At last! Some big guns for my tiny Huns!
8.8 cm Flak battery...
Nice models, though , and fun to work on. An extremely effective counter to enemy air support in the game, and also good for picking off tanks, of course!
The Battlefront boxed kit has lots of nice peripherals, including extra crew stands, shown here...
...and prime movers for the guns, even a staff car for the command team. Also included were a set of trailers for the trucks. I didn't paint those, since you don't really need them for the game, I'd lost some of the pieces and anyway my patience with modeling non-essentials has its limits...sometimes.
...one of a very few German AFV's produced from the very beginning of the war to the very end. The Germans built more Stug IIIs than any other tank-type vehicle.
One of my Flames of War pet peeves is that Battlefront does not provide stands for most of their vehicle minis like they do for most of their infantry and artillery models. In 28mm this might not be a big deal, but with 15s it means that your infantry tower over their tank support in a galling sort of way. In real life, tanks are big and scary, and I feel that they should get the same bases everybody else so they can look appropriately intimidating, so I add bases to all my tanks.
The added height won't do my Stugs and Shermans any favors when people are shooting at them on the tabletop but what do I care? I don't play in tournaments or anything like that anyway.
Grrrr....belching fire and metal, farting blue fumes..the Stugs crawl forward in support of the grenadiers...
The horde so far...Company HQ with anti tank section, 3 Grenadier platoons, Pak 40 platoon, mortar platoon, 88s and Stugs...900 points...almost finished with my company!
"...farting blue fumes..." Funny imagery; but you are certainly right to suggest that the StuGs are immanently more practical and would have served the Germans better to produce more of them than waste materials on 'sexier' tanks. However given the militaries even of today, not much has changed in the mindset of the military men. I hope that FoW point values reflect the practicality vs effect as well.
ReplyDeleteNice looking command!
Cheers.
Thanks, Doug! You could be right...I've read that the Germans could have built as many as 3 Stugs with the resources it took to produce a single Tiger or King Tiger, but they were trying to go for quality over quantity, and given that prewar German planners correctly envisioned a conflict in which a relatively poor and landlocked Germany would face a wealthy allied coalition with the bulk of the planet's resources at their fingertips, I understand why they got into that mindset. In the end, I guess it wouldn't have mattered a squib whether the Germans built Tigers or Stugs. By 1944, in the west, where my Stugs are fighting, either vehicle was just as vulnerable to the all powerful allied air umbrella. I do like Stugs, though. And yes, they are fun to play in the FOW games I've tried so far. You just have to keep the Shermans off their flanks!
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