"10/12mm WW2" Topic

I am kind of downscaling my WW2 stuff going from 20mm to this scale due to my lack of room now.

I have just ordered some Pendraken British infantry along with their new M5 halftracks . At the same time I have ordered a platoon of Sherman Vs and a firefly from Red3 which is one of my favourite Cold War producers . I intend doing elements of 11th Armoured ( I did 7th Armoured in 20mm and wanted a change)

I am looking now at some of the plastic Victix stuff in 1/144 scale . For some reason I cant seem to be able to find any camparison posts comparing Victrix to the other ranges.

Thats what I am asking if anyone mixes the Victrix minis in without problems ? My local shop will get them in for me but as he doesnt stock them ,I will have to buy them if ordered . Therefore I want to make sure that they can mix .

Thanks guys

I have quite a few Tank Museum 1/144 scale painted T-34/76, Panthers, Tiger I, anti-tank guns, JgPz IV and Nashorns for sale if you are interested.

Wolfhag

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Anybody know what scale Red3 stuff is? 10mm is a meaningless miniature size often wildly inaccurate. Scale tells you exactly how big men and material is.

Well I have Red3 Cold War Soviets and Brits and they are 10mm as they go well with PSC 10mm . The Red 3 Cold War infantry are bigger than Pendraken being just under 12mm tall but can vary . Clever basing you can use some together in my view.

I find in many cases with Cold War stuff the distinction between 10 and 12mm is quite blurred . With WW2 ,I am not sure hence my OP .

Thanks, Machinehead. Those comparison shots were quite good.

I have a box of various 1/144 Germans I inherited, which includes Takara, Dragon, 21.C Toys, and World Tank Museum vehicles. The differences between manufacturers are negligible, and as much about style and proportions as about size.

I would like to get a lot of Soviet gear to complement these, so I've spent some time researching the OP question as well. It looks like the 10mm lines tend to be noticeably smaller than the 1/144 (12mm) stuff.
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My conclusion: single manufacturer for a particular vehicle, one scale (10mm or 1/144) for all vehicles on a side, one scale per stand for infantry and guns.

I probably can't get the full range of Soviet AFVs I want in 1/144 (it was always limited, and now most of it is OOP and massively expensive), but I'm waiting for the Victrix T-34s anyway. Victrix tanks are irresistable.

I have to be more lenient about mixing infantry and gun scales because there is so little available in 1/144 (12mm) and so much available in 10mm. Since I want these as ground targets for my 1/144 aircraft, I'm pretty much stuck with Pendraken for AA guns.

If I were starting this project from scratch, I'd probably just go with Pendraken for everything. They look fine, paint up well, and are reasonably consistent within the WWII range.

- Ix

Thanks Machinehead for the comparison link .

Thanks Yellow Admiral for your useful input

Thanks guys for all your input

Pendraken and Red3 it is then :)

Just to add I got some Butler Printed Models in High Resolution resin . These were Sherman 3 and VC Fireflies. These are very clean and very sharp and would recommend them. Sizewise they are comparable to Red 3 with the fireflies in particular being very close sizewise . I like Red3 and use a lot of Steve's models for my Cold War collection but his WW2 range is rather limited but still nice models.

I am beginning to think that the size difference between 10 and 12 mm is getting more blurred .

I am still waiting of my Pendraken order and so cant comment yet .

I've mixed Pendraken and Victrix and have no real issues. The figure sculpting style is very different but at this scale I'm not sure it's an issue at all. Despite being 10mm I find the Penraken figures as big as Victrix and slightly bulkier.

I've made Victrix my figures of choice and what their range doesn't cover I've filled in with Pendraken. These Germans and British are all plastic Victrix figures:

Pendraken supply things like AT guns and crews, but with the HQ and company commander bases I've mixed Pendraken figures with Victrix and I don't think the difference is really notable:

For example with engineers I've gone with Pendraken:

You can see more about them here:
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and here:
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Thanks mate .

I was thinking along the same lines.

That kind of confirms to me that the distinction between 10 and 12mm is very blurred now

Those photos are one helluva sales pitch. Now I have two shopping carts full of stuff (Pendraken and Victrix), and I blame TacticalPainter01.

Truthfully, I've been in this quandry for a few years. I hesitate because I'm really not sure how much 1/144 stuff I should buy; my uses for it are limited and perhaps even moot, but there is so much exquisitely nice 1/144 stuff around that they're very hard to resist. Victrix' sudden launch of a Black Friday 20% sale yesterday is not helping my willpower…

- Ix

I've been using these for company level actions using either Crossfire or I Ain't Been Shot Mum, and also for battalion level using O Group. I really like the look of the table when playing in this scale, plenty of space and often a good sense of the ‘empty battlefield'.

