Napoleonic British battle flags are Waterloo. Which is why my Peninsular War army has Waterloo units (and the Horse has guidons as well, which they didn't in the Peninsula).

    Generally I leave the resizing to the very useful Microsoft 'Paint' software. With this you can extend the with of the pole wrap around as required, but - and here's something very handy - you can select and skew obverse and reverse vertically 10, 15 or 20 degrees. This will give a much more convincing 'drape' to the paper flags. Having done the skewing, you select and move the pole sleeve according. Although it is not something I have done in the past, you might consider, before skewing, extending the 'fly' on each side by maybe 10% or so. The reason is that I suspect that as skewing reduces the area of the paper flag, colours are likely to be intensified and darkened.

    At any rate, I find the 'Paint' feature very useful for this kind of thing, and for the few minutes extra effort, the results rewarding.
    Cheers,
    Ion

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    1. Good tips AP. I tend to prefer GIMP, but find myself using paint a lot more for quick resizing. I had thought about skew for a decal for a draped molded flag, I will play around with that as well. Thanks for the tips.

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  4. I know the feeling about trying to find sets - I can't get the HaT Marching Napoleonic Prussians or their Duth Militia for love nor (reasonable) money!

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    1. Hi Tim, I feel your pain. Don't even get me started on the Seven Years War. Where are the damn Austrians?

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  5. +Gary Amos did a great post reviewing flags at http://wargamesleadslifenstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/long-see-no-time.html

    Don't Perrys and Empress do Boers?

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    1. Hi Edwin, thanks for the link. I'll pop over and check it out. As for Boer figures in general I'm sure there are many. In 1/72 not so much.

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  6. For me it was the Stelets Medieval English civilians. So many figures that'd be perfect for me, now so inaccessible. I don't know why they won't re-release them as a single set; maybe they damaged the molds or something.

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    1. Hi 1Mac, I don't even know about this set. Civilians would be great. I've come up against this problem quite a bit since deciding to cast my fortunes in with 1/72. Appears I missed the boat on a lot of sets. The other that chaps my hide is wanting to use the WWI Germans with gas masks for repurposed sci-fi. Out of Stock. Hohum.

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