Today we have another of the models we previewed over Christmas – this is the EuroFed battlecruiser Tetuán.
At 74mm long, the vessel is larger than a Liberte class battleship, with heavier main weapons and a higher top speed. This all comes at a cost however, and the Tetuán’s aren’t as well shielded and are lighter in secondary armament.
The Tetuán is a one-piece resin hull with separate metal turrets.
SFS-402 – Tetuán class Battlecruiser – £6.50
We’ve had a few enquiries recently about how compatible our Small Scale Scenery range is with 1/700th scale naval vessels. The SSS range is 1/1000th, so they work out to be a bit small, which some people don’t mind – we sell a lot of models to 6mm gamers who prefer their buildings to be closer to ground scale. Others like their scenery and other models to match, so we’ve decided to cater to that camp by scaling up some of our coastal forts to the larger scale.
We’ve started small – both in size and number of models – with an initial offering of three items. All are single-piece models in resin.
Over 100 Martello towers were built around the coast of Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, of varying types. This pack contains two typical designs, one with a single cannon and the other with three.
Fort Vauville is a tiny fortification on the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. It was one of a number of similar constructions built by Vauban in the latter half of the C.18th.
St Mawes Castle is one of Henry VIII’s Device Forts, built in the 1540s. It has been continuously garrisoned at various times since, including during the time of the Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars and both World Wars.
B700-025 – Martello Towers (x2) – £2.00
B700-026 – Fort Vauville – £1.50
B700-029 – Castle St Mawes – £3.00
At Crisis last year, I was shown some pictures of our EuroFed spaceships by Eric Pigat. Nothing unusual about that, we love to see photos of our models painted up, since many of you seem to do a much better job with them than we do !
The difference with these is that Eric had modded them with LEDs to light up their engines – he has drilled through the models to route fibre optics from the engine to the base which houses the power source. He has even managed it with the tiny fighter craft, which is pretty amazing. They look absolutely stunning, as you can see from the pictures below. Bravo, Eric!
We have some new 6mm buildings today – they’re in the style of the Primitive Dwelling from the Desert Buildings range, with flat roofs, external staircases and support columns. Rather than bundling them in with the rest of the desert buildings range (which is getting pretty big now) we’ve made them into their own range which we’ve titled Desert Outlands.
There are four so far (plus the existing Primitive Dwelling, which has been included in the range and recoded as B300-805), all of which are dwellings of some sort. You can buy them individually, or we’ve created a pack with two of each model in apart from the Small Dwelling, of which there are three.
We also have a new piece for the Town Walls set – a pack of four 45° Wall Sections to give you more flexibility when designing your layout. You can see them surrounding the buildings in the picture above.
B300-187 – 45° Wall Sections (x4) – £4.00
BP300-801 – Desert Outlands Pack – £2.00
B300-801 – Large Dwelling-1 – £2.00
B300-802 – Medium Dwelling – £1.50
B300-803 – Small Compound – £1.50
B300-804 – Large Dwelling-2 – £2.00
B300-805 – Small Dwelling – £1.00
If you haven’t already heard of it, A Billion Suns is a new set of spaceship rules from Osprey. They have been written by Mike Hutchinson, author of Gaslands, so come with a great pedigree, and are due for release at the end of May. Mike has been kind enough to include a number of photos of our models in the book, which he has painted himself (very, very well it must be said, as you can see from the photos below which are all Mike’s work). We plan on stocking the rulebook as soon as it appears.
We’ve been lucky enough to have been included in the playtest group and have played a number of games as it has evolved. The rules are very different from any other set – not just in the combat mechanisms, but the whole premise of the game which is much more about resource management than huge fleet actions. Rather than trying to explain it here, we’ll just point you at the rule’s homepage, where you can find out all about it. There’s also an active Facebook page which you can join and ping questions at Mike.
We’ve updated our show list for the year with confirmed bookings and others that we hope to attend but that we’re still waiting on confirmations of dates and attendance.
One notable absentee is RobinCon in Nottingham; although we were booked and confirmed for the show, it appears that the organisers have had some operational issues and decided to pull the plug (for this year at least) – but at least this was done with plenty of notice and as far as we know everyone that had booked a stand or ticket has been refunded (we certainly have). Hopefully they’ll be able to resolve things and come back in 2021. You can read more on their Facebook page should you wish to do so.
