"6mm Horse Drawn Transport" Topic

Does anyone know of a manufacturer that makes horse drawn transport for artillery for some of the armies that tended to lean a little heavily on horses like the Germans? Want to get some for my artillery batteries because I feel like there's too much motorized equipment on the table.

I have GHQ and Heroics & Ros horse drawn limbers.

pjm

Here's what GHQ offers for WW2 German horse-drawn equippage: link

Jim

At 6mm, I tend to use old Napoleonic horse teams and wagons for both Russian and German horse drawn teams. When you look at all the odds and sods that the German army found itself with, plus the field expedients, almost anything works with a decent paint job..

+1 Narratio

Plus that mixed really looks the part – most wargaming armies (mine included) are FAR too neat and uniform.

In my collection I have:

- H&R gun limbers from the WW2 French 75mm gun set. I used these for both my French and my Romanian forces.

- H&R supply wagons from the WW2 German wagons set. I use these for my Russian and Romanian forces.

- C-in-C (now available through LegionsIVHire)WW2 Russian "Panje" wagons set. These are generally useful as wagons for about any force. I have kit-based some into horse-drawn medical support for my Russians and Romanians. They come with extra horses that I also make wide use of.

I also get extra horses from various cavalry sets (H&R and GHQ). Both come with pack horses to go with the cavalry. I use cavalry figures both as horse-ridden gun tows (most armies had at least 1 rider on the horse-team per gun) and slightly mod'd pack horses as limbered un-ridden horses.

- GHQ caissons from the Russian Infantry Gun / 45mm AT gun set. The caissons in this set, which comes with Komsolmalyets tractors (ie: no horses) is the same caisson used by Russian horse-drawn gun teams. So I apply my extra horses to these to produce Russian horse-drawn guns.

The GHQ catalog also includes horse-drawn gun sets in both the German and the Polish lines. The Polish set is a French 75mm horse-drawn gun, and so can be used as well for the French, and maybe even the Romanians. But I went with the H&R version only because I had already purchased them before I came to know about the GHQ version.

Hope that helps.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Maybe a pic or two…

Here are the French 75s I mentioned, with their horse rigs. These are H&R models from the WW2 French line.

I constructed these with long bases. The horse teams and caissons are glued to the bases, the guns are just placed on the bases with them.

Here are the guns placed on French guncrew stands, in artillery emplacements at game-time.

Here the same guns are placed on Romanian guncrew stands.

I don't have any pics handy of other military wagons, but can get a few put together if you'd like to see the others I described above.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Fantastic suggestions gents. Thank you all for the ideas! Time to part company with some money when Baccus reopens the cart in five days time!

Found a few more pics in my files that I thought I might add to this thread, even if they are only a follow-on for some late-comers to the topic…

These are supply wagons from the H&R WW2 German line. If you look at the center fuel wagon, you'll notice that it, even if horse-drawn wagons may seem to be an ancient technology, the Germans did, in fact, use some fully modern (by WW2 standards) wagons. Small road wheels, inflated tires, etc …

I don't have any German forces, so I have painted these up to support my Romanians (who might have used some German wagons … right?).

This was the only pic I was actually able to find of my Russian WW2 gun caissons. It's not a very close-up view, but they are about dead center, making a hasty withdrawal after depositing some AT guns for a forward defense as a company of BT-7s and T-34s advance past them and a rifle company double-times up the road.

This pic was taken in a battle fought at a gaming con, so it has all of the flavor of the actual practical use of 6mm miniatures. But that con was … dare I say it? … in 2005 !!! So not exactly a recent pic. Of course, horse wagons are nothing new, even to my armies.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Does anyone make Horse dawn radio vehicles or command wagons or am I going to have to try to do it myself lol

Does anyone make Horse dawn radio vehicles or command wagons or am I going to have to try to do it myself

I am not aware of any vendor that makes horse-drawn radio carts or command wagons.

