Building Howitzers for 3mm Ogre

Here are some pictures of how I am using the extra gun barrels from O8´s M92 SPG to build howitzers for my 3mm Ogre set-up.

Here are the supplies and components:



A bit of pasteboard for the base. A thumbtack (pointy bit cut off and reused as a bunker antenna), eight slices of a dead credit card, a couple of plastic bits (which are glued together and filed into the right shape), some plastic tubing (for the bunker) and, of course, the extra gun barrel from the M-92.

This shows you the four howitzers in various stages of construction.



Here they are, all built.



Primed....



And painted.

"Combine" Army for 3mm Ogre -- w/2 Ogres

Here's the beginning of my "Combine" army for Ogre. Right now they are wearing Belgian rondels, because it's a good color mix. I will create some better decals in the future.
 
The army currently consists of two cybertanks (an Ogre Mk III and a Mk IIIb) and a company of 14 heavy tanks. Not shown are the twelve squads of Mobile Infantry that ride the tanks into battle.

 

The ogres are self-aware and, as such, each controls three attack drones.

I have added the drones because, as Henry Cobb has made everyone on SJG's "Ogre" board painfully aware, the addition of LGEVS and Light Tanks into Ogre's follow-on supplements subtly skewed the game against the attacking ogres. This is because the conventional armor units can "mix 'n match" their attack strengths to the Ogre's defense strengths while the ogre can't really respond in kind.

As a buff I let self-aware ogres (i.e. any ogre fighting an opponent that's allowed to draw from the full range of conventional units) to command one attack drone for evey "mark" (3 in the case of Mark IIIs and IIIbs).

Attack drones are essentially light GEVs (you could also experiment with light tanks). They are not affected by "D" results on the combat table, but must stay within five hexes of an ogre at the beginning and end of the movement phase and also at any point that the drones would engage in overrun combat. Moving your ogre first and then your dones helps you keep track of them. If a player screws up and "forgets" to keep his drone within five hexes of his ogre, it immediately goes rogue and is eliminated.

You can see the drones I have made here to accompany my ogres. They are made out of stick-pins, plastic greeblies and wire.

 Here is the Mark IIIb. She is known as "Mama Spank":

Above, you can see Mama together with her Mk III consort, "Nervous George".

The conventional Heavy Tanks are O8 Caesarions.

The ogres are made from the chassis of 6mm Plasmablast Games Phestorm misile crawlers, with added plastic towers and greeblies. The missile launchers themselves are being repurposed into 3mm planetary defense installations.

Light Missile Tank and Sarissa Battle Armor for Ogre Miniatures

Here are two new units for Ogre Miniatures: the Light Missile Tank and Sarissa Battle Armor.

The Light Missile Tank was a stop-gap measure employed by the Paneuropeans during the battle for Spain. The Pansies discovered that their infantry needed heavy missile support just when the main factories at Stuttgart had just cycled away from the elderly Peltast Missile Tank towards the new Ajax design.

The Psiloi was cobbled together using any chassis available (mostly obsolete MBTs and APCs) and a "fire and forget" brilliant missile launcher. BPC applique was bolted on to the vehicle and a rudimentary close-defence system gave the LMSL slightly more protection than a cheap pair of  jammies. Equipped with heavy-duty off-the-shelf civilian grade fusion power packs, the Light Missile Tank also typically sported several charge ports, used to support power armor in the field.

The "Pissies" were extremely cheap to produce, and could be knocked together in a matter of hours using the most basic machine tools and fabricators.  Most M.I. battalions quickly produced their own variants from whatever material they had at hand. My particular battalion has a two-vehicle section attached, but most Paneuropean Mobile Infantry Regiments attempted to field at least one section per company.

The Light Missile Tank moves as a light tank, cannot transport any infantry and has A2, R4, D1 and M2. It's cobbled together nature, however, means that it is eliminated by both "D"  and "X" results, like an archaic armor unit. It costs half an armor unit or 3 points to field. However, given the quantity of self-aiming missiles it packs, it can choose to ripple fire its entire load. This allows it to make three 2/4 attacks in one turn. If it does this, however, the LMSL is eliminated after combat is resolved (the chassis simply can't handle the stress).

I have never been satisfied with the MSL, considering it to be the weakest of the conventional armor units in terms of its cost-effectiveness:  it comes out to 5.67 points using Henry Cobb's calculator, whereas a GEV is 6 and an HVY 6.17. The LMSL is 2.5 points, but it's one-shot multiple attack ability brings it up to a nice round 3.0 points. This is basically a disposable Heavy Weapons unit. It costs one-third the price of a regular HVY WPN, but has less firepower, significantly less mobility, practically no defense capacity (not to mention no infantry weapons). Use it and lose it. It gives infantry positions a very nice anti-GEV capability, however.

