June | 2014 | Musings from the warp

The first of a few moderns on the project bench, a pair of M-ATVs from Empress Miniatures.

Assembled a pair of M-ATVs from Empress to go with our moderns and to be used with our in-house modern skirmish rule-set, Fire Team. The first thing that needs to be said is that these boys are big units. The only way to hide these things would be to find a building and drive into it for cover, and it’d have to be an American sized building at that, they stand over the Abrams and dwarf the British Jackals, which I thought were pretty big vehicles anyway. I must admit I’m unconvinced of their use outside of patrolling a tertiary warzone or policing duties but I guess time and combat success will tell the tale ….

And the models ….. they comprise 15 resin and 15 white metal parts. The resin is impressive, being very crisply moulded with very little clean up required to get the major parts flush and aligned. There were a couple of minor issues, while filing I did “break” through the resin surface and exposed a couple of sinkholes but a little Tamiya epoxy putty should fix them ok and one of my turrets was close to being a miscast. It looks like the moulds shifted during pouring with the top being off centre to the base and one side pretty roughly cast, although after some clean up and paint I suspect only I’ll notice. The white metal parts are ok and typical quality for mixed media wargaming kits.

I made a couple of detail changes, drilling and filling out the armoured glass windows on the turrets and pre-drilling holes for aerials and some wiring to be added later. There’s a few extra details I’ll add after basic painting too, just the usual stuff, tow shackles, some chain, mirrors, front grill mesh, rear mudguards, step ladder and spare wheel bracket, the aerials and wiring for them and the ECM gear, and some mesh and stowage to the rear storage cages …… at some stage I might try making a CROWs remote weapons system mount as seen on the current vehicles, which should be just a plug in swap for the manned armoured weapon station.

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A few ref pics filched from the web to whet the appetite ………