Another hurdle overcome, sort of.
 |
| The Zouaves and Chasseurs now have an MG each. |
I thought making Maxims was stretching my scratch building skills until I turned to the French army's Hotchkiss machne guns.
 |
| Thank you whoever I borrowed this picture of a Hotchkiss from. |
Rather than a big fat water filled sleeve with a big breech section and tripod, the air cooled Hotchkiss has a thin barrel with another thin cylinder (gas?) underneath, with a big complex base connecting the gun to a tripod.
The tricky bit was the thinness of the barrel and other cylinder and the scarcity of materials, tools and techniques on hand for me to work with. After rejecting various fiddly possibilities which, in the unlikely event that they were successful, would have been very fragile on the table, I finally remembered that I still had some sprues of 1/35th WWII bits in the cupboard including some air cooled German light machine guns and some ammo boxes.
 |
| A very crude portrayal of the pedestal and there are no fins but.... |
Oddly, despite being 1/35 item used with 1/43rd-ish figures, they look a bit too short and thin to my eye but they'll do.
 |
| The Zouaves are now ready for battle. |
Well done! How will you things like determine range, beaten zone, hits, etc? It's hard enough keeping artillery from dominating a game, even in smoothbore days, but what are your thoughts here?
ReplyDeleteBest Regards,
Stokes
Luckily I long ago left bottom up design and counting noses. As far as I can tell, while the MG's were deadly against troops caught in the open, or attempting to close with cold steel, their main effect against trained troops was to pin them while slowly inflicting losses. In game terms they are more likely to hit usually pinning the enemy with a higher chance of doing 2 hits thus pretty much forcing the pin and causing a hit.
DeleteMy big issue is that while both sides had a similar ration of mg to infantry at an operational level, the Germans concentrated their's into batteries while the allies had a pair with each battalion. I'm still pondering whether or not to ignore this and give every player one.
They look terrific Ross. That's a splendid regiment of Zouaves.
ReplyDeleteThey are Merten ACW plastics I painted up 5 years ago. Since they have seen lots of action, I've spruced them up a little, replaced their white spats by more 20thC-ish black boots and of course added the MG.
DeleteNice modelling there Ross- yes, often hard to find 1/43rd items for modelling- well solved.
ReplyDelete