Living in the Pits

Posted on October 31, 2023 by Tony

At the Joy of Six show earlier this year, someone asked if we had any photos of our 6mm Sunken Dwellings in use on a table. The answer was, no, we hadn’t – we had never found the time to paint some and build them into a piece of scenery. So over the summer, Tony cast up a set (incidentally, they’ve all just been remoulded) and built a small mesa with them dug into the surface.

The original idea for the buildings came from a famous sci-fi film franchise (you all know that) but not so well known is that the film was itself inspired by the underground dwellings of the Berbers in Matmata, Tunisia where filming took place. Our range consists of four different designs, all of which are cast in square or rectangular resin blocks exactly 25mm deep. The idea is that you can make a piece of scenery from 25mm polystyrene or insulation foam by cutting holes in it and dropping the buildings in – we figured square holes would be easier to cut than circles or random shapes. The edges can be disguised with whatever you use for texturing the foam surface.

Tony started by painting the buildings – they were undercoated with Army Painter Skeleton Bone, washed with Citadel Agrax Earthshade and drybrushed Terminatus Stone. Doors and details were then picked out in various colours.

The hill was cut from normal white insulation polystyrene, and then a base was cut from 5mm foamex roughly 5mm bigger all round. Positions for the four buildings were marked with a sharpie and cut out, test fitting as we went – you want the fit to be as tight as possible with no gaps. The hill edge was bevelled and shaped with a knife and the base edge also bevelled before they were stuck together with glue gun adhesive (a non-solvent type so it doesn’t attack the foam).

A couple of buildings were added around the edge of the hill. One of our Loading Bay models was cut in half, the main door end was used as an entrance to what is obviously an underground cave network and the other end, which I was originally going to discard (which is why it’s not fully painted in the photo !), became a bunker/observation position. Positions were cut into the hill for these and they were glued in place.

Once all this was done, several conventional buildings were added to the surface and then then the whole thing was textured. This was done with a mixture of household emulsion paint, PVA glue and sand (clean bird cage sand from a pet shop). We had some emulsion mixed at a DiY store to match Army Painter’s Skeleton Bone, so that all of our base colours are the same. This was then washed with Citadel Seraphim Sepia shade and drybrushed bone. We added some awnings made from cheap (rough) paper towels soaked in PVA, with supports made from paper clip wire. After that it was just a matter of painting in a few details, varnishing and then adding various grass tufts in dry, arid desert colours.

So that’s it – welcome to life in The Pits. The mesa matches the rest of the terrain we built for a game at the Maidstone Wargames Society Open Day last year and should see action soon.

Posted in 6mm SF, Painting and Modelling | 3 Comments

Chain (Print at) Home

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Tony

Digging into the vaults, we’ve unearthed some more STL files which we’ve added to our list of print-at-home items so, as before, we’re adding them to the website for very modest amounts. These are all modelled at 1/1000th scale to match our Small Scale Scenery range, but you can obviously resize them to other scales.

One of the most popular pieces is the Chain Home set, depicting a full installation of the British early war radar system. The set includes the transmitter and receiver towers (of which four of each are needed) plus several ancillary buildings and bunkers.

We also have our Airship Mooring Tower, perfect for tethering your Imperial Skies vessels. The model is based the one at Cardington Airfield, but similar designs were seen across the world. There are two versions, with and without the building at the base.

The next item is Wardenclyffe Tower, also known as the Tesla Tower. It was designed and built by Nikola Tesla on Long Island, New York to test his theories of wireless communication and power transmission, but never went fully into operation as his funding ran out. The tower has long been demolished, but it’s still possible to see the outline of the concrete tower base in satellite images.

Finally for this week is this gigantic cantilever shipbuilding crane similar to the ones still found on the Clyde in Scotland, which would be a great addition to any dockyard scene.

STL-103 – Airship Mooring Tower – £1.20
STL-105 – Airship Mooring Tower with Base Building – £1.20
STL-106 – Tesla Tower – £1.20
STL-108 – Titan Crane – £1.20
STL-502 – Chain Home Installation – £5.00

The files are supplied ‘as-is’, we haven’t added any supports.

Posted in 3D Print, New Releases, Small Scale Scenery | 1 Comment

Facing The Warrior

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Tony

One of the most iconic stories in the Hammer’s Slammers pantheon is “The Warrior”, a three-parter that tells the tale of Slick Des Grieux, a fearsome but somewhat wayward tank commander in Hammer’s regiment. The second part portrays an assault on the town of Morobad across a landscape of paddy fields, causeways and dikes by the Han Black Banner Brigade supported by Slammers’ blower tanks. The town is held by the Hindi army, aided and augmented by tank destroyers, infantry and artillery from Baffin’s Legion.

