Getting WaT 15mm tanks in Australia

 Getting WaT 15mm tanks in Australia 

https://toofatlardies.co.uk/product-category/what-a-tanker/

What a Tanker in my area (Canberra Australia) uses 15mm (1/100) miniatures to play this great 'beer and pretzels' level miniatures wargame.

One of my friends asked how to get miniatures, and I am the sort to head off being asked a questions a few times by making a blog post. (Hi Mr C!)

The game only needs a few tanks per side to get going, and on your first game and large team games, you may only need a single tank, easily borrowed from your teacher or game runner. After that, you will naturally want your own collection. 

STORES

http://store.aetherworks.com.au/

Super Biased first pick! Aetherworks are my friends of 20+ years and I have even done bits of work for them. I declare my bias :)   

An easy start point would be the "Fury" boxed set with three US and two germans.  

You can drill down in the store to Miniature/ Flames of War/ country and then pick the miniatures you want. This is a very easy way to get what you want miniature by miniature. They are located in Sydney, so postage is fast. For example, this link should go to the German vehicles. Vehicles this way are about $15 each. 

If you want to start a collection in one box and don't want to paint, you could get the World of Tanks Miniatures game and get four base coated tanks and a whole other rule set for $71. This is a rebrand of Gale Force 9's (GF9) old "Tanks!" game adding in the basecoat painting and bumping the price. Singles are not out yet, but look like they are $22 each. Great if you have no interest in painting, or if you only want to detail the tanks yourself.

https://www.warandpeacegames.com.au/15mm_Plastic_WWII_s/2469.htm

War and Peace stock a few different companies than Aetherworks. they link above goes to 15mm WW2. The bargain of the moment seems to be that they are clearing their GF9 TANKS games miniatures for $7.50 each. Good price! Limited Stock.

https://www.mightyape.com.au/brands/zvezda

Mighty Ape stock Zvezda models. They are inexpensive models, recently endorsed by Jygdrasil. He was very happy with them arriving in a couple of weeks at very, low prices. He put his toe in with s $20 starter order and order #2 at $40 is underway.

https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=15mm+tanks&_sacat=0

Everyone knows ebay. You can watch carefully for bargains @ $5 a pop, or go spend $250 on someones complete pre painted collection of everything you want. Search 15mm tanks or 1/100 tanks

http://www.thecombatcompany.com/categories/miniatures-historical/plastic-soldier-company/15mm-world-war-ii.html

The Combat Company main differentiator here is stocking Plastic Soldier Compoany brand miniatures. They came through ompeteing with Flames of War by offering inexpensive simple pose plastic miniatures. They sell cheap tanks in boxes of five to match the FoW ruleset. 

3D PRINTING

Down at the 15mm level, 3D printing is just fine. If you have a friend with skills in the area, the polite thing to do is for you to make all the tank decisions by picking what you want from https://www.thingiverse.com/ and sending them the links. Then, offer them about $5 per tank for filament and setup labour. I have 6/25 3d printed tanks, and unless you have a good eye you won't be able to spot them from my plastic and metal tanks until you pick them up.

 

The quest to be "That Guy"

"That guy" is from a three panel work "The Martyrdom of St. Ursula" by Hans Memling. He is depicted in what appears to be the armour of a mid to low level man at arms. One of my aims as a member of The Company of Saint Christopher is to get my gear ready, so I can be armed and armoured like this man. The picture was painted by an artist who lived at the time, the clothes are cut in the right style, and the complexity and expense is not too great.

Head to toe breakdown:
Helmet: His simple cap helmet will be protective in a basic way, and not too hot. I have no sourced this helmet yet: It will likely be my last piece gathered: I intend to use my current Sallita until this cap has been sourced/ created.

Mail: Dan Oliver has shown they way, and has an inexpensive source of riveted mail. I will get the links presently.

Jack (the cloth jacket) & Jack Chains (the arm armour): I intend to save the ladies of the group that sewing task: It is my intention to purchase from Cap-a-pie.

Poleaxe:  I intend to have a variant of the Wallace collection hammer extended to poleaxe length. Hammer and rear spike, Spear point and butt spike. Four ends, no waiting. It is my hope to craft an SCA poleaxe to as close to the same weight and handling as the metal reproduction item.

Sword and sword belt: I will hand make the belt, and I will talk to Master Owain about the best way to obtain the sword.

Hose & Braies: Here I will talk to the ladies of the group, and get patterned and supplied, likely in exchanged for calligraphic work etc.