Years ago (actually I believe it was during the 1990s, so maybe I should say "decades ago"? Or "in the last century"?) I kit-bashed a radio cart for my own forces. It was kind of a rush job -- can't say as I had a specific need for it, but I thought it might be a useful application of one of the extra un-used trailers that come with the GHQ Jeeps pack.

I snipped off the hitch at the end of the runners, spread the runners a bit, and put an extra horse from the C-in-C wagon set between them.

The "radio" was just a piece of almost rectangular soft-metal scrap left over after clipping bits and pieces off of the sprues of various models. I dropped it in the back of the trailer-come-cart, added a seated figure from the GHQ armored infantry set (passengers for halftracks -- a dead useful set for all of the customizations I do) and plunked some bit of something down as the antenna.

It was done well before I had progressed to my current level of modelling of my Micro kit, so does not stand up very well to close inspection. If I were ever to refurb it, I would probably take the one rectangular blob of a radio out and replace it with three smaller rectangles cut from plastic, each with it's own antenna, to give a cart with multiple radios. I would also re-paint it, and move it off of the cardstock it's currently on to a base of a penny or at least sheet polystyrene, with some flocking. But I am not very likely to refurb it, as in the decades since I made it it has not turned up on a single battle board.

I did a bit of an online search for radio carts of WW2, and was not able to find any illustrations or pics. I found pictures of various horse/mule mounted radio sets. If you find any pics to guide you I'd be interested to see them too. I might consider kit-bashing up a radio horse, but all the time and effort I've put into WW2 cavalry forces has not really paid off so far -- I have only brought my Soviet cavalry onto one game table in all my years, and most WW2 rules don't do a very good job with horse soldiers. Wagons and carts, however, are quite appropriate and useful in my experience.

Your gaming may vary.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

As I didn't have any decent pics of my gun limbers, I thought I might dredge through the ready forces box and get 'em out for a few pics over the weekend.

As it was, I decided to to a bit of a refurb on the bases, but otherwise they are not much changed over the past 20+ years.

They were created for my Russian force. But they can serve equally well for my Romanians, and in a pinch might also serve with my French 1940 forces.

I probably should have touched up the paint on the caps of the horse riders. They are wearing soft caps, not the helmets of the guys sitting on the caissons. But … well they've already been on the game table enough times, and no one has complained yet.

At some point over the years one of my limbers was lost. So I kit-bashed another one together, using part of an AA gun towing mount and some scrap plastic. That one is seen here in the upper right position. Not exactly my best kit-bashing work, but good enough to pass on the game table.

I also mentioned that my collection includes some of the C-in-C wagons.

Here are 3 of them. Before I found the H&R models shown above (GHQ now also makes some of those same wagon types), these were the only wagons I could find in this scale. I have a total of 8 in my forces. I chose these three to give a sense of how I have configured them.

About half of them have cargo filling the wagon bed, as shown in the bottom left wagon. One is even filled with barrels (not pictured). Some number are left empty, as shown upper left, but only one has a civilian-painted wagoneer (as shown). I put canopies over 2 of them, and painted one up with the red cross (as shown) to be part of a field hospital. Might be worth mentioning that the set does not come with the canopies -- they are my own kit-bashes.

The C-in-C wagon set appears to my eye to be modeled on the common Russian Panje wagon type. But I suppose it could serve as a wagon for almost any WW2 (or earlier) purpose. The C-in-C set comes with the stands that you see, which have slots for the horse bases. Each set comes with one four-horse wagon mount, but I have kept to 2 horses per wagon, and used the extra horses for other purposes (such as with the gun limbers).

These have not be refurbed, but have been in my finished forces box in this state for decades now.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

In addition to the WW2 items from GHQ and Heroics and Ros, I also use carts and wagons from the H&R ancient and other periods. Irregular also makes wagons and other items that can be used.

I also use carts and wagons from…

Pictures, man. Your adoring fans crave pictures!

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I mainly use H&R for WW2 (limbers, horse carts etc).

Irregular also do a large range of carts and limbers, which I use for my nineteenth century and WW1 stuff.

I was very honoured to have one of my carts and my Irregular train on the cover of one of Don Featherstones books:

link