Sunday 1 September 2013

Artillery rebasing

One of the most dreaded words in wargaming: rebasing

A big foul up on my part had the wood cut by a friend into bases, cut into the wrong sizes.  I pulled out one of my SYW artillery bases to compare and placed it beside the existing Napoleonic infantry bases and, you know what, it looked good! More in 'scale' to what the infantry are and more 'proportional'.
No scientific rationalization or even mathematical calculations for any of this. Just looks good.

Been having trouble with our firing arcs for the rules and while these smaller sizes could help with that, the look had me immediately excited.
  I have felt this a few times in my long wargaming life and it has always turned out to be a good thing. With that feeling, I took some quick pictures and sent them to Seth for his thoughts and approval.  He said he liked it too. 

Upper Right: new and old sizes of artillery stands. Middle: Napoleonic infantry in between SYW artillery with the red-painted cannon on the same sized bases (all terrained to not jar the eye from the effect.)  Upper Left: Napoleonic infantry next to the newer based artillery on raw wood
While the smaller bases are better for storage/ transport [nine in an area which only four could fit previously]  any rebasing effort is a pain.  I took an afternoon in front of the television watching a baseball game to paint the bases edges, attach the painters tape for the space left for the labels, and glue on the dice frame, and finally, attached the newly removed miniatures of all my painted artillery so far (23 models and crews).  A little tight getting in the poses, labels and dice frame and still leaving room for markers but doable.
I still must terrain and flock.  Sigh.  But this was necessary -- in a wargamer sort of way ---  I truly hope.....