First redoubt finished

Some posts ago I showed the early stages of the redoubt construction for Poltava.  Now I have finished the first one:

I recall that these redoubt are planned for Maurice as a "immobile unit" and hence are not intended to host a base. Rather they have an intrinsic garrison (which will be materialised by a couple of minis). In Maurice terms the Redoubt characteristics are:

Redoubts are immobile garrisons

-1 Disruption point. Broken at 2

-Fire 2 dices as Trained at 4 BW

-Fires in any direction at a single target

-Hard Cover as in a city against enemy fire

-Combat value of 4 unmodified in defense. 

-Cannot assault.

-Cannot be assaulted by cavalry.

-Broken if Attacker doubles. Any other results is no effect.

There are still four of them to be finished. (In my planned Maurice scenario the redoubts are scaled to 5.

The Russians are coming

The painting line for the next weeks: 

on the left the “augmentation” of the existing Russian cavalry which shall be put on the standard of two bases for each regiment. On the right the infantry regiments which are necessary to complete the Poltava OoB, the existing regiments being based on the Holowczin OoB. One of the regiment is a Streltsi one mustered from the “Streltsi bonus figures” which I collected between my Strelets boxes.

To complete the OoB however I need further 7 two-bases regiment which I plan to represent by using both Strelets and Zvedza miniatures.

In the first line you can see the five yet unfinished redoubts whose building I showed in a previous post. I am going to use the same techniques to represent the Russian Army camp which is a serious affair like we can see in these near-contemporary prints:

Poltava: the redoubts, part 1.

Any decent replay of Poltava can’t  be done without the famed redoubts. As we all remember, the Russians built 10 redoubts straight on the swedish advance line just the night before the battle (some of them were indeed unfinished at the beginning of the swedish attack). In my scenarios I reduced the number to 5 and started to think how represent them.

An idea of how they should be is given in this painting I found on DeviantArt:

however, given the scale of my scenarios (a 40x30mm base represents a battalion and a 40x40 base represents 4-5 squadrons), rather than a “real” redoubt capable to receive a real garrison, I decided to represent the redoubts as terrain items with specific combat capabilities (more or less like the DBHx “Strongpoint”). A token miniature then will represent the presence of a garrison whose values and capabilities are given by the scenario rules.

It follows that my redoubts size will be 65x55 mm with an empty space more or less of 40x30 mm inside to host the token miniatures (one or two, I have not yet decided).

Here I’ll show the steps I followed to build my redoubts.

First of all a cut a rectangular thick cardboard 65x55 mm and a “rod” taken from an HD polystirene insulating board, of an approximatively square cross-section  about 20 mm.

Then the redoubt "walls" are glued with white glue to the cardboard; at this stage the rod overlaps the cardboard base:

To give a certain uniformity to the scarp I made a template to draw the contours of the parapet: then by using an hot-wire saw I cut the polystirene to create the scarp.

The embrasures and the redoubt access are roughly drawn and then cut with the hot-wire saw. 

The outer faces of the redoubt and the parapet are then plastered with the Vallejo Brown Earth paste 26.219.

The redouts interiors are lined with cardboard stripes and toothpicks to represents the wooden planks.

Finally I did the redoubt access: I decided to give different accesses to each redoubt to add variety: in this case with toothpicks and cardboard I realized a tilting drawer.

At this point the redoubts are ready to be painted. More on a next post.

Star Fort

Everybody needs a “Star Fort” for his minis: I found this for free at the Mondorfer Bastelbogen site. It is the Festung Pfaffenmütz, built on the Rhine by the Dutch in 1622 during the Thirty Years War and besieged and conquered by the Spanish in 1629. It doesn’t exist anymore, its trace lost in the whirlwind of Revolutionary Wars.

It is an easy model to build: I simply flocked the glacis to give some uniformity with my terrain and with the regimental bases. In the future I plan to add some ravelin and maybe an hornwerk. No idea how to use it in my wargame, but I felt that my collection wouldn’t be complete without a fort…