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 Coastal Forts, 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

A Holiday Gift

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Tony

We’re still on a holiday break, but we’ve left behind these new models for you while we’re away. There’s one new model in the Desert Buildings range, and two in the Desert Outlands range (which you probably all mix and match anyway – they’re slightly different styles but perfectly compatible).

That’s it – a brief post, but straight to the point. We’re on holiday after all !

B300-153 – Low Tower with Stairs – £3.00
B300-809 – Corner Building – £2.50
B300-810 – Building with Bay Front – £2.50

Posted in 6mm SF, New Releases | 1 Comment

Base-ick Instinct

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Tony

Yes, that’s probably a terrible headline…

But today we have several new types of resin bases aimed at 15mm models.

The first is a set of flying stands for grav vehicles and VTOLs. There are five different bases, pre-textured with rocks and dirt and with a hole in the middle. They are supplied with a ~200mm length of acrylic rod which you can cut to suit your requirements (it made more sense to us to supply this uncut rather than dictate how high your vehicles would be hovering).

We also have three new types of resin figure base. These all have slots for five figures, so will suit games such as Osprey’s recent release Xenos Rampant. There’s a base with regular spacing for normal troops, one with slightly more irregular spacing for creatures or hordes, and a compact variant for smaller figures. All slots are for figures on 16mm round bases – Euro 1-cent coins are perfect if you can get them, or our M8 washers are the same size. The two larger resin bases have holes for magnets (not supplied). The bases are supplied unpainted and untextured – the photos below show what they look like once painted.

SF15-946 – 5-figure Regular Base – £0.60
SF15-946a – 5-figure Irregular Base – £0.60
SF15-947 – 5-figure Compact Base – £0.40
SF15-948 – Grav Vehicle Bases (x5) – £3.00

Posted in 15mm SF, New Releases | 1 Comment

Killer Whale

Posted on September 8, 2023 by Tony

First a reminder – it’s Colours tomorrow, hopefully we’ll see some of you there.

And another reminder – we’re on holiday next week, the website will remain open for orders but nothing will get dealt with until we return on Monday 18th. This covers orders from the 7th of September onwards – unfortunately restocking and loading for the show yesterday meant that we weren’t able to tackle a couple of orders that came in during the day.

And now – something new for the Antipodeans; the Orca class Battlecruiser sets off for distant stars, bolstering the PacFed spacefleet.

A two-piece metal kit, it boasts four engines (more engines = more speed, of course !) and photon torpedo tubes in the main hull.

We’ll have some in stock on Saturday at Colours, and any mail orders will be dealt with when we return from holiday.

SFS-702 – Orca class Battlecruiser – £4.50

Posted in New Releases, Spaceships | 1 Comment

Time for a Short Break

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Tony

After last Sunday’s return to the Hereward show for the first time in four years, we’re gearing up and restocking for Colours on Saturday.

After this, it’s holiday time again – Tony is off to the south coast with the Brigadieress and the hound for a few days R and R. Unlike last year, when illness had left us badly behind, this year we’re in a much better state and pretty much up to date with orders. So we’ll leave the website open, with the obvious caveat that any new orders won’t be dealt with until we reopen the workshop on the 18th.

Hopefully we’ll be able to cram in another new release before then, there should be enough time before setting off for Newbury on Friday afternoon.

Posted in Updates and General Waffle | 2 Comments