Boots: I already have a pair of the boots, and will get another pair.  

Knights, households and longswords, oh my

Knights:
I was asked to join the chivalry in the SCA, and on Easter Sunday I was dubbed a knight with my grandfather's sword. Since then I have prioritized my medieval efforts slightly differently, and made sure my broad attention was on the whole of the Politarchopolis fighting community, and that my narrow focus was on building up the knowledge and combat capacity of my household, and my personal fighting goal was to develop a greater understanding of medeival combat techniques.

Politarchopolis has had a training revolution brought to it by appreciating and appropriating methods from two main sources: Sir Gemini's combat school, and ANU Kendo.  Duke Cornelius (Corny) has been in contact, and has studied the Gemini method. ANU Kendo has a 10 week beginners course, where you wander in clueless, and at the end you are able to throw the basic shots, put on armour, and see if Kendo if for you. These two were melded, and Corny has run beginners course three (?) times now, and one of my aims is to pick up this method well enough to be able to teach it independently next course. We have lots of new blood who have come through the course, and the mid-rankers are all improving in technique and teaching capacity.

Households:
My household has grown since my knighting, and at the fields of gold event later this month, I intend to take squires, and present belts to those who will stay as man-at-arms. Each is equally important to me, for different reasons. Aedwyn had faith in me way back when, and I have faith that she will sort out that getting cash in, and having free time thing enough to find time and fight more. Angus is an accomplished combatant, quite skilled, and needs to work on his temperament, calibration and training. Angus will be key in making sure the next two get authorized and have a good foundation of armoured combat. Urbana and Krieg are both sixteen, and are both learning the Gemini method. They are both high school students, and we are working on getting them armoured and ready to fight, as they have gotten their 'perfect circle' drills down pat, and need armour time to see where they go next. Urbana is academically gifted and a deep thinker, Krieg is charismatic and warm, both are figuring out that teenage thing pretty well. Gunter has a hard path, away from a major fighting community. He will need to find local combatants to train with, and I will be here to answer his questions as best I can. My mystery man-at-arms is suffering most deeply from work-life imbalance: I hope he can find a way through that issue.

Longswords:
I love co-incidences: I love that I can go to an ABS work function, find this guy who works in the ABS, and is an incredible teacher of the study of longsword. I love that we met just as I was knighted and bringing my head up to look around at the broader re-enactment world. I love that we had free alcohol as we figured all this out.

Lucas/ Matt is doing some super cool stuff. HEFT & The Company of Saint Christopher are going great guns. HEFT is a school of medieval combat methodologies studying existing manuals and other modern teachings. The Company is more of a living history group, with a focus being a tournament company around 1450-1500.

I recently had just over two weeks in Tasmania, and I made it to three HEFT lessons. They have a great crew, about 20 participants divided into beginners and advance, all learning and doing drills developed from the medieval manuals. Saint Christopher's had their first outing just after I left: My contribution was in the calligraphy field, and my gain was in finding sources to prepare an improved 15C persona.

The other white blog

I have bundled out my miniatures hobby blogging to "Needs more skulls" Funny thing about that, is that it is now where I am writing most, as I am on a hobby run. Those who care can head on over, and those who don't can stay here and wait till I do something interesting that is not miniatures related :)

Supernova Overnight trip

At the last minute I took up the spare ticket for Supernova.  It's the geek convention for comics, manga, sci-fi teev etc. I was never that keen in attending, but it was a road trip with a good crew, so why not? Adelle reveling in the end of exams, and was doing SCA workshop stuff all Saturday, and said that I was okay head off.

The crew was Dr Nick, the Womble, Uncle Ray-ray, Keefer, BK and myself.

The first run was Womble and I chatting about stickery jockery, Baronial succession, Kendo, when my wrist injury was going to heall enough to fight again, etc. And Dr Nick helped by snoring.

After Maroulan Keefer hopped in, and we got up to speed on happenings in QLD, and filled in our own ACT news services.

Arrival was done via a lot of wandering, and bitching about people from NSW not putting up useful signs. We walk a kilometre line, but that felt pretty good - I don't normally walk past 5000 people and fell trim and sexy. Thanks, geeks.

Once we were in on our pre-paid tickets, it was wandering around looking at stalls 20%, and going "Cool" to all the cosplayers 80%. Tell yah what, without the cosplayers it would have been pretty dull. I liked what the boys at 501st have done, linking cosplay with charity. Props, gang.

