The Roaring Northerners are Dave Stewart, John Hill and Iain Robertson; a loose affiliation of tabletop wargamers and figure painters who inhabit the frozen and somewhat soggy wastelands of west central Scotland. Shadowy and secretive, they stoically quest to reduce the scale of the lead mountain that threatens to engulf them all, and perhaps even find the time for the occasional game...
....This is their story

Saturday 22 November 2014

A Hazy Shade of Winter…



Well, there’s been quite enough Communism on this blog of late, time to redress the balance with some apple pie eatin’, football watchin’, moonshine sippin’ good ol’ boys…

Work has finally begun on my long-planned late 70s US Army project. I plumped for a winter scheme purely for aesthetic reasons; there’s just something about a snow themed army that hits the spot for me. As for the timeframe, I wanted something different from the more common M1 & M2 laden late 80’s US Army-of-Much-Shooty-Death, and liked the underdog factor of 1970s USAEUR. This also allowed me to indulge in MERDC-ing the shit out of various bizarre AFVs, which feature the seldom seen brown & white MERDC scheme (as previewed in my last post. Well done if you guessed correctly. If you did I may even provide some sort of pointless prize, like a picture of a fish or something…). This was intended for areas  of open plain without heavy vegetation, which suited me down to the ground (I envisage some ruined industrial terrain being created for these guys, and their inevitable winter-themed Soviet opponents, to fight through)…

At the moment, there is a bit of a dearth of suitable infantry figures kicking around. However, Matt at Elhiem is sculpting away like a some sort of thing possessed, creating a load of late 80’s US Army PASGT wearing troops, and when he’s done with these, I’m reliably informed that earlier M1 helmeted types will follow. So that gives me a head start to paint up the whole two packs that are currently available.

I say two, but this is really only because going for a winter army has allowed me to use the Elhiem Fictional Arctic Fireteam as a LRRP unit. This set of four features some of the nicest sculpting in the range, with 4 troopers armed variously with M16A1s, an UZI and an M79 Grenade launcher. I’ve added ALICE packs to underline the fact that they’re SF (nothing says that like a stonking great rucksack). At the moment, these guys are just awaiting basing;


I deliberately went for quite a blue tint for the parkas, working from a photograph; however it did come out slightly bluer than I had intended, but still looks pretty decent, I reckon. The white boots are Arctic issue “Mickey Mouse” boots, and the mittens are similarly painted as having the white covers on them.  It might look slightly incongruous given that the basing won’t be totally snowbound, and the rest of the army won’t be nearly as heavily equipped; however I’m going on the theory that the rest of the snow suits are in their bergens (it’s melted a bit since they were deployed, y’see…) and since they’d be spending weeks outside in exposed hides behind enemy lines, they’d need a few extra layers. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it (that and it looked good)…

As for the grunts themselves, I’ve got the first two finished and two waiting in the wings;


These guys have had the hip pockets of their BDUs filed off to back date them to OG-107s, and hoods sculpted onto their M-65 jackets, to make them look slightly more “wintery”. The helmets have been painted to show the Autumn/winter reverse side of the Mitchell cover, and the uniforms are a mix of shades of green, since any shots of US Army personnel seem to show no one’s uniforms quite matching…

As for vehicles, the tank park currently looks a bit like this-



And I picked this up from KingKit, to give the LRRPs a sweet ride (jokes about “heliborne insertions” to follow). MERDC was trialled but never adopted on helicopters, so of course this will be painted in MERDC. After all, it’s a SF bird, and who knows what would’ve happened if it had all boiled over. Needs must when the Devil drives and all that…


Next up will be making a start on some vehicles, but what to do first…

Cheers
Iain

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