Slammers Update

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Tony

Since the new website came online, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into updating some of the content of our various ranges – it was always something we wanted to do but put off until the new site was ready (after all, what would be the point of updating the old one when it was due to be retired ?). In particular, we’ve been looking closely at the Hammer’s Slammers part of the website, setting unique pages for as many of the different armies and mercenary units as we can and listing all of the different model options for each one. Hopefully this will make life easier for new gamers to find their way around and pick the correct vehicles and infantry units for their forces.

To this end, we’ve also created some new pre-packaged detachment packs to make things really easy – just pick a detachment that takes your fancy and you’ll get a complete force ready to put on the table (once you’ve painted it of course !). We’ve concentrated on the forces derived from the stand-alone novel The Forlorn Hope. Strictly speaking this isn’t a Hammer’s Slammers story (the Slammers don’t appear in it) but since it deals with the adventures of another mercenary unit it fits right in, and David Drake was happy for it to be considered part of the Slammerverse as far as the game is concerned.

It deals with the fortunes of Fasolini’s Company on the planet Cecach, caught between the forces of the Federals (who they are fighting for) and the religious zealot Republicans. It brings some interesting equipment to the table, such as Fasolini’s tracked support guns, the huge Kastenwagen personnel carrier and the Henschel Eisenfaust laser tank. There are detachment lists available for the Fasolinis, Federals and Republicans including regular troops and garrison units, plus a new mercenary unit, Podele’s Lions.

You can find dedicated sections for Forlorn Hope in both 6mm and 15mm on the website. Each of these has sections for Fasolini’s Company, Podele’s Lions and the two indigenous Cecach forces. We’ve also added detachment packs for each force which cover all of their options on the lists. Each pack makes up a complete detachment with vehicles and infantry as appropriate, plus in the 15mm packs you also get tank crew, vehicle stowage, right down to bases for the infantry.

HSD15-301 – Fasolini Company Detachment (410CGS Guns) – £43.00
HSD15-301q – Fasolini Company Detachment (440CGS Quad Guns) – £43.00
HSD15-302 – Fasolini Support Detachment – £24.00
HSD15-901 – Cecach Republican Commando Detachment – £45.00
HSD15-902 – Cecach Republican Mechanised PzGren Detachment – £68.00
HSD15-903 – Cecach Republican Infantry Detachment – £43.00
HSD15-904 – Cecach Republican Mechanised Infantry Detachment – £48.00
HSD15-905 – Cecach Republican Armoured Detachment – £91.00
HSD15-1301 – Cecach Federal Garrison Detachment – £82.00
HSD15-1302 – Cecach Federal Mechanised Garrison Detachment – £92.00
HSD15-1303 – Cecach Federal Infantry Morale Detachment – £58.00
HSD15-1304 – Cecach Federal Mechanised ‘Intruder’ Detachment – £81.00
HSD15-801 – Podele’s Lions Heavy Infantry Detachment – £45.00
HSD15-802 – Podele’s Lions Panzer Grenadier Detachment – £52.00
HSD15-803 – Podele’s Lions Panzer Detachment – £71.00
HSD15-804 – Podele’s Lions Assault Panzer Detachment – £105.00

HSD6-301 – Fasolini Company Detachment (410CGS Guns) – £7.25
HSD6-301q – Fasolini Company Detachment (440CGS Quad Guns) – £7.25
HSD6-901 – Cecach Republican Commando Detachment – £5.75
HSD6-902 – Cecach Republican Mechanised PzGren Detachment – £10.00
HSD6-903 – Cecach Republican Infantry Detachment – £6.25
HSD6-904 – Cecach Republican Mechanised Infantry Detachment – £6.75
HSD6-905 – Cecach Republican Armoured Detachment – £11.50
HSD6-1301 – Cecach Federal Garrison Detachment – £10.50
HSD6-1302 – Cecach Federal Mechanised Garrison Detachment – £11.50
HSD6-1303 – Cecach Federal Infantry Morale Detachment – £8.00
HSD6-1304 – Cecach Federal Mechanised ‘Intruder’ Detachment – £11.00
HSD6-801 – Podele’s Lions Heavy Infantry Detachment – £6.25
HSD6-802 – Podele’s Lions Panzer Grenadier Detachment – £7.00
HSD6-803 – Podele’s Lions Panzer Detachment – £9.75
HSD6-804 – Podele’s Lions Assault Panzer Detachment – £12.00

Posted in 15mm SF, 6mm SF, Hammer's Slammers | 1 Comment

A Sluggish Expansion

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Tony

Phil Page, our friend at Slug Industries, has a Kickstarter running to expand his 1/300th Medieval village. We’re pleased to see that it’s already reached it’s target, but you still have a couple of weeks to jump on board and pick up some beautifully detailed micro-Medieval buildings.

If you missed his initial KS for the first part of the village (which includes a very nifty laser-cut partially constructed barn), we still have a small number of sets left on our website (you won’t find them anywhere else).

Posted in Slug Industries | Comments Off on A Sluggish Expansion

Agricultural Additions

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Tony

We launched our new Agricultural Colony back in the bright days of the summer, and it’s been one of the more popular styles of 6mm buildings that we’ve come up with. So we felt it was time to expand the colony a bit with some new designs from the factories of Thunberg-Haalland.

We have a new large homestead building (imaginatively name Homestead-4), large enough to be home to one of the families of colonisers on Rallance-IV. As with other homestead designs it sits on a raised platform to keep it away from minor flooding and local critters.

The second new design is a larger building with several sections that can be configured as a headquarters for the local council, public community centre, or just a set of offices for the local branch of T-H. It could even be pressed into service as a monorail station if you remove the rear set of steps. During development it was dubbed The Pavilion, for reasons that now elude us, but the name has stuck.

B300-1310 – The Pavilion – £6.00
B300-1311 – Homestead-4 – £3.50

Posted in 6mm SF, New Releases | 1 Comment

Defending the Roads

Posted on November 3, 2023 by Tony

We’ve added another pair of models to our 1/700th range of coastal forts. These are both Henrician Device Forts, built by Henry VIIIth and funded by an order from the King known as a ‘device’. These were mostly built across the South coast to counter the threat from the Spanish, although some were built in Wales and as far north as Hull on the East coast. They varied in size and design from small artillery blockhouses to large castles such as Deal and Walmer.

This week’s pair are from Dorset, and overlook the Weymouth Harbour and Portland Roads anchorages. Sandsfoot Castle (also known as Weymouth Castle) is a smallish rectangular blockhouse with an octagonal gun platform at one end. Sadly it’s in a state of disrepair nowadays, with much of the stone taken for other building projects when it fell into disuse in the C.17th.

Portland Castle is further south on the Isle of Portland. It’s a fan-shaped artillery castle which housed around a dozen guns, and was still used during the Napoleonic wars. After repairs to the foundations, today it’s considered on of the best preserved of Henry’s forts.

B700-196 – Portland Castle – £3.00
B700-197 – Sandsfoot Castle – £2.00

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

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