"Help finding better 1/72 Napoleonic artillery" Topic

I have a very soft spot in my heart of 1/72 Napoleonics – so soft I have a couple thousand of them. I am not, however, a very big fan of 1/72 artillery pieces.

I recently acquired an old painted collection with some older 25mm lead figures mixed in, including some lovely artillery pieces. I decided I want more, but I'm having a hard time knowing what to get. On the bright side, I'm only collecting for the Peninsular War, so I only need French, British, and (if I can find any) Spanish guns.

The size compatibility lists from this TMP thread are a very helpful start, but I'm open to suggestions or other options.

Kennington and RSM are purportedly size compatible with 1/72, but there are no photos on either web site, and my Google Fu is failing me. Does anyone have photos of guns from either range they can show off?

Art Miniaturen are beautiful, but too expensive to contemplate (even with the best EUR:USD exchange rate I've ever seen).

Newline figures are gorgeous, but undersized. I expect the artillery to be the same.

Any other suggestions welcome.

- Ix

Try Historifigs which have the old Jack Scruby "true" 25mm figures. They are very compatible with 1:72 scale figures. The guns are very nice. link Scroll down to page 10.

These are 2 G-6 6-lb double trail guns and 1 G-10 6.5" howitzer with Scruby figures.

It may take a little while for the order to be cast as these figures are in his "retired" category, but I think you'll find them a good fit.

Jim

Have you seen this? It should answer most of your questions (I wrote the spreadsheets and collected the data).

link

link

There are also some SHQ pictures here.

link

SHQ are decent but have quite a lot of flash and the carriage trails are often twisted slightly off centre. Hinchliffe are nice models but rare. For French, you may want to consider plastic if cost is an issue. I think the Hat French 12 pounder is quite good dimensionally and there are also Zvezda (if you want to buy Russian products at the moment).

P.s. The Spanish used the Gribeauval system so you can use French guns for them. The French in the Peninsula largely used the older Gribeauval (based on guns captured at Vitoria).

I don't have any experience of 3D printing and no recommendations but that may be an option for a large number.

Another comparison.

link

Some picture of Newline next to HH figures. They are rather small.

link

Useful stuff Trockledockle. Thx for doing those.

Thanks for the links, that is exactly the kind of visual info I was failing to find.

The photos by Lazylimey are especially useful.

Also, unfortunately, I agree with him. The best guns (Hinchliffe and NapoleoN) are cast in unobtainium.

I actually own a pack of the Newline guns, and they look even better than the photos. The carriage even has wood grain! Like everything by Newline, they are gorgeous but small, literally a different scale than the artillerists I have to serve them. That's so frustrating.

I'm torn about the Kennington guns. They look the right size and proportions, but I'm not sure they're much of an improvement over the available 1/72 plastic guns. They have better detail but worse proportions than the Revell and Esci guns, and the muzzle flare on all the gun tubes in the photos looks funny. I guess a sample order is in my future.

- Ix

Hinchcliffe are available in the UK? link

Is there a US stockist?

@ LBR

25mm unfortunately. Nice, but too big.

If you want bigger ones Hagen are very nice: link

Franznap are beautiful: link

Westfalia (on the Schilling website) are just as nice: link

I hope that's helpful

4th Cuirassier – my comment was less about the scale and more the suggestion that they weren't available as thy were mentioned. I know there's been a lot of retooling nd i've picked up some of the 20mm WW2 from Early War Miniatures too. Lovely pieces.

I took it that someone thought the 20mm Hinchliffe artillery pieces were still available somewhere. These items must be seriously vintage. I got into Hinchliffes in 1977 via the Harrow Model Shop, hoping to find Airfix-compatible 20mm metals. All such were long gone as long ago as that, and there was zero sign of 20mm Hinchliffe anything except WW2 – everything else had gone to 25mm. Anyone looking now for 20mm Hinchliffe guns is looking for some seriously old stock – more than 45 years old, maybe 50.

Skytrex don't give much away about what they've still got. I am also interested in 1/32 WW2 stuff, of which Hinchliffe used to do an interesting range: PAK38, PAK97/38, stuff like that, that's still hard to find in 1/32 (1/35 is another matter). Skytrex have the moulds but a few years ago told me they had no plans to do anything with them. They weren't for sale either. I would not be surprised if they still have the 20mm gun moulds in a dusty box somewhere and likewise have no plans to produce from them.

Here's a link to the list of 20mm Hinchliffe Napoleonic artillery models.

link

My understanding is that Skytrex never produced them and when asked some years ago, denied all knowledge of them. Skytrex have of course gone so I think that it is a dead end. I've heard that someone contacted Frank Hinchliffe's family but they were unable to help.

They do appear on eBay every so often but hidden amongst other stuff and rarely with a Hinchliffe description.

How good are they? Compared with Hinton Hunt or early Minifigs, they are magnificent but HH artillery is really bad. I would say that they are equal to or slightly better than SHQ. I'm still not convinced about the look of the British 9 pdr but the French 12pdr does look right. I suspect that they aren't up to the standard of AM etc or Zvezda but that is 50 years of progress.

The interesting thing, as seen in the photos above, is that nobody seems to do a British 6-pounder even though there are lots of plastic sets. They're all 9-pounders, the visual difference between them being that the 9's barrel projects forward beyond the wheel rims whereas the 6's doesn't.

I don't have access to my spreadsheet at the moment but my guess is that the Airfix gun is more of a 6 pounder than a 9.

A possible explanation for the lack of 6 pounders is that most plastic manufacturers concentrate on Waterloo and by that time the field artillery had replaced all their 6 pounders and the RHA most of theirs with 9 pounders.

When you see a correctly-done 6-pounder it's very different from a 9-pounder. Short, comparatively spindly barrel with the trunnions set quite forward, so the muzzle is level with the wheel rims.