As the good ship Brigade sails on into yet another year (we make that 37 and counting since our humble beginnings), we’d like to wish all of you a Happy New Year (yes, we know we’re late, it’s been a busy start to the month).
Like a swan we may appear serene on the surface, but there’s lots of thrashing underneath. Some of the past year has been ‘interesting’ (as in ‘may you live in interesting times‘) with the last couple of months seeing our main bit of casting kit temporarily out of action at the worst possible time. Then we had the surprise of the new GPSR regulations which have stopped us selling to the EU, at least in the short term.
As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of card testing attacks over the past few weeks. This seems to have happened to other websites which are built on the same e-Commerce platform, so at least it wasn’t just us. We’ve seen well over 10000 fake orders attempted using stolen credit card numbers, although we’ve kept our security plugins up-to-date so almost all of these failed. The worst of that seems to be over at last, thank goodness.
If you’re in Canada, your orders have been held up by a postal strike – but that at least has ended and all outstanding Canadian orders will go to the post office tomorrow (huzzah !).
However, all of that will be sorted out and overcome soon enough, so it’s time to look ahead. We don’t plan our releases too far in advance, at least not in detail, but we generally have a vague idea of what we’d like to get out over the year.
We still have the final country, Venezuela, left in the Imperial Skies South American project. They’re way overdue but pretty much finished (the largest two ships are moulded and ready to go), so we’d hope to see them very soon.
After that we’ll be returning to Europe. There are several fleets of older models that we plan to update (the Swiss, the Ottomans and the Belgians), after which we want to start on some of the smaller European nations.
In the Hammerverse we have lots of plans. In 6mm we should finally see the Hindis make an appearance to complete the forces for The Warrior in the smaller scale. In 15mm it’ll be the two sides of the Bessarabian conflict from David Drake’s final story, following on from the Firedrake which debuted at Salute.
Scenery-wise, we’ll continue to expand our large and ever growing 6mm building range. The Agricultural Colony set continues to be very popular so that will be added to in short order – in fact, had the last few weeks been a bit less fraught we had hoped to squeeze in a release before Christmas. But some of the other building sets will also see additions as we plan on concreting over the known universe. We’re also hoping to bring the Agri Colony to 15mm as well, with some flexible multi-part models utilising resin, metal, laser-cut MDF and possibly even 3D-printed parts. They’re quite complex designs so we’re not sure when they will appear, hopefully sooner rather than later.
We’re very pleased to have added Germy’s 3mm models to our website, and so to support them we’re going to release a number of buildings in scale with his vehicles. Many of these are based on the paper models that Germy has on his website, but they’ll be cast in resin instead.
Beyond those snippets, it’s all a bit vague – we haven’t even mentioned spaceships, small scale scenery or any of the other ranges. Although we do have something brand new up our collective sleeves for Salute, but more of that later…
Crikey, 37 years! Well done! Those Venezuelan nefs look very nice! 🙂