Draco - Task Force Bravo

Well, that was a relatively effective use of Christmas…I got some things painted…

My inital plan was to paint the tanks first before starting on the infantry, but after a few difficulties with coloring, I swapped to painting the grunts. And boy, did this bring back memories of when I still played Flames of War!

I have, however, developed a decent enough system for mass painting 15mm models like this, and, in many respects, I didn’t have to change much. Each model get put on the head of an iron nail, which allows me to paint all the parts of it without touching the mini itself. I work on one colour at a time, which allows each colour enough time to dry by the time I get through all 20 or so that I have on the pad.

But lets talk about the colours a bit.

Mostly, I did use the colour schemes given in the British sourcebook, and the camo scheme they have is actually quite good. But I did also remember that trying to do individual clothes camo is rather difficult to get working properly (at least for my skill level), plus a full suit of camo does tend to cause the miniature to blend into a single blob, since you can’t effectively highlight anything.

But somthing that came to mind was when I was painting my Finns for Flames of War – their winter uniform has a two-tone scheme, and it allowed the models to stand out quite a bit. I was wondering if I could do the same thing when I came across this picture:

I do understand that this is probably an earlier uniform since it doesn’t use the DPM-camo trousers (I read somewhere that it was the usual uniform that British troops wore in the Falklands), but it gave me the colour scheme I was looking for – the single colour pants would give some definition against the camo smock.

Next, I considered the L1A1 rifle.

Pictures I’ve seen of this gun have it both with wooden and plastic furniture (this is the British version, though – the Australian SLR had wood for its entire service), and you can even see some of Battlefronts own minis having a mix of brown and black furniture. But after a quick bit of searching I found statements from some veterans that the switch to plastic started in the mid-late 70’s, with new rifles having the plastic, and gradual conversion of the older weapons. However, this process was not completed by the time the L1A1 was replaced with the L85A1 in 1985. So, I decided that about 1 in 3 of my rifles would have wooden furniture to reflect this.

Also, you may notice in the company photo below, several of the soldiers of D Company were of African or Afro-Carribean decent. I decided to show this as well, although the ratio there was about 1 in 10.

The final thing I needed was a colour for my painted metal. According to the source book, it should be Bronze Green (Vallejo 897). But the experiments I had with that colour showed to to be waaaay to dark for my liking. It was at that point that I noticed the tank crew I was painting up I had used an old tube of Brown Violet (887), and it looked fairly good. A quick test, and that was going to be my main painted metal colour, as well as other things…

And two weeks later, my first two platoons and a few extra weapons were done…mostly – I ran out of minis to finish off all three platoons, and was one mini short for my second.

But didn’t you buy a Company box and an additional platoon?

Yes, I did, but I did a few things differently to what was recommended. For one, it appears that half the bases in a platoon are assumed to be having one of the leader models. My personal preference would be to have a leader only on the Unit leader stand, helping to point that stand out. Additionally, I wanted each of my GPMG teams to have a GPMG gunner on them. But the they only give you 3 gunners per platoon, only one of which is prone.

With that need for additional models as well as not using nearly a dozen leader models, I’m in need of another company box to finish it off, which I’ll pick up when The Bunker reopens next week. Yes, I’ll have left over minis, but I’ll start on another company in case I ever do a two-company force, or an Air Landing company, or the support troop for a Recon company (that I’ll probably paint up and never actually use in a game).

The only thing I don’t have that I still need for my first force is the FV432 transports – I’ve got several boxes on order, but indications are they won’t arrive before February. Not that it matters too much – I can pick up a box of Spartans from The Bunker and use them in the interim – they’re still APCs…mostly…

Still, the number of FV432s I need for a single company is impressive – HQ vehicle, 5 vehicles per platoon, 4 for the mortar platoon – that’s 20 per company, more if you want some additional weapons. All that plastic for metal bawkses! that’ll probably spend only two turns on the field…