The second new unit is O8's Sarissa battle robot. This is quite out-of-canon for the Ogreverse, so I obviously won't be using it in anything like "purist" play.





Heavy battle armor works like regular infantry in terms of combat and defense, but:

1) It can only combine in two point units (not three as normal).
2) It defends at x2 in urban terrain (unlike regular infantry, which get x3).

The Sarissa was built to give Mobile Infantry some dedicated recon and sniping capacity. It has A1, R3, D1, M3 per point, with two combining to give A2, R3, D2, M3. Like all infantry units, it's doubled in overrun and loses one point to "D" results. It costs 4 points or the equivalent of two infantry per unit.

Paneuropean Mobile Infantry Battalion

 Here's a reinforced Paneuropean Mobile Infantry Battalion. It has three power armor companies and a support company made up of a Light Missile Tank battery and two Light Tank troops.

Here's the same battalion, but with a Light Tank company attached in reserve as support:




You might notice two new units in the battalion. One is what I call the Light Missile Tank. The other is a Sarissa heavy recon battlesuit. These units will be detailed in an up-coming post!

First Polish Lancer GEVs in 3mm scale

Here's a GEV troop from the famous First Polish Lancers next to a U.S. quarter and a British pound. These are modified O8 Centaurus GEVs. I added a paperclip nub as a forward gun, the back jets (chunks of plastic tubing) and a cabin extension (a piece of plastic beam):

3mm Ogre Miniatures: it begins

While up in Puerto Rico for the 2014 National Women's Studies Conference, I picked up some of O8's new sci-fi figs (tip o' the hat to Gregory Mitchell for bringing them down to the conference!).

My goal here is to paint "black" and "white" armies for Ogre Miniatures - as close to the old classic game and paint schemes as I can come - yet still be able to use these figs, at a pinch, in other sci-fi settings (most particularly my on-going Smade's World campaign). The "Combine" figures are thus white with red trimmings while the "Paneuropeans" are my standard blue-grey. I gave the Combine Polish Roundels and the Paneuros Belgian roundels. Hopefully, I will be able to switch these out with home-made decals at some point in the future.

O8 now has some smashing stuff that can easily stand in for Ogre figures. Having bought a bunch of it, I've now set about kit-bashing to make everything as close to Ogre as possible.

So here's the new O8 Centaurus hovercraft, kit-bashed to look like a GEV...

The casting is a little too long and lightly-armed to be a straight-up Ogre GEV (although it's damned near perfect for the GEV-PC). I bulked it up a bit by adding a cabin extension made out of a chunk of plastic beam. I also gave it a nubbin of paperclip as a bow gun and two snips of plastic dowel for its jet engines. It now looks pretty spot-on, IMHO.

The GEV-PC version has no gun or cabin extension, but a boar-brustle hold bar was mounted running from the cockpit to the back fan and the back fan was raised a bit via a square of plasticard.

The two are now easily identifiable at arm's length.

This is a tank and it's a bit of a heartbreaker for me. As is, it looks just like a Combine Heavy Tank. Almost perfect in that respect except that it's one of the smaller tanks made by O8. The GEV and MSL dwarf it! This is a pity, because I think it's lovely as a Heavy.





Maybe someday O8 will do the other Aliens tank from The Colonial Marine Technical Manual. It has the same general design, but is much more high-tech and, presumably, larger. If they do that, then said vehicle will become my Heavy.  Until then, the Caesarion will have to do, as it's about half again the size of this baby. This vehicle will be relegated to being a Light Tank (I don't like the original Ogre designs for these, anyhow). It's still very nice looking!

Here're the Mobile Howitzer and the Howitzer. The MHWZR is a straigh-up O8 casting. It comes with an alternative barrel, however. I used those and a bit of plasticard, a thumbtack and a bead to scratch-build the HWZR, which I think looks quite nice.




Here is my newest Mark III Ogre build. Its chassis is a Marhaf Legion Phrestorm support tanke from Plasmablast Games. Its superstructure is built from pins and plasticard:

Last but not least, the infantry. I am basing these as four castings on a 12mm x 12mm stand and two castings on a 6x12mm stand. This makes for a "platoon" of six castings on a 20 x 12mm base, with "change" being able to be easily made. I will also base some 10 platoons, per army, on full bases, just to make life easier in smaller scenarios.

