"French artillery in 15/18mm" Topic

Partly inspired by an exchange on TMP (and thanks to LittleArmies) I have remade all my French artillery in approx. 1:100 scale to accompany my now 18mm army. This has been quite hard because when the various manufacturers were putting together the 15mm ranges there were a lot of misconceptions about French artillery (for example that the standard field piece was the 8-pdr; there also seems to have been a belief that all the gun carriages were the same, and based on that 8-pdr).

I have compiled an 8 part series of blogs on this project – but the summary is here: link

The results aren't the polished artworks I often see in this forum – but I hope this is of interest to anybody trying to build a French army in this scale.

And to anybody else starting out on the French army my descriptions of the various artillery pieces in use might be of interest too!

Matthew

I think these look great and always feel artillery make great indivual models. I loved your Guard Foot Artillery. Look polished enough to me!

I'm impressed by how much work you did to get the accuracy right. Nice bit of modeling overall.
I also greatly enjoyed your thoughts on skirmishing in wargames in your other post -- I was just hoping for a brilliant solution at the end!

WOW!!Great work there, and some lovely painting too. Many thanks for the effort you have put into this project.

Great article. Thanks!

Agree – Great article – Thanks

Would love to see more like this

Thanks for the kind words. My blog has a newsletter subscription facility if you want to know about future posts. My aim is now to post about once a week. But projects like this one take quite a bit of time, alongside the rest of life!

tshyrock. I am working on a skirmishing house rule for ESR!

Very nice work.

I hope this is of interest to anybody trying to build a French army in this scale.

Yes, your series was very helpful to this novice, as was the review by Little Armies I read a few months ago.

I am still painting AB infantry and have not yet purchased any artillery. I have been leaning towards Blue Moon artillery instead of AB only because BM offers 4-pdrs that I need. But BM sells packs of 6 guns, too many for my small project. I was wondering how it would look to mix 4-pdrs from BM with other size guns from AB.

Probably the most helpful comment was your summary of the 8-pdr that says,

… both Blue Moon and AB look fine – but these will look best beside models in the same stable, though.

So, although I may end up with some extra guns, all of them will be from the same Blue Moon "stable" as you say. I plan to use AB artillery crew with the BM guns. Hope it looks good whenever I get to that point someday.

It's a tough to choose between the BM and AB ranges, but they look better uniform rather than mixed. AB have finer detailing, slightly smaller wheels, and the carriage is narrower, straighter and with thinner cheeks. But neither range is complete!

AB sell in singles and have a much better 12-pdr. But no 4-pdr, and I think their 6-pdr is wrong. The howitzer is usable but it is the old 6 pouce, not the later 24-pdr, which was used much more widely.

BM sell in 6 packs, but they have a much better 6-pdr, and the range includes a 4-pdr (even if the wheels area bit small). But the 12-pdr carriage is over-sized and the French howitzer unusable. Though you can use the Prussian howitzer as a 24-pdr at a stretch.

If you are doing an early period army then it makes some sense to use the BM 4-pdrs and 8-pdrs, and maybe to use AB for the limited number of 12-pdrs and howitzers you require. But you wouldn't go hugely wrong by using BM just for the 4-pdrs. For me it is the 6-pdrs that make the big difference – and I am tolerating a certain amount of mixing of the two ranges even though BM predominates.

You won't go far wrong with AB crews, though I personally don't like their Old Guard Foot figures – not that I'm going to change them!.

Great Read keep up the good work

Ah! I forgot the Peninsula! You only really need 8-pdrs and 4-pdrs for that (and some 24-pdr howitzers if you go down to that level). BM would cover that quite nicely.

MatthewGreen – I'm very impressed at your efforts. That particular post of mine was a bit ignored by most viewers having very few hits compared with the Xan / BM / Campaign Games figure reviews so I was quite surprised to see your post whilst I was away in Greece.

I was thinking of doing a similar exercise with the British 9lber but as I only have the BM and AB versions it would be rather succinct!

matthewgreen: I found you above posting extremely useful. Thanks a lot! John Miller

Enjoyed the article and the frank comments!

Littlearmies. That's the problem with the stats – don't distinguish quality over quantit!. That post and the TMP interchanges certainly gave me a bit of a kick to sort my French artillery out, and the project just grew!