Having a merry little white Christmas

Season’s greetings, and here we are, or rather here I am, almost a year since I published my first blog post, almost three years since I ordered Go Strong into the Desert – where the gestation for this project began, and a year since I received my first order of figures from Perry Miniatures. Over 2,000 page views and three, yes three, followers.

Progress hasn’t been as rapid as I should have liked – even the lockdowns were filled with a major professional project, which is ongoing, and will continue to demand much of my time. Overall then, I am not too unhappy with my progress … I now have a clear idea of the structure of the project in terms of the overall scope, unit composition, army composition, modelling projects, and so on.

On the subject of unit composition, I have revisited this and decided to increase the RMLI and infantry companies to 24 figures, two half companies of 12. This was prompted while looking at the composition of the infantry unit in melee, which had been bothering me for a while. I concluded that the addition of some kneeling and reloading figures would give it more of the character of the eye witness sketches (usually worked up by the artists at The Illustrated London News or The Graphic). Rather than substitute figures I decided to add some, increasing the unit size.

I am now thinking along the following lines:
– Naval Brigade companies 20 figures
– Infantry and RMLI companies 24 figures
– Cavalry troops 6 figures, squadrons 12 figures

This allows for a standard size infantry unit of 24 (a company) for Black Powder and a regular infantry unit of 12 (a half company) for The Men Who Would Be Kings. Cavalry troops are a bit small for The Men Who Would Be Kings, but I think I can live with this, since I would rather not have expensive cavalry figures left over (given that there are three in Perry Miniatures’ codes). Much of this is about the look of the unit on the table … too few figures at 28mm just looks wrong. For the same reason I am making batteries units of two models.

Accordingly I purchased some extra figures; two sprues of plastic Afghanistan/Sudan infantry; six kneeling/receiving infantry; six firing/reloading infantry. I also bought some additional Beja riflemen and crouching spearmen.

White-out … undercoated buildings, tents for the British field hospital, and small barricades including one of sand bags … plenty of sand in the Sudan.

Undercoated RMLI (top) Naval Brigade (middle), Beja camel band, and Melton Prior, with Burnaby just out of shot … reloading, probably. (Did you see what I did there?)

Not much progress with these … I am replacing the flag bearer with a metal rifleman, since I want these fellows to be stealthy.