Blue Helix Defense Solutions - An awesomely painted (i.e. not by me) 6mm Mercenary Force!

I came across this force on The Wargames Website a couple a month ago while cruising the net, trawling for inspiration and trying to get a sense of what to get to start playing Horizon Wars...

Mathieu Moyen AKA Mr Average AKA Mike One Echo kindly allowed me to show the relevant lead porn and matching fluff (which I edited from a couple of forum messages into a single blog post) on my blog! So, Ladies and Gentlemen...  

Blue Helix Defense Solutions LLC is a "Dispute Resolution Organization" headquartered in Québec City and operating throughout the Americas and Western Europe.

Somewhere near the Sulaco-Costaguana Border, a Blue Helix Intervention Unit starts its day…

Tommorow's Wars meets Horizon Wars - A 6mm Democratic People's Republic of Glory (DPRG) Battlegroup?

Although Horizon Wars and Tommorow's Wars have nothing but the editor and book production value, reading the recently bought former inspired me to (beside buying a 6mm British Battlegroup) go back at the later to look at some miniature porn!

It's not the first time I think about gaming in that universe: I already wrote down some thoughts about which infantry models to use for the Republic of Arden and for the Democratic People Republic of Glory...

Brazilian built grav tanks are starting to equip select People's Republic Guard formation (the one that didn't displease Dear Leader). All pictures (except the Darghaur hereunder) from their manufacturer website.

Horizon Wars - First impression & shopping for a British Battlegroup

I just bought Horizon Wars...

The rules seem promising and I actually have other interested parties in my gaming group. 

One thing I like very much is that the small scale hasn't lead to an explosion of mini count.   

In most games, the smaller the scale the larger the scope: 28mm is for platoonish games, 15mm for company-sized games, 6mm for battalion and so on... Table size, number of elements (bases with either a single or several minis on) and game duration remain more or less constant around 4' to 6' by 4' (120cm to 18cm by 120cm), 30 to 50 elements and 2 to 3 hours a game.

After having been exposed to games like Mordheim and more recently X-Wing, I've come to appreciate games with a limited number of elements (a dozen) and short games (around one hour, allowing for two or three games on ), but have been missing the miniature diversity (infantry, ground vehicles, "air"-crafts all together on a table) of larger scope "combined arms" types of games...

Horizon Wars goes for a more "skirmish" (from a number of elements point of view) approach which should allow to enjoy varied "combined arms" miniatures while remaining in the realm of fast paced "skirmish" games... 

 

Pictures from the author collection... "A 'typical' Horizon Wars force (less airframes), it has a mix of infantry, armour and mechs; and elements can be dropped to create smaller lists or manipulated to create a list up to ~30 points, what I consider to be a large game that would take about 2 hours to play out."

I paint... I fucked up something! - Brigade Model 6mm vehicles - Proxy Dropzone Commander UCM

The events chronicled in this post actually happened last winter... It took me that long to be able to face it and blog about it!

I don't enjoy the painting part of the hobby (did that sounds GWish, or should I say the Hobby™?) and don't have any ambition to become an expert painter... I just like playing with painted (not to mention based and taken out of their package) minis and don't have the disposable income to have them painted.

It looks even worse in real...

So after a lot of research (cough procrastination cough) I went with Army Painter and their "basecoat your mini directly in its primary colour without an airbrush", "paint everything that's not that primary colour in bright uniform patches" and "dip the mini in Magic Goo™ that shade and highlight all the right parts of the mini without any work or talent" system...

Delta Zulu Six - A (6mm proxy) Dropzone Commander UCM army

I'm not too found of Hawk Wargames: I wrote about this before but I'm not sure where or when anymore, so here I go again (feel free to skip the next paragraph, the good stuff is underneath)...

When I first heard (well, read probably) about Dropzone Commander I was very eager: air-mobile-centric game, beautiful and original models (the Post Humans and United Colonies, that is; the Scourge goes from OK to "hey look, evil flying CD-rack at 3 o' clock" and the other aliens gear looks like a mix between Native Americans headgear and BDSM accessories)... And then I found out it was all going to be 10mm-scaled! I came over to 15mm for the sheer pleasure of freely mixing and matching whatever toy form whatever manufacturer, so I'm not about to buy into another scale that's compatible with pretty much nothing else, thank you very much! I'm sure there are plenty of arguments for that specific scale (air-mobile tactics need a lot of space; but then why not go 6mm, another widely accepted standard?), but that choice of scale seems a very GWish "let's make sure if they taste our product they can't go anywhere else to get their lead - or resin or whatever- fix" move to me. Not meant as a compliment. End of ranting.

Recently I read a blog post about using 6mm proxies to try out Dropzone Commander rules without taking on a new mortgage... Nothing new so far, I thought about it before but the idea kind of broke down with dropships (and other flyers): they are a key component to the game and each faction has several different very specific ones; not that easy to source in 6mm. But Raskal just used suitably sized Firestorm Armada ships (he had, I assume, laying around) for the different dropship. 

6mm not-UCM proxy army by Raskal over at Raskal Central.

Sure they're not the correctly scaled next to the 6mm infantry and ground vehicles, but...

• Visual scale clues are usually pretty limited on spaceships model;
• A bit of scale wiggle room is apparently allowed when two scales are not in the same plane (i.e. air versus ground à la Flames of War 15mm ground forces with 1/144 airplanes).

I think Raskal intended this experiment as a crude placeholder (he ended up buying the official stuff), but I think it could work as a permanent solution... Especially if you go for spaceships that stylistically match your ground vehicles and blend them further together with your paintjob...

So here we go with yet another project (as usual just a gedankenexperiment, I probably won't go very far with it)!

I'll call this project Delta Zulu Six: "delta zulu" for "dropzone", off
course; "six" for 6mm but also for the commander call sign in military
radio procedures, so "DZ6" can actually mean "dropzone commander";
the triangle is both the Greek letter delta and the APP-6 symbol for a
dropzone... I'm quite proud of this ;-)

Computer Games Imagi-Nations - ArmA 3 - Altis Armed Forces

The Armed Assault (ArmA) series website as long been in my browser favourites and an exemple of nicely done imagi-nations with exaclty the sort of information and details one needs for wargaming purposes. I've never played the games themselves (from what I've read, they're quite good but their realism and steep learning curve puts them outside the reach of the casual gamer that I am) but ArmA 2 Chernarus (a civil war ridden post-Soviet republic) and neighbouring Takistan (basicaly not-Afghanistan) were instumental in me "finding out" imagi-nations as a way to actually play with ultra-moderns minis without stressing my suspention of disbelief too much!

I recently ventured into the ArmA 3 part of the site and discovered the islands of Altis and Stratis and the fight of the NATO and Altis Armed Forces (AAF) to repel the Canton Protocol Strategic Alliance Treaty (CSAT) invasion... Another great looking imagi-nation, original factions and a very interesting weapon mix on the very edge of near future sci fi... What's not to love?

Altis Armed Forces. Screenshot from developer website.

So let's take a look at the "independents" from the game, the AAF, their gear and the best way to model them in 15mm and 6mm (not sure what scale I'd rather go for this yet)... As usual, this is just a much a place for me to consolidate info and links I gather than an actual post for your edification ;-)