First pictures of Salute

Yes, probably cheating because I just spent my Friday up at ExCeL setting up tables, moving chairs and stuffing bags, but here are the very first pictures of Salute. This was about 4:00pm today; we have maybe a quarter of the traders in, and we still need to lay out all the tables for visitors to eat their lunch at - useless information number 1, we HAVE to hire the ExCeL food trolley, otherwise nobody is allowed to eat in the hall. And we have to pay for the electricity it uses as well.

Most traders will be arriving tomorrow morning from 7:00am, and all of the games will as well. Anyway - early night, as it will take me about 2 hours to collect the people I'm giving lifts to and get up there in the morning, and on early shift, I have to be in the hall for 6:45.

Happy days. I have to say, I really enjoy it. I was chatting to a trader (I won't embarrass him by naming him) and he said that they really enjoy Salute because of the buzz you get - seven hours of trading goes by in a flash. I was thinking - if we have 4,000 visitors, and they spend £100+ a head (not unreasonable; I know many who spend a lot more than that), that is getting close to a half million pounds of wargaming trading in seven hours. And I do think that £100 is a conservative estimate, what with the number of pre-orders and collections I see.

Wargames Factory release the Greatcoats

I'm excited to see that WF have a release date for their Greatcoat infantry at last. Because of the nasty add-on fees that the Post Office slaps onto them, I'm only pre-ordering one pack, but as soon as Nick at North Star gets them in, I want another five.

Anyway, in case you have missed the pictures, here are one or two...





...I think mine will be in 'Steel Legion' colours with tan greatcoats and black armour, but they do look very nice. Assuming the shoulder pads are attached to the arms, I should be able to remove some pads to use on other minis to tie them together stylistically.

Mission: Kill Team

We played a few games of the Kill Team mission from GW's new mission book down the club last night; my new scenery got a quick run-out and all was good fun. I did intend to take my camera along, but somehow it slipped my mind at the last moment, so these rather poor efforts were snapped on my phone.





The tanks were acting as scenery, and did quite a good job of keeping my troops alive! I went with Imperial Guard (though I don't have any troops yet, so they were WW1 German figures. The list I took was:

Veteran Squad Alpha:
1 x Sgt with plasma pistol (feel no pain)
4 x lasgun
1 x heavy bolter (relentless)
1 x flamer
2 x grenade launcher

Veteran squad Beta:
1 x Sgt with laspistol
4 x lasgun
1 x heavy bolter (slow and purposeful)
1 x flamer
2 x grenade launcher

That gives me move-and-shoot on the heavy weapons and the specials are assault weapons anyway, so this is a quite mobile army. In hindsight, I could have happily replaced the flamers with more grenade launchers (S6 is very effective), but they did well enough.

We had fun; nice scenery helps, but the fact that we could play three games in an evening made for a nice change of pace. I think we'll play again...

Ragnarok Demolisher

Well, I didn't get anything done over Easter, but here's the third tank. This time it's another KV2, this time with the spare barrel from the Leman Russ Demolisher. Looking at the pictures, I seem to have swapped the hull and turret with the first one (and it's also ended up at the back of all the photos), but it doesn't really matter. I tried for some battle damage, and removed the engine cover and one road wheel of the new hull (which seem to be not unusual on the real thing, judging by some wartime photos.) The engine was a resin piece from Ramshackle Games fitted into a plastic card box and glued to the underside of the hull. I now have another couple of KV2, for a total of five (three of them still in boxes).

I took another couple of photos along with the Leman Russ; you can see my terrain as well, including a half-finished building to the left of the last picture. This was a Pegasus kit again, to which I have added plastic card floors; it still needs to be fully painted, but I thought it would look okay in a couple of 'action photos'.