When choosing Russians for Napoleonics you really need to paint some guns. Actually, my main reason for taking 12 pdr (that's heavy field artillery) was aesthetics - in miniatures the bulkiness of the human figures dwarfs the smaller 6 pdr guns. So if you want something that looks like bad-ass guns you need to go to the heavies. This is a little unfair - I can tell anyone who hasn't tried it that when you stand besides a 6 pdr at a museum, they indeed feel quite big! The Russians paid great effort to the artillery arm - with many guns and a great proportion of heavy ones. They also organized them in very big batteries - 12 guns per battery when most other nations had six or eight. Maybe this overworked the commander and probably they also often had more of the batteries guns in reserve during battle (in a six gun battery maybe four guns fired and two were in reserve, but some argue that the big Russian batteries maybe had four or six guns in reserve). In any case this made the Russian batteries more resilient and likely to keep up the fire for longer time. Another reason for the big batteries may be that properly trained commanders were in short supply in the Russian army, whose officer corps were known for being not too good! Drinking, gambling and a place in the army because of birth privileges anyone? The artillery pieces were modernised and of very good quality - with state of the art aiming devices for instance. The Russian artilley also had very good horses. However this does not count for much in a skirmish game, so let's see what I did with the miniatures! The business end. The guns and most of the crew are from Perry Miniatures. To flesh out the crews for SP I got three more, including an artillery officer, from Front Rank. They are the two behind the guns and the third from left on the right hand gun. I am very pleased with how the polished bronze turned out. I mixed gold in it at first, then washed with black ink and then added more layers of "highlights" in which I had silver as well as gold to get it bright enough. A three-horse ammunition wagon. This set up is known as a "troika" and a famous Russian one. Most (all?) other nations chose even pairs of horses for their equipment. To have a three-horse variant must have been convenient. So, not only be good-looking and useful for Sharp Practice, this one adds a certain Russian flavour I really like. Thanks Perry for making these more usual wagons, they add a lot!
Thats all for this time. Next time I will show even more wagons! Cheers!/Shirty
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