And finally, here are some group and comparison shots. You can see the Missile Tank and GEV-PC in these. The Ogre is a tad small, but not too bad: canon Mark IIIs are 58 feet long and mine is slightly over 50. People are accustomed to thinking of Ogres as amazingly huge, but the Mark III is only really about twice as long as an Abrams M1. "Only"...

That last shot shows a company of Light Tanks being chased by the Mk III. This is the only unit I've got painted up for now.More pics next week, though, God willin' an'the creek don' rise!

3mm GEV Armored Task Force and Anti-Grav Armored Battalion, by The National Cheese Emporium (Shapeways)

As I mentioned last week, I received a package from Andreas Udby, AKA “Javelin98”, proprietor of The National Cheese Emporium shop on Shapeways in mid-May. In it was a nice selection of Andreas’ 3mm science-fiction stuff, which I have finally gotten around to painting up.

As I also explained last week, TNCE’s stuff varies wildly in quality. Andreas’ began making figures years ago in 1/900 scale for Ogre Miniatures players. When Oddzial Osmy’s 3mm (1/600) stuff started becoming popular, he re-sized some of his production and started in on new lines. As the years have gone by, his 3D sculpting skills have drastically improved. So you can kinda say Andreas has sort of a “the good, the bad, and the ugly” dynamic going on.

Last week, I presented the vehicles of TNCE’s Wheeled Taskforce, which I found to be quite good. These, of course, are a relatively recent sculpt. I thus decided to do some “ugly” vehicles this week: the hover and grav task forces.

These are “more recent” sculpts: not as nice as Andreas’ newest stuff, but not as basic as the re-sized 1/900 line. I do not like these sculpts, but I must say, the hover vehicles  ended up looking much better than I thought once they were painted! I am still not into the grav vehicles, however.

Lets take a look…

The hover vehicles are obviously inspired by David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series, so I painted them up as if they were from that universe. I think the silver paint scheme turned out quite nicely! I am not so sure about the grav vehicles, however. I wanted to go for a US Air Force basic gray paint job. It doesn’t seem to have worked as well as the silver scheme and that might be one of the problems  with these vehicles.

 

The main problem with both lines, however, is that I think they are too small for 1/600 scale.

Here we see the hover tank and grav IFV models in relation to an O8 Caesarion (from that company's sci-fi line) and a TNCE wheeled AFV. See the difference? It is particularly noticeable in the grav vehicle. These figures need to be at least 25% larger, in  my opinion.

To top it all off, the packs have the same problem as the earlier vehicles I reviewed: they come in  a pre-established mix and you can't buy the sculpts you want seperately. This is particularly problematic for the hover line. O8 has also produced some (much superior, IMHO) hover tanks based on the Hammers’ franchise, but they stopped expanding the line, apparently due to fears that they were infringing on John Treadaway’slicense for HS miniatures. We thus only have the blower and combat car for that line. It would be nice to get artillery, command cars and maybe some other vehicles and TNCE’s figs could fill that niche… if we could actually buy only the figures that we need. As it is, we have to buy the whole selection at 3-4 times the O8 price.

 

O8 hover tank.

TNCE’s combat car is particularly bad in my opinion. I’ve stuck one of O8’s Heavy Infantry troopers in there, just so we can see how it scales. Not very well, as it turns out. There’s barely room for two troopers in the back, let alone the canonical three. And where is the driver and engine on this bloody thing?

TNCE combat car with O8 heavy trooper in back
 

This brings up another point: far too many GEV-style futuristic tanks - from almost all the companies producing them - don’t make adequate space provisions for the vehicle’s drive train. Many manufactures seem to think that the way to model an air-cushion vehicle is to chop off the treads and stick on a ground effect skirt. GEVs, however, need air intakes and enough space UNDER that skirt for fans or jets or what not, not to mention what needs to be a pretty robust powerpack. They thus shouldn’t be lower to the ground than treaded or wheeled vehicles. TCNE dosn't sin particularly worse than other manufacturers here, but it's still annoying.

My grades for these vehicles are: B- for the hover combat team and C for the grav combat team. Resizing the hover vehicles and making their mix geared to the kinds of models we can’t get from O8 would raise that team’s grade to a B+ for me. Resculpting them slightly to let them fit in better with O8’s vehicles (i.e. higher chassis and add intake fans) would move them into the A range.

 

The grav vehicles, however, aren’t worth redoing, most particularly because TNCE has recently sculpted two far better grav lines, so why waste your money here?

We will look at those new grav lines in a future installment!