We’ve already released models for the Black Banner Brigade in both 6mm and 15mm, plus trucks and even some trikes for the regular Han troops (only in 15mm so far, 6mm is on the way). So we’re moving on to the opposition this week with the release of a series of vehicles for the Hindis.

Their primary armoured vehicle is the Hathauda (‘Hammer’), also know colloquially as the H-Tank. It’s called a tank by the Hindis, but could also be considered to be a tank destroyer as it has no turret which gives it a very low profile. It’s armed with a heavy liquid-propellent gun along with a remote-controlled chain gun plus a pintel weapon on the commander’s cupola. A specific feature mentioned in the story is that the vehicle can operate either on its wide balloon tyre wheels, or alternatively single-piece rubber tracks can be fitted around the wheels to lower ground pressure and improve traction. So we’ve provided both versions of the model to allow you to choose. Anyone familiar with armoured vehicles from the Cold War will immediately recognise where the inspiration for the H-Tank came from – and that’s because it’s exactly the vehicle that David Drake himself was thinking of when he wrote that part of the story.

Also mentioned in the story are towed anti-tank weapons which pop up in the paddy fields to take quite a toll on the advancing Han armour. These have the same LP weapon as the H-Tank on a wheeled chassis. Continuing on the towed weapon theme, the Hindis also employ artillery pieces which Slick encounters in Morobad itself. We’ve also provided a tracked gun tractor, the Khachchar (“Mule”) to haul these weapons around the battlefield.

There’s no mention of any other vehicles in the story, but we’ve rounded out the Hindi inventory with the addition of a 6×6 APC, the Ganda (“Rhino”) which comes armed with autocannon, gatling or missile pod. Finally, recce duties are carried out by the Nevla (“Mongoose”) armoured car and Binturong (“Bear Cat”) scout car.

HS15-4401 – Hathauda ‘H-Tank’ Tank (tracked) – £8.00
HS15-4401a – Hathauda ‘H-Tank’ Tank (wheeled) – £8.00
HS15-4402 – Ganda 6×6 APC – £7.00
HS15-4403 – Nevla Armoured Car – £4.50
HS15-4404 – Binturong Scout Car – £4.00
HS15-4405 – Khachchar Gun Tractor – £7.00
HS15-4406 – Pinaka Anti-tank Gun – £6.00
HS15-4407 – Saranga Field Gun – £6.00

The final part of the Warrior’s forces is Baffin’s Legion – these are already in the works, with several new vehicles to complete the story.

And it’s time for one of our occasional shout outs to other companies whose products make ours look good; firstly Geek Villain for their Autumn Grass Mat, and Early War Miniatures for the latex roads. As for the rest of the scenery – the foliage is from a variety of aquarium and other artificial plants, the hedges and fences are model railway bits (manufacturers unknown). The building was made by us from an old internet router housing with bits and pieces from our building components range stuck on.

Posted in 15mm SF, Hammer's Slammers, New Releases | 1 Comment

Gaming with the General

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Tony

Next week sees our final show of 2023, RE-PLAY at the Royal Engineers Museum in Gillingham, Kent. The event has a selection of traders, demonstration and participation games along with the opportunity to pit your wits against Major General (Retired) John Drewienkiewicz, the army’s former Engineer in Chief.

We’ll be taking a very cut-down stand as we’re not exactly sure what space we’ll have and what the audience will be. So if there’s anything specific you’re after, it might be an idea to get in touch first to ensure that we have it with us. You can also order from the new website – this enables you to place an order for collection at a show (there’s a shipping option specifically for that) and choose either to pay in advance or on collection.

Talking of the website, we’re still fixing and tweaking things. We’re working through restoring dimensions for some models that somehow disappeared in the move from the old website. We’ve also fixed an issue that stopped you adding more than one example of any item from the Small Scale Scenery range – if anyone else finds this problem on any other ranges then please let us know. We’ve also made the check-out process clearer when paying by card – previously you had to select ‘PayPal’ which then gave you the option to pay by card instead; now there’s a specific pay-by-card option which should be less confusing.

As always, if you come across any other issues, please get in touch.

RE Museum photo by Immanuel Giel via Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED

Posted in Shows, Updates and General Waffle | 1 Comment

3D Files for Printing

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Tony

Some of you may remember that we used to have a shop on Shapeways where we sold a number of useful 3D items, mostly 6mm or matching our Small Scale Scenery range. We ended up closing it because various changes to the Shapeways pricing structure made most of them unaffordable and we simply didn’t sell anything.

