15JUN09 Lower Hull of the TACP Stryker is assembled...

I've also given it its initial coat of paint, Vallejo #922 U.S.A Uniform from a WWII paint set. While its not precisely 'medium green' its as close as I've got and if memory serves me correct is about right for this Stryker! As a primer I'm using 1:1 scale Krylon Camouflage Olive Drab! I'm pretty impressed with how its working on the scale model!



Here are the PE parts I had in the earlier posting:


Not too shabby! Now I'm going to figure out where to go from here. I've got the loads of PE parts from Eduard for the Trumpeter kit, hopefully it will work on this version (needless to say, internet searches cannot come up with a separate product for the AFV Club kit...).

More to follow (I hope...).

09JUN09 AFV Club's M1130 CV TACP Stryker in 1:35th scale!

A recent trip to my local hobby shop, Models Enterprises in Fairbanks, surprised me immensely. I found a 1:35th scale M1130 CV Stryker by AFV Club. That in and of itself is no surprise. What did surprise me however was the fact that they included parts to turn the CV into the TACP Stryker! I was one of the first Airmen in the Air Force to work out of one of those variants, my squadron at the time, the 3rd ASOS, and our brigade the 172nd Stryker Brigade were the first to receive this particular variant! Here is the AF.mil article dated 05MAY2005!

USAF Photo

Personal Photo

Let me give you some of the details about the TACP variant rollout that the AF.mil article, and the Pentagon News Channel didn't go over. Or actually, the fallout from the rollout footage and article...


USAF Photo


Personal Photo

As you can see by the camera man on the left side of the photo in between Strykers, the Pentagon News Channel filmed the event also! However, that lead to CMSgt of the Air Force (at the time) Murray seeing his Airmen wearing 'a damn Army uniform'. This resulted in a phone call to the 354th Operations Group Commander bitching about "What the hell are my Airmen doing wearing a damned Army uniform" (rumor... call is true however) which resulted in our squadron being informed NOT to wear ACU's and get DCU uniforms ready for the deployment. Fun, my DCU's were from 2002 and still had my Airman First Class stripes on them along with my Ft. Riley 1st Armor Division (3rd BDE was there in 2002 until recently when the 1st Infantry Division returned to Ft. Riley). I remember running around on Eielson AFB in DCU's for a couple weeks until a call came down informing us that we could wear the ACU's that were issued to us for this deployment!


Personal Photo

Now, on to the kit!

The four shock absorber covers on the lower hull, parts P-10 and P-11. Somehow, I managed to fold them correctly...


I assembled the photo etched parts (P-10 and P-11 respectively) that go over the shock absorbers pretty easily. The highlighted part is P-7, the photo etched bolt and washer. As long as you cut them out carefully, on a piece of wood and use your finger nail to hold them in place, they don't go flying. I managed to use moisture on my finger tip to pick them up and place them roughly in the right spot, then used my hobby knife to get them right where I wanted them before the CA glue dried up.


Here are some styrene bolt/washers that came attached to the side of the parts sprue A. These were the worst to attempt to work with mainly because I had to carefully shave them off without losing them! After that, aligning them was the hardest part. However, as you can see here, the results were rather rewarding!


This is as far as I am right now, I do have a large portion of the lower hull completed as far as drive train and axles in place, that will be another article here shortly.

27APR09 German Weaponry of WWII

Here is a video of German weapons.

27APR09, WWII US Infantry Weapons Training clip

Kudos to The Sniper for digging up this old fossil!

Great film for wargamers of the WWII period. At the very least, its fascinating to see the amount of penetration from the .30 Cal rifle, (.30-06) round.

10APR09 Guns and Gaming

Yesterday I ran into Brian who runs the great gamer blog &games and had a good change of pace at work over at Frontier Outfitters. It was a good day for guns and gaming. Just a couple days ago I sold some .44 Mag dies (I own no .44 Mag revolvers... Long story, but I thought I might get one and so I bought reloading supplies for it, but then wound up getting a .45LC instead... For my wife... Years ago...) and used the cash to buy the board game Munchkin Quest to play with a buddy of mine who was getting ready to head back to Iraq. Not more than an hour after I get back to work from my lunch time shopping trip at Comic Shop, Brian walks up to the gun counter wearing a Boardgame Geek T-Shirt.

So, it was a good gun and gaming day yesterday. That its always great to meet the face behind a good blog!

27FEB09 First Map

I did it! I finally combined Inkscape (to do the hex grid) with GIMP (to turn the .png exported from Inkscape into a multi-layer Photoshop Document .psd file) so I could use Painter X to paint the background! So, you have a small village with the well and a battle field with several choke points to fight over. So far, no numbers yet...

Nuts and Bolts (short version):

1. Using Inkscape, I made a .65 inch high hexagon with .03 inch width stroke for line weight. I also made sure my document preferences were for US Letter size paper... Important! Inkscape defaults to A4, most of its development is done in Europe! When I was happy with where my hex grid was, and its alignment, I exported the entire page to .png format which allows RASTR editors like Photoshop or the GIMP to read it as a picture instead of a scalable vector graphics (.svg) file.

2. Using the GIMP (or Photoshop if you are rich enough, I know you aren't a pirate, if you are you need to try the GIMP... I've used the CS Demo and I'm not impressed with Photoshop...) I loaded the .png file. It starts out as black lines on a transparent sheet! Thats fantastic! Thats what makes it handy! I added another layer that was opaque white and moved it behind the hex grid. If I wanted to, I could start making my maps now by working on layers underneath the hex grid! After getting the background in place, I saved the file as a Photoshop Document (.psd).

3. Finally, I loaded the .psd file into Painter X. Painter X put up a background layer called 'canvas' behind my white background, so I deleted the white background and proceeded to add layers and build my map. Finally, I saved a copy in the .RIFF format for further editing using Painter X and exported a copy as a .jpg which we see here!

There you go, baby steps! Turning terrible twos!

15JAN2009

Playing with Pixen, I made a few good graphics for war games, be it computer or board type... I just don't know exactly how to apply it yet, but it'll happen someday I hope! I'm still learning Scribus and how to import my map grids from Inkscape. So far, nothing intelligible has been done that way yet...

Cavalry Scouts in Strykers


JTAC and ROMAD team (my old job!)