All,
Man am I on a painting streak. Not getting any games in, but painting my butt off. Next up in the queue is some more 15mm modern troops, a US Navy SEAL platoon from Jimmi at Flashpoint Miniatures in The Land Down Under. A cool pack, it's 24 troops in a whopping 24 poses, which is absolutely incredible, perfect for knuckleheads like me that are playing skirmish games in 15mm.
Whenever I get a new set of troops I immediately open them and spread'em out, survey the figures, see what I've got. What I immediately picked up on with these guys is that they can be evenly divided into two groups based on gear. While weapons and headgear vary, twelve of the guys are not wearing packs and twelve are, and most of the twelve without packs are loaded down with belted ammo. It immediately hit me: break the platoon into two different elements: the one with packs is the Reconnaissance and Surveillance (R&S) element, the snoopers and poopers, inserting deep into enemy territory, locating the enemy and keeping score on them. The guys without packs make up the Direct Action (DA) element, the shooters. When the R&S guys locate a high value target, feed the info back to HQ, and the DA guys come swooping in for the takedown. Or the R&S guys get compromised and they're on the run, the DA guys come swooping in as the Quick Reaction Force to pull their bacon out of the fire. Pretty cool setup; I painted the DA guys up in an eclectic and flamboyant mix of colors and camouflage items, while I painted the R&S guys up uniformly in camo, much more subdued (I actually tried to paint them with cammied up faces and hands, but it didn't really work out and I just used my normal flesh tones on them).
The guys are meant to fit in anywhere special operations types are needed, primarily looking at Vietnam-era US and Allied SF types, and fictionalized 1980s Cold War flashpoints for Western countries looking to be covert/sterile. As it's 1970s and 80s, I went with a lot of Tiger Stripe camo; what was cooler in the 1980s than Tiger Stripe? ;)
The whole force, 24 troops in 24 unique poses. The Direct Action shooters are the top three rows, the Recon guys the bottom three rows. I did ya a solid and took a whopping three pics of every single pose! Let's get to them.
An M-60 gunner from the Direct Action element.
And a Recon dude. For more pics, please visit the blog at:
linkVery cool, yes? Next up is some more modern 15mm vehicles, most of them 3D prints from Bashytubits. Until then…
V/R,
Jack
shows off M-113s painted by 