There are no new events – we have made a tentative enquiries about a couple of other shows but there’s nothing concrete at the moment, so the list looks like this:
23rd February : Cavalier, Angel Centre, Tonbridge
18th April : Salute, ExCel, London
14th June : Broadside, Sittingbourne, Kent
July*: The Joy of Six, Hallam University, Sheffield
September* : Hereward, Bretton Centre, Peterborough
12th September : Colours, Newbury Racecourse, Berkshire
October*: SELWG, Crystal Palace, London
7th November* : Crisis, Hangarie 29, Antwerp, Belgium
* – dates/attendance TBC.
We look forward to seeing you at our first event in Tonbridge, or anytime after that.
In the meantime, here’s a video from YouTube of our stand at at Salute 2018 (thanks to Robin Fitton for that)…
It’s the first Friday of 2020, and thus also our first new release of the year. We’re starting with a pair of new buildings in the Small Scale Scenery range from the Middle-East.
The first is a larger mosque with four minarets – this isn’t based on any particular real-world prototype, but instead is a more generic model. The main body is resin, the minarets are separate metal pieces.
The second model is the Roman fort of Qasr Bshir (also spelt Bashir) in Jordan. This fort, known as Mobene back in the day, was part of a chain intended to protect Arabia from nomadic tribes. The original is in surprisingly good condition given that it’s roughly 1700 years old!
SSS-8146 – Grand Mosque – £2.50
SSS-8147 – Qasr Bshir Fort – £2.50
One final post for 2019 (that makes 129, or slightly better than one post every 3 days…); and another chance to look forward to new models in the New Year.
Firstly, the workshop will be brought out of mothballs and powered up again on Thursday and the backlog of orders that have built up over the holiday period will be tackled. With a bit of luck they might all be cleared in a day, depending on how many more orders we get before then. There are a few other outstanding ones waiting on restocks of various things – Imperial Skies tokens, Starmada rulebooks etc. – for which we’re reliant on other people getting things to us, and delays are inevitable this time of year.
Next week we’ll be diving back into the creation of more new stuff – we placed an order for a big pile of 3D printed masters just before the sale, which arrived just before Christmas. We’ll be sorting these out, prepping them for moulding etc. In the meantime, here’s a photo of some things that will be one of our first few releases of the year – you might think you’ve seen them in our ranges before, but look closely – are these bigger ?
Happy New Year!
Tony and Phil
We did really well with the sale this year, keeping pretty much up with the orders and not allowing a backlog to build up. Until the final weekend – you’d all obviously been saving up your orders until the last minute, and we were deluged on those two days! So we’ve been slogging away all hours for the last week clearing those orders – but we did it. All orders that arrived before close of business yesterday have been cast and packed. UK orders that arrived by last Friday (20th) have been posted, but overseas orders, and any UK ones that arrived after that, will be posted as soon as possible after Christmas (there’s no point sending them sooner, they’ll just sit in the post office for several days anyway).
Today it’s catching up on admin, paying bills and answering emails – so apologies if you’ve contacted us recently, but I should get them all answered today. We’ll also be updating the website – we’ve run out of stock on one or two items, and this sale seems to have taken its toll of a number of resin moulds, so a few items will be taken off sale until we can have a blitz on mould replacement in the New Year.
The Brigade workshop is now shut for a few days, but the website of course remains open for business – just remember that no orders will now get dealt with until we reopen on the 2nd January.
So after several weeks of toil, it’s finally time to spin down the centrifuge, empty the pressure pot, switch off the lights and open the mulled wine –
Merry Christmas from Tony and Phil.
We recently ran a large Crucible game at Maidstone Wargames Society involving eight players. Six took command of a detachment of Hammer’s Slammers, a mixture of mid-period and late uparmoured vehicles, while John Treadaway and I took the defence with a mixed bag of Solace rebels and regular forces plus a couple of Wolverines detachments to stiffen their resolve.
You can find more photos one the Maidstone Wargames Society website plus a full game report on the Hammer’s Slammers website.
