28mm Napoleonic Perry Miniatures - Royal Artillery Company

 

This has been an enjoyable little project.  These are the Perry's Peninsular War Royal Artillery guns.  There are two 6 Pounders and one 5.5inch howitzer to create this Company/Battery.

By the mid-Peninsular War there would more usually be 6 guns in a Royal Artillery battery or to use the more contemporary term - 'a Company'.  The nomenclature of the British military has always been confusing (even to those who serve!) as words have different meanings depending on Regiment/Arm of Service etc.

When the guns were equipped with their drivers and horses they were called 'Brigaded'.

A pair of guns was called a 'Division'!

I recommend the excellent book "Wellington's Guns" by Colonel Nick Lipscombe for the definitive story of the Royal Artillery in the Napoleonic Wars.  This gives all the background information before diving much more deeply into the composition of each Company at each battle.  

The book also goes into some detail about Wellington's particular difficulties/feud with the Board of Ordnance who were responsible for the Royal Artillery.  This resulted in much petty bitterness between Wellington and his Artillery officers who were rarely given credit for their bravery and actions in Wellington's post battle reports.

The 6 pounders were able to fire ball, cannister and shrapnel shells.  They did not fire common shell and this was left for the 5.5 inch howitzers to fire.

I will be using these guns in battles using the General d'Armee rules. Hence I only have 3 guns in this Company/Battery rather than the full historic 6 guns.  I have play tested the rules once and it gave a superb game, certainly feeling very Napoleonic, though the detail will take me a number of play throughs before I feel I have got the mechanics fully understood.  That's standard though for me though.

The models were a joy to paint. I really like the artillerymen who do look like they are on campaign.  I have painted them up in my preferred style of keeping them soldier-like but with the inevitable dust/dirt of campaigning in such a harsh climate. 

The Royal Artillery uniform is very distinctive with the yellow braiding and lace. This of course makes it really challenging for the painter!  Though it does pay off the effort of putting the detail work in.  The guns needed a little cleaning up to remove some flash between the spokes, but it was not excessive. I am delighted to have finally got them done.  

These are the first Napoleonic British artillery figures and guns I have painted since the mid-1980's when I obsessively painted Airfix and Esci figures (they are all in my loft but I have no doubt that the paint will all have flaked off by now!).

I'm currently painting a few random things as a little break from Napoleonics, though there will be more to follow soon.

Jacobite Rebellion 1746 - 10mm Pendraken - British 10th Dragoons and Royal Artillery

This post sees the addition of cavalry and artillery to my British Army of 1746.  All of the models are Pendraken 10mm.

The cavalry are painted as the 10th Dragoons (Cobhams), who were posted on both flanks at Culloden.

 As I'm trying to create the armies in as closes as to 1:10 scale of the actual forces in the Rebellion (without having unsightly figure gaps or massive wastage of figures).  The historical splitting of the Regiment meant that I had to do two things, which I don't normally tend to do.

• Think in terms of Troops and Squadrons rather than Regiments for the cavalry, and with Cobham's 10th Dragoons in particular.
• Use enough cavalry to give the feeling of power./numbers that their appearance must have made at Culloden for the Jacobites to send so much of their forceto  face them on their right flank  (I tend to scale back cavalry compared to infantry and in 28mm this can make sense, 10mm gives more options and space for more cavalry)

I was undecided about the basing  even as I was creating it.  Normally I use a base and proceed to fill it with troops.  Unlike 28mm, I have been trying to reduce Regiments to one stand to save moving multiples of bases per turn.  As described above, the need split the 10th  to cover both flanks meant that I didn't have this option.  So I decided to put two Troops on one base (one Squadron).  This meant a small gap between troops.  It looks unusual, but will hopefully grow on me!  The practicality will become more apparant in the game.  I don't have a need for individual cavalry Troops to run about on their own.

The flags came cast on so required some research and painting.  The excellent resource at  www.kronoskaf.com has helped in so many ways with my British Army. 

The larger number of figures used, 30 figures for Cobhams 10th Dragoons, meant that I could use both the Kings and Regimental colours and it wouldn't look 'flag heavy'.

In addition to the cavalry I now have all of the Royal Artillery I require.  Below are 3 pounders with crews.   I'm still unsure what to do about the artillery in the game.  If I was to issue the guns out to scale then I would need just one piece for the whole army.  This looks a bit wrong, especially as guns tended to be placed between infantry Regiments. 

To cover all options, I decided to paint all of the contents of the two packets of guns and crews.  This gives me options for later. So I now have 6 x 3 Pdr guns.

The Royal Artillery also had Coehorn mortars on the battlefield.  These were not reported to have been effective.  The soft boggy ground at Culloden probably minimised the effect of the mortar rounds.  Even so I decided to include them for completeness, even if it might take some pretty good dice throws to get any hits in the game!

I took the opportunity to take photos of the figures with both my Samsung Galaxy camera on the smartphone as well as with my 14 year old Olympus digital camera.   Interestingly both seemed to perform as well as the other so that didn't really help in my experiment. 

I'm doing my very best to stick with this particular Jacobite Rebellion British Army project.  I have so many other interests trying to pull me in different directions.  Last week I purchased one of the Too Fat Lardies Christmas Specials just to get their Boer War rules and some scenarios.  This has proved to be really interesting and given me a lot of ideas.  The rules really are quite a revelation with their mechanics and I am really keen to try them (which means building an army first!).  Still it's all khaki...how long could it take..!

American War of Independence - British Artillery

This British 6pdr has waited patiently for most of the year to for me to realise that I had yet to post it up on here.

I built and completed this whilst staying away on a two-week course. It was mostly finished in a whole week of evenings (a good thing too, as the second week of the course left little time to relax!).  It was really nice to have something pleasurable to focus on and paint whilst living away from one's home comforts

The figures are by Perry Miniatures and the Royal Artillery crew are in the Southern dress which would have been most likely worn in the Guilford Courthouse campaign, this being my primary area of interest in the AWI (but once I have the required troops I am sure to spread into other campaigns!).

I apologise for the poor lighting on the following close-ups- I nearly didn't post them but as they are only few and might be of interest, I included them.

Well, December is racing by - I reckon I can get one more AWI post of recently completed troops in before the end of the year if the new flag arrives in time for them.  It's going to be a post on this or a rambling blog post about my first thoughts on playing Team Yankee and reading the rules for Flames of War.   I hope the AWI flag arrives quickly!