Grasshoppers and Elephants

This is the first squad of the Rifle platoon.

i am following the platoon organisation from the Osprey book Vietnam Infantry Tactics by Gordon L Rottman. P16-p17

In this book it says the Rifle platoon on paper had 44 men made up of a command element of a platoon commander, platoon sergent and the Rto.

it then had 3 squads of ten dudes split into two teams made up of a grenade launcher and  rifle men.

the last group of men was the weapons platoon made up of 11 men with a squad leader two machine gunners with assistants and two antitank teams with loaders.

The book then goes on to say that in country this format very rarely existed due to squad members being wounded of on r&r the weapons team would sometimes be split up and used to give each squad a machine gun increasing its fire power or attatching them to the command squad.

It then says the anti tank units of recoiless rifles would in most cases be put into storage and the men would absorbed into the squads as riflemen.

Im going to base my platoon on the incountry formation with reduced squad size.

it will be made of a command unit with the platoon leader and a platoon sergent with the Rto.

two squads made up of two fire teams.

the point team will be 4 rifle men one will be armed with a grenade launcher and pistol

The gun team will be made up of the m60 gunner and loader supported by 4 rifle men.

which should be an understrength platoon of 23 men i may add another squad later on making it 33 men.

i am rebasing them on plastic counters that measure 20mm across as they are super cheap on ebay.

i used to use coins but did not clean them well enough so the paint and glue kept chipping off, i now have a pile of odd coloured 2p coins covered in glue and sand.

the tabs on the models are blended to the base with milliput then medium sand is stuck on with super glue.

I used a very course sand last time and it looked very out if scale with the smaller models.

they are now ready to be undercoated with games workshops grey seer paint.

These are a pile if cool miniatures that i have collected over the years at shows like salute and colours.

the pile includes US, NVA, and VC as well as civilians.

most are from brittania miniatures from a company called grubby tanks.

they have a huge range of 20mm bits and bobs

i plan on stripping in dettol and rebasing the little dudes on smaller 20mm bases to reduce the space they take up as my storage space is limited.

the models that are painted are very dark i have found recently with some 15mm flames of war models  that i prefer painting smaller scales with brighter colours as i find they show up better on the table.

i think im mainly going to paint them with GW contrasts as the block colours then highlight from there.

There is quite a bit to be getting on with here. Its going to take a few days in the dettol to strip the paint off the figures amd i have to wait about a week for the bases to arrive, but i do have enough bases and unpainted miniatures to start on a US rifle squad and command team.

I picked up the trees at salute a few years back they have been used in my 15mm, 20mm and now 28mm nam projects. The scrubby bushes are made from a chopped up door mat with some bits of rock and aquarium plants stuck to it.

These cast resin buildings are from grubby tanks 20mm range but i think they fit ok with the 28mm figures and work well for what i need them for.

they have some cool details like corrugated metal sheets poking through holes in the thatch.

the roofs are not stuck down so you can place models inside during a game.

I wanted to make some modular field sections so large areas of the table can be covered in them.

these came out a bit on the small side as huge areas would be covered in these wet and muddy fields with hard mud packed raised paths that would provide a small ammount of cover if you got down into the mud.

they are made from a chopped up rug with milliput sides covered in pva glue and sand.

different  sticky flocks and tufts as well as bits of aquarium plants have been added for the crops i was  going to add some plastic rice plants but decided against it as it would make it difficult to place minis during a game.

This is a cast resin bunker again from grubby tanks.

i added bits of plant and grass to help the bunker blend into the environment on the table.

the roof is removable making it easier to move minis around in game.

you could also place the bunker on the table with the roof off and use it as a fortefied position for a morter

I needed a better objective marker than a green disc with a star on it so i ordered up a       Bell H -1 Sioux laser cut wooden kit. These helicopters were used early on in the vietnam war as an observation helicopter but was phased out early on and replaced by the OH-6 Cayuse.i went for this kit as it was cheap and i planned to chop it up quite a bit.The kit is made by sarrisa precision and is great fun to build.Thought it would be cool to have broken plexiglass on thd ground so i chopped up an old gw blister pack and glued shards into the helicopter  and scattered on the ground with pva so as not to frost the plastic.

1. During both the lockdowns i have been fiddling with some ideas for a solo rule set to use with my Vietnam war miniatures.

To create a sense of suspense i decided the enemy would start as random tokens that have to be revealed to find what you are facing.

i started with wooden tokens with units written in marker pen on them.

due to bad hand writing i wanted a better way to make tomens.

last november i started messing with 3d printing and have happily printed stl files that are already made.

this time i was making the file from scratch in tinkercad then slicing in chitubox then printing on my creality resin printer.

it took a couple of evenings messing about with the programs but i am happy with the results.

After watching many youtube videos on hiw to use tinkercad i gave it a go.

i created a solid token then created a star that was hollow and iverlaid it to give the star pattern.

the writing was easy as well you just write what you want and it apoears on the screen then make it hollow and overlay it on the solid disc

i then exported the tokens as stl files and loaded them into chitubox for slicing.

About three hours later and after uv curing the embossed tokens were ready for a splash of paint and varnish.

bam ? a good couple of evenings experimenting

its cool to be sble to take an idea from a thought floating around in my head to a physical thing.

In between painting up my new cursed city set i found some timr to paint up this cool model from gringo40s female vc range.

This model is going to have a couple of uses in games either as a part of a force or as an objective marker.