The Linton Lancers

The Linton Lancers are a small mercenary force I created for a game at my club’s recent Open Day. The name came about simply because Linton is the name of village where the club meets, and since I was using British kit for the force, ‘Lancers’ seemed a suitably alliterative moniker.

The force is a 12-element unit of four vehicles, four Power Armour teams and four infantry teams. The infantry ride in two Artemis APCs.

The vehicles were dealt with recently in my post about masking with blu-tack so I won’t say much more about those.

The Power Armour were painted the same way as the vehicles – they looked rather odd swaddled in the blu-tack !

However, I used a cheaper blu-tack substitute for these called Power Tack. It was rather stickier than the proper stuff, and unfortunately on a warm day got very messy and was a nightmare to remove – it was like trying to peel off fresh bubblegum and it pulled away a few small areas of paint that needed to be touched up afterwards. I even tried putting them in the freezer for a bit to try and harden it up, but it didn’t help a great deal. In the end I might as well have brush painted them, the time taken to apply the masks, set up the airbrush and remove the power tack again took far longer than a simple brushed camo scheme would have. However, the results are decent enough.

The infantry are Keith Armstrong’s excellent Armies Army Commonwealth – these figures are full of character and go well with the British armour. They were basecoated with a Plastic Soldier Company ‘Russian Green’ spray and then the details picked out – I tend to try not to use too many colours on 15mm figures, so I limited it to boots (rubber black), weapons and helmet sights (grey), faces (various flesh tones), helmet (dark green) and webbing (khaki). Then Army Painter dip, Tamiya flat clear top coat and we’re done.

I’ve even knocked together a simple, unofficial play sheet for them so we could use them in a Hammers’s Slammers game – there are no points, just basic stats for each vehicle so we could use them in the game. Nothing fancy, but it worked for the game – you can download it here if you want it.