One of the things our new website allows us to do is sell files for immediate download, so we’ve decided to resurrect some of these files and sell them for printing at home. The files are sold ‘as-is’, we haven’t attempted to add printer supports to them, but they have all been successfully printed at some point or other. Some of the models are quite delicate so you’ll have to use your best judgement as to whether they best suit resin or FDM printing.

Because of this we’re only charging very modest prices (although we decided not to make them free – that would simply encourage a load of people who don’t really want them to hoover up the files just because they can). And there’s also a theory that people are more likely to consume a product if they’re aware of its cost; consumers feel compelled to use products they’ve paid for to avoid feeling that they’ve wasted their money, and we want the files to be used rather than collect metaphorical dust on a hard-drive.

The first batch of files includes the two 6mm bridges we created for the Maidstone Wargames Society Operation Deadstick game, Pegasus Bridge and Horsa Bridge. We also have two types of 6mm power pylons – these were always popular on Shapeways until they went overnight from £10 per set of three to over £50 ! This time you can print as many as you like for a very modest amount.

STL-301 – Pegasus Bridge – £4.00
STL-302 – Horse Bridge – £2.50
STL-305 – Power Pylon Type #1 – £1.50
STL-340 – Power Pylon Type #2 – £1.50

The models in this range are mainly items that are uniquely suited to 3D printing, and which would be difficult/impossible to manufacture in resin/metal. To forestall a question which some people may be wondering – we currently have no plans to release any of the models from our existing metal and resin ranges in digital form.

Posted in 3D Print, New Releases | 1 Comment

Surface Landers

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Tony

We have a couple of new shuttles to add to the 6mm range today, both for the European Federation.

The first and largest is the Aigle Assault Lander, which can carry a platoon of infantry or several small armoured vehicles from orbit to surface. If inserting into a hot landing zone, it’s equipped with a suite of ECM and active counter-measures to avoid attracting enemy fire on the way down. Aigles are also capable of travel between planets, with the interior cargo area re-configured into crew accommodation.

The Cormoran is a small personnel shuttle, used for courier work or landing away teams on planetary surfaces. Specially configured stealth versions with improved EW suites are also used by special forces for insertion, while the shuttles on smaller vessels also do double-duty as lifeboats. Like the Aigle, many have found their way into civilian use with the military electronics replaced by commercial grade equipment.

Both models can be used in 6mm surface games, or they will also serve in Squadron Commander games as scenario objectives. Both models are also available in our spaceship range at a smaller scale.

SF300-413 – Aigle Assault Lander – £6.00
SF300-414 – Cormoran Personnel Shuttle – £2.00

Posted in 6mm SF, New Releases, Squadron Commander | 1 Comment

More 1/700th Additions

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Tony

Today we have three more additions to the 1/700th range of coastal forts and scenery, all scaled up from the Small Scale Scenery range.

The first is Nehaj Fortress, in Senj, Croatia. A fairly simple square tower design, it was finished in 1558 as a defence against the marauding Ottomans – beyond that it’s not easy to find out much about it.

Next we have the Forte de Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat, a small fort in Salvador, Brazil (not to be confused with the much larger fortress in Portugal of the same name). It’s an interesting irregular hexagonal design, but again seems to have little other history beyond the date of building (somewhere between 1583 and 1609).

And third is a generic Middle-Eastern fort, the sort of thing that could have been defended by the Foreign Legion in Morocco, although it isn’t based on anything specific.

(l-r) Desert Fort, Nehaj Fortress, Nossa Senhora

B700-016 – Desert Fort – £1.50
B700-186 – Forte de Nossa Senhora – £3.00
B700-187 – Nehaj Fortress – £3.25

Posted in 1-700th Scenery, New Releases | 1 Comment

Instant RE-PLAY

Posted on September 26, 2023 by Tony

A three part post today – starting with the news that we’re attending a new show in the Royal Engineers Museum in Gillingham, Kent. It’s been organised at rather short notice, and is taking place on October 28th. If nothing else it should be an interesting venue, set as we will be amongst the armoured vehicles and other exhibits of the museum. We’ll be taking a cut-down stand as we don’t really know what to expect in terms of attendance and audience, but we’re looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Next, an update on orders. We’ve made good progress in clearing the holiday backlog and all orders up to September 22nd have shipped, so we’re pretty much back to normal. The exception is EU orders; we’re just waiting for the payment to clear for an order to Germany, then all outstanding orders to the EU will be off the to shipping hub – we’re hoping this will be by the end of the week.