@ Tactical Painter

Thats the main reason I wanted to do this scale .In my view the detail is enough to satisfy a painter like myself and you dont need an airbrush to get results .Its more about technique ,smaller brushes and plenty of washes .The art of dry brushing being a key element as well.

The best bit is when they are on the wargames board and your opponents forces are at the other side of the board and you cant make out what they are. Only the small scales you get that effect .Very realistic and adds to the game

But like you say you get that realistic battlefield space and not something resembling a supermarket car park on a Saturday afternoon.

In my view this is the upcoming scale and I just hope we dont get a big player with Victrix being big enough . I like the variety of suppliers who would suffer with a big player joining the affray.

Well I have taken the plunge now and Butlers Printed Models have won my Sherman order with enough Fireflies and Sherman 3s to equip a full squadron . I have decided to go with C squadron of the Sherbrooke fusiliers .

To add to the interest I have also order 2 @ M4A1 cast hulled Shermans to use as a couple of Grizzlys mixed in.

For the OP tanks of course I will be using the Ram tank.

For avoidance of doubt ,I am not Canadian but a Brit . With the state of things in this country at the moment I wish I was ! lol

My 20mm Brits are the 7th Armoured and whilst that can easily be done using Victrix , I decided to do something a bit different.

My German opposition forces will be the 21st Panzer Division. Again different to the Lehr which I have in 20mm .

I need to do both forces as all of my friends at the club wargame in 28 or 15mm for WW2 .

The rules that we use tend to be a mixture of Bolt Action ,FOW and Battlegroup. I only play the latter and followed that project from its inception including its predecessor Kampfgruppe Normandy

@ Tactical Painter

I have checked out your blog and enjoyed very much of what I have seen .

I also think your an excellent painter and appear very experienced in this scale .You have given me some ideas and I do like the 3 men to a base for normal infantry and weapons teams kept to the required number of figs to operate the weapons .

But that wheat field NO! lol.The fibres are just too over scale and I am thinking on the lines of a fluffy felt type material .

I tend to use more flock at this scale for basing obtained via Model rail outlets. Woodland Scenics being my favourite brand

But that wheat field NO! lol.The fibres are just too over scale and I am thinking on the lines of a fluffy felt type material .

Yeah, I know, I moved on from there and now use teddy fur for crop fields in all scales (I just trim it down in length). Here are some pictures of a recent 3x3 Normandy table I put together for a small company level action in Normandy.

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I also think your an excellent painter and appear very experienced in this scale .

Thanks, that's very nice of you to say, however I have to confess that these are all my first attempt at painting in this scale. As always my key guide is making colours lighter the smaller I go in scale. I did a few tests and it was clear at this scale you can go for very high contrast between base colours and highlights and you are aiming to work like an impressionist painter, it's not about the detail but the overall look. The real problem I found was that I need to work on these under magnification and so the temptation is to paint more detail than you need simply because you can see it when magnified – the complete opposite to how they appear in a game when at anywhere between 1 and 3 feet away you really can't see much at all.

True . I found that out when I first started painting this scale with my Cold war stuff. Whilst I said washes are important, I found they need to be made weaker to avoid making the model look too dark .I find the wash medium a good buy here and mix it with soapy water before applying it to the wash.

I agree the teddy bear fur works well in this scale going off your pictures.

My Pendraken order has come today and the M5 halftracks which are new sculpts look really good . The infantry first impressions are that they will mix with Victrix

This keeps up and we will need a 1/144th scale board here. Or, at the very least, a 10/12mm one.

I'm thinking the same thing. I'm usually against more boards, but this is turning into a popular scale, and there are posts about 1/144 WWII going back to 2004 (including a long trail of very inspiring photo posts by machinehead and FlyXwire).

Well in the end I decided to go for the 12th SS Panzer Division to oppose my Canadians .I did want to do the 21st but
reasearch shows the 12th being the most common foe here including the horrible atrocities against the Canadian prisoners of war.

Victrix have a Black Friday sale on and so various packs of infantry and vehicles have been ordered. Incidentally ,unless my maths is wrong the mega bundles dont work out as well as ordering the packs separately in the sale.

I agree with you guys as well this scale has got more for it , if you own the average size table .

Instead of a couple of buildings you could have a town occupying very little space. :)

Wolfhag – if you still have extra T-34/76 models to get rid of, I'm suddenly interested. Contact me at smegma17@ixtraneous.net

Check your email.