BK had never seen the "Bart knows people everywhere" thing in affect. As we were going for lunch, Numbat showed up, rescued us from the convention queue for food, and took us to a nearby pub. Win! (Later, when we randomly chose a pub in Sydney, the barmaid was a fellow Beswick. From ten metres away and not being able to hear, the gang thought I was trying to pick her up as I was yapping to her for five minutes and she seemed quite keen. Heh. One - I have Adelle at home. Two - I'm not Tasmanian!)

Next was more wander around the convention. It was okay, but I wouldn't rush to do it again.

After, we got a park near the hotel, and checked out our rooms. We called the MM crew but they already had dinner plans.

We just wandered around, and due to having an Alice in our party, decided to got to Alice's Thai restaurant. A cheesy way to choose and eatery, but it worked! Well worth a try, the Musulman curry is great. After this we wandered into the bar staffed by my discovered relative, discussed the Beswick facebook links, and had a few drinkies. As usual, I had one to everyone elses three, but the chat was good so I had fun.

We wandered slowly back to our rooms, and I stripped off and hit they hay. Not so early! Others had ordered pizza and a six pack, and so we had a room party. We watched Australia's first world cup goal, I explained why Kewel was sent off (I called it off the live feed - he twitched into it. Not much, but he did. ref saw what I saw) and we saw the equaliser.

After that it was 2am and ready to crash. Next morning it was time for some Ray-ray and the Audi ( He loved it when i said 'It sounds like a car from the movies')  Come Marulan the other way, BK, Womble and I hopped in the toe-rag and put on a obscure 90's collection we found on the way in. Hitting Canberra to the soaring strains of "Stay" by Shakespears Sisters seemed somehow right.


Once I landed I got texted that J had sprained his Ankle. I got stuck into the dishes, and J was amused that the best way to get him around was via piggy back from me. Home!

Brisvegas shines on like a crazy diamond

We parked in the new half built car park. Caught our flights on Virgin Blue. Caught the Airtrain in the Valley.

Grabbed a super bright long sleeved shirt from a goth botique on Brunswick street before heading up to Mana Bar.  Manabar was heaps of fun, with about 20 friends all jammed in having fun. SCA, Burgers (Cheeseburger gothic blog fans) and gamer friends represented. Medway's awesome gurning unleashed a thousand photochop memes. We even achieved the internet fame of a Mana bar advert!

Went to dinner at the Tibetan place next to the Arts Theatre. 13 fine people did the banquet. It was nice, basic stuff, breads, dip and curries. Once they knew we needed to be done by the show, they got their shuffle on and we made it comfortably. There was plenty to eat, and some small amount was left behind - impressive with that ravaging horde. Burgers and my mates are good at maths - we were $1.50 over on the bill :)

Meeting up with the crew went smoothly, and tickets were distributed. Two friends who were just winging it managed to get in - Simon generously gave one of his comp tickets to Greg, and Toni managed to get in on the standby list.

They play was good fun. A couple of roles were compressed, but the right cuts were made. The jokes from the book all hit home despite knowing they were coming, and the latest jokes slipped in perfectly as well, with the added bonus of shock of the new. There were a couple of themed return reference jokes that were played perfectly, especially the musical numbers with Beyonce's "Put a ring on it" and "The Teddy Bear's picnic"

Nat's blog did a great job of outlining last night shennanigans.

Abe's ten bucks was returned in a very Birmo way - taped onto the commemorative urinal. If you want your ten bucks that bad, Mr Frellman...

Birmo popped a reference to the evening, with better Burger lists than I can recall in the comment.

I picked up some merch, a couple of stubbie coolers and a "Team York Street" t-shirt.

Buzz Glitter Twitter Flitter Vampires

GW -  Buzz - So... it's like... twigter? gtwit? Nifty.

Bart Beswick - Well, it's gooGLe crossed with twITTER, so it must be GLITTER. I wonder if Mariah Carey uses it yet?

BC - Got to love the sparkle

GW - Do Vampires use it?

Bart Beswick - Vampires use Buzz / Glitter during the daylight, then turn into Bats and use Twitter at night, but they call it Flitter.

Internet back, time low, Twitter query

The internet is back at my house, so I'll be able to post from home again. Telstra got it right on the third attempt.

Time is low due to preparation for crown and a new young lass. Both GREAT reasons.

I'm getting half a moment to post tweets (Twitter messages) here and there - is there a way to have your tweets show up on your blogger blog? I couldn't find anything in the help files on a quick look, and have not yet investigated RSS but from what I hear I assume there is a way to get them to talk.