And finally, the new website seems to be working OK – we’ve had orders coming from it over the weekend, the first of which were shipped out this morning. We’ve already made a few tweaks to it – after quite a bit of feedback we removed the rather unwieldy VAT message that was obscuring the thumbnail images on each item, so the view should now be clearer. We’ve also had to add a CAPTCHA box to the Contact Us form as that’s proved to be a magnet for Russian spammers. It seems that the size info’ on each product has gone astray somewhere between the old website and new one, so we’ll be working to restore that as soon as possible. We’re also looking at improving navigation around the site – some people have said that they miss the navigation menu on the left hand side so we’re looking into what we can do to replace it within the framework of the layout template we’re using. Once all that is out of the way, the next job will be to restore some of the content from the old website such as Starmada and Aeronef gaming stats.

Posted in Shows, Updates and General Waffle | 1 Comment

The End of an Era

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Tony

First up – we’re back into the swing of things after the holiday break, and working through the orders that came in while we were away. Everything up to September 12th has been finished and shipped out, and we’re making further inroads into the backlog.

Now to a story (we know you like those). The Brigade website has quite a long history. Initially we operated from a bit of free webspace that one of us had as part of their ISP package, and neither of us can remember the address of that ! It was initially written by the mysterious, now-departed Third Brigadier who had a habit of writing everything in capitals – the website did seem to be SHOUTING AT YOU after a while. Sadly we can’t find any record of this first site, but if we do we’ll be sure to let you see it.

According to Nominet we registered the brigademodels.co.uk URL in August 2000 and started operating from there soon after. The oldest entry in the Wayback Machine is for February 2001 – at that point we’d just started taking credit cards via PayPal, but there was no integrated shopping cart (orders still had to be sent by post or email) and things looked rather different:

The shopping cart came in early 2003; we’d just forked out for a rather expensive eCommerce package when Tony realised that he could integrate the PayPal shopping cart into the website with a bit of bespoke code – for free. His software read lists of products from text and CSV files and spat out finished HTML pages (effectively it ran an offline database that was manually uploaded each time an update was needed). And this home-made website has run quite happily for 20-odd years without too many hitches, handling tens of thousands of orders. It’s looking a bit dated now – it still relies on frames, which are rather old-hat as far as web technology goes. When it was written, everyone looked at websites on desktop machines with 640×400 screens (800×600 if you were lucky), so there was no real need to handle different screen resolutions or aspect ratios. Nowadays over 50% of our orders are placed on mobile devices (phones and tablets) with smaller screens of varying resolution and shape (which can change depending on which way up the device is held), none of which our website handles.

So it’s time for a change. PayPal have been gently nagging us to move to their new checkout system, which means we had to make some alterations anyway, and the easiest option was to start from scratch. So we have a brand new, WooCommerce-powered webstore which should work much better on mobile devices and is also more secure (you may have noticed the change to an https:// site a while back). The site also allows you to create an account so that you can track your orders, and is also friendlier in terms of generating order acknowledgements and shipping notifications. It’s all just so much … better.

We’ve also been able to tweak our shipping charges. On the old system, small UK orders were sometimes undercharged while larger ones were overcharged; now we have just two flat rates for large letter and small parcel orders, plus the option for adding a signed-for service. For overseas orders (apart from EU ones, which haven’t changed apart from tweaking some individual country rates) we’re able to more accurately calculate shipping costs using the weight of each item (that was fun, weighing and entering over 3000 products…). Some orders will end up costing more, some less than the old method, but it’ll reflect the actual cost of shipping rather than being a best estimate.

We’ll shortly add redirects from the old website to the new one – otherwise all the links from the blog to products and ranges would instantly be broken ! However, this may not cover every single page so there might still be some missing links. We’re also planning to keep working on the look of the new site over the coming months, and restoring some of the older content that we haven’t yet had time to transfer over.

This is all rather scary – 90% of our income come through the website, so even though the new site has been tested, tweaked, tested again, fixed, tested yet again, it’s still a daunting prospect to switch the old site off and move to a new one. Yes, we’ve taken a backup !! There may be some teething problems (no; make that – there will be some teething problems …) so you may have to bear with us while it all beds in.

So where can you find this spiffy new site ? It’s here… https://brigademodels.co.uk/

Wish us luck…

Posted in Updates and General Waffle | Comments Off on The End of an Era

Under Maintenance

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Tony

The website is having a bit of work done on it so it’ll be down for a little while.

Hopefully we won’t end up breaking it all…

Posted in Updates and General Waffle | Comments Off on Under Maintenance