Wolfhag

Its just dawned on me ,another advantage is that your unpainted models are so easy to store in a smallish container like a shoe box. That way you can keep all your stash together and doesnt fill a cupboard up like one of the larger scales like 28mm

mysteron – Nah! it just does not work that way. Smaller just means more. At this scale you do real actions, you need armoured cars, Bridge layers, Mine clerance vehicals, Companies of diffremt tanks and ATG's. My German Army now spereads over 200 vehicels and has not finished growing. Scenarios get much more interesting at this scale.

I store mine in 50 count trading card boxes. If you base your troops or vehicles, you should be able to get 2 stands in each. You could stack them in a small box with less sliding around and less chance of damage. The white thing on the bottom is a blank playing card as Dragon Cando and Panzer Korps will melt the plastic box and get stuck.

@UshCha

Not going down that route again lol . I have enough with my 20mm stuff taking up the room :)

@machinehead Thats neat for finished models. I will be basing mine as well

Thanks guys

The white thing on the bottom is a blank playing card as Dragon Cando and Panzer Korps will melt the plastic box and get stuck.

What, what? Seriously?

I consider this scale too big to base the vehicles, so I need to pay attention to material interactions like this.

Right now I have all my 1/144 vehicles in polypropylene plastic trays (Iris 12x12 boxes with inserts), but those are about to run out of space and they're OOP.

@ Yellow Admiral – Whilst that specific box may be out of production ,there are many types that could be useable . I had a trip to Hobbycraft as Mrs is rather into her crafts. There were a few there that could be used for the storage of finished models ,

This box had Cando Jagdpanthers, the tracks are made out of a rubbery kind of plastic that melted their way in. None of the other brands, WTM etc. do that.

That's just freaky.

Do any of those card boxes have a recycling number on them? It would help to find out what kind of plastic they are. I have a few of those around, but all they say is the product name ("Ultimate PKK" or some such) or "Made in China".

May I recommend the Anschlus range – 3D printed and very well detailed

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Thanks! I didn't know about Anschluss.

I'm trying to avoid unpainted 1/144, but the Anschluss angle is to produce the things you can't get anywhere else, and they're in resin instead of metal. I placed a small order of niche tanks (StuG IV, KV-2, Ostwind) to see what I think.

If I get too much unpainted German armor, I may have to buy an airbrush to do the cammo patterns right…

I am kind of doing the bread and butter stuff first ie Mk4s and infantry for the Germans and Shermans and Infantry for the Canadians.

I have seen the Anschluss range,ironically through the Butlers Printed Models site as they stock their gaming rules .

Butlers Printed Models done in the high resolution resin I do also recommend. The advantage of Butlers is that most of the marks of Sherman are covered in their range . For me that was the Sherman 3 and VC firefly. I am also placing a couple of Sherman 2s in to represent a couple of Grizzlies, which was the Canadian built Sherman and very similar to the Sherman 2 in appearance. Butlers also do the Ram Observation tanks, again something a little different and a talking point.
I am trying to avoid using more than one manufacturer for a specific type of tank. That will help to keep sizing issues at bay . Although the Red3 Sherman Firefly is identical in size to the Butlers model and therefore this will be an exception to my own rule here

I can also recommend the new Pendraken M5 halftracks . Very sharp and detailed and well defined sculpts. I like the canvas cover which is a nice touch .

That's good news about the Pendraken M5s. They certainly look good in photos. Unfortunately, I'm avoiding metal vehicles as much as I can – metal miniatures that aren't cushioned and/or fixed in place go knocking around during transport, chipping paint, bending guns and masts, making dents, etc. I don't mind metal artillery and figures, since they'll be magnetically based anyway, but I'm not basing my 1/144 vehicles, and metal ones will vastly complicate my storage problem. I am really enjoying the light plastic vehicles that I can just throw into compartmented boxes without fear of damage, and I'd like to keep that going.

Butlers Printed Models has lots of stuff I want (in nice light polymers too!), but the photos all show copious print lines. Yech. Are the "high resolution resin" models better? They're pricey, but for small quantities of less-common equipment that should be okay.

The High Resolution models are much much better . There are some lines but nowhere near as many and very easy to clean up . Where there were lines once cleaned up , I would recommend a coat of liquid green stuff in addition prior to priming. The models are very sharp and are not wibbly wobbly looking like some of the older models from others. The range is expanding all of the time with Funnys just being released.

If I was you perhaps just order a one off model that you need as a test bed. Perhaps one of the new Funnys if they are used in your chosen rules set.

I have been very impressed with the quality and they are very light in weight. And I am fussy lol .

I live in the US, so even small test orders have to be large enough to justify the shipping costs. I may have to wait for photos of "better" BPM models before I pull the trigger.

- Ix

Okay mate . I havnt checked out the new Funny's pictures on the BPM site yet .

I am sure if you contacted them by E mail as they are very approach able ,that they would assist with pictures for you. Maybe a free sample :)

Just an idea

If you are looking for 10/12mm buildings, check out PaperTerrain. We have about the largest selection of WWII era buildings in that scale you will find.
paperterrain.com

In other news: On Friday I was introduced to Scalefiend, which makes a few 1/144 trucks in resin. The miniatures are cheap and the shipping cost to the US was almost unbelievably low, so I placed a small sample order. I need dozens of trucks, so this could be a real score.

Has anyone else bought any of this product line?

- Ix

I spent some time over the weekend overpainting some of my pre-painted tanks. Nothing fanatical, mostly changing or removing serial numbers on various tanks, and a little bit of overpainting awful factory color choices.

Matching paint colors on pre-painted models is always tricky, but sometimes I get lucky; Tamiya XF-65 was such a close match for my Takara T-34/76s that I was able to change three turrets labeled "20" into "21", "26" and "29" with green paint straight out of the jar.

Normally I have to mix paints to get close, then use tricks like blending, shading, and ending color changes at panel lines in order to pull off spot overpainting. Case in point: I had 12x 21st Century Toys PzIVHs labeled "623" on the turrets – one stayed "623", one became "628", the others all got the numbers removed, and will be renumbered with decals at a later date. I wanted to try modifying the numbers on all of them, but I simply could not mix a dunkelgelb that matched 21.C Toys' color, so I couldn't blot out a single number or just parts of it. I had to overpaint the entire area with my own dunkelgelb, then add in a lot of the green and rotbraun cammo colors to hide the difference in tones between dunkelgelbs.

Hi Admiral

I have just taken delivery from Scale Fiend in the form of a Dorchester,M10 And Achilles .Looking at these they do look printed but like the Butlers very easy to clean up. Similar to Butlers in that you get a naked vehicle and will need populating with stowage before use. I do prefer the Butlers resin though than the white type that Scalefiend uses . But happy with my purchases but not priority for building and painting .

The pictures of the 12mm High resolution resin Sherman Flail tanks are on the Butlers site .

And now to Victrix .

I have to be honest I am a tad disappointed with the MkIV Hs . The model is okay but reminds me of the 20mm PSC types I built some 10 years ago and with the same problems .

The pins on the hull bottom plate are too large for the recesses in the track sides . All needed redrilling bigger which was a pain . I recommend you put one of the tracks onto the hull bottom first and then the hull top before fixing the final track side on . That will avoid a gap at the front like Victrex have on their picture of the completed model . Then affix the final track and check to make sure everything is square before adding the final bits . I would recommend using liquid poly cement as it gives some playing time to adjust the parts if necessary.

The BPM photos don't show a lot of detail on the tracks of track laying vehicles. In the photos of the Sherman Crab, the tracks look downright smooth. What are they like in person?

Well thats the only down side is the tracks. There is a bit of texture but not a great lot . That doesnt bother me too much with me having Canadians as some of their Shermans were equipped with conventional type treads.I do have a silver pencil for adding some details should I need it .

paintandglue.co.uk

The above site may interest some of you . For me its the soft skins that are the draw .Dont be put off with the prices as those are the 1/56 prices. If you click on the model you can get the price for the appropriate scale .

The 9th SS was poorly equipped when it comes to armoured half tracks for the panzer grenadiers and therefore a motley collection of trucks is a must .That would include gun tows as well . Some of the Russian tractors are growing on me .

Thanks! There's a lot of nice looking stuff on that site,and the prices are really nice. 3D printing is really growing this scale! I'd have placed a test order already, but I have so many test orders out now, that I'm running out of things to order.

I just received my test order of Kamiya Russian tank destroyers (SU-85s and SU-76s). The SU-76 model has a hint of layer lines on the front glacis, nowhere else I can see; the Su-85 seems to be smooth and clean. Both have a few flash bits in corners here and there, but nothing too bad. Some of the details are exaggerated to GHQ proportions (BIG RIVETS and such), but overall I really like the way these look. I hope to get paint on them soon so I can see them better.

About paintandglue.co.uk: I was really excited to see a section for 1/144 aircraft, because I'd like to see the world of 1/144 3D printed planes drastically increase. Unfortunately, most of the pictured models have curvy wings, which is downright discouraging.

- Ix

Aircraft tbh I prefer the kit types. Revel being my favourite . In Battlegroup you dont need too many aircraft. A couple of late model Spits and Typhoon/Tempest will suffice for me .

What I like about Paint and Glue is that Gary produces a lot of unusual stuff . I can also get my Canadian Otter Scout Car and Canadian wireless trucks . Some of the German stuff I have never seen before let alone know what it is ! :)