Where did he go? He went to Moscow.

I know the blog has been borderline nonexistent this past month or two.  I'm just doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes which doesn't translate into actual hobby stuff.

Still working on the latest revision of the dungeon crawl decks, and been designing tokens for WW2 Battlegroup.

To that effect I've actually been working on something new; a 15mm Soviet army for Battlegroup.

I rarely show off stuff in progress, but this has been my last couple of weeks slowly accruing the materials to do 15mm.

 First stands of FoW "Storm Group" Soviet miniatures - painting 16 at a time on a couple of sticks of sintra.

 The FoW "Storm Group" box has some little 50mm mortars, some AT rifles, etc.

Overall I am finding painting 15mm to a "reasonable" standard quite fun and relaxing compared to 28mm stuff.

The Plastic Soldier Company crew for their 45mm guns are pretty boring/flat/poor by comparison, but at this scale they work fine.

While I'm not running hordes of vehicles yet, I opted for the occasionally simple Zvezda kits for my initial vehicles.

Before priming my bases, I used a drop of wood glue inside each place, allowing for easy removal afterward - saves time over carefully scraping off paint to allow miniatures to glue nicely to the base.

After priming, the tabs of wood glue pop out quite easily.

Tada!  Bases with clean plastic for gluing.

Using Vallejo "Dark Earth" gel paste for the basing material, quite handy, quick, and thus far looks good.

The vehicles painted up nicely and easily...if not beautiful, at least functional at the tabletop level.

The Zvezda kits were great...with the exception of the BA-10, which was a fucking nightmare and I cannot recommend it.  Whoever thought 25 pieces was appropriate for an inch-long tiny armored car...should be shot.  In addition to being fiddly and easily broken, they show large gaps I wasn't able to fix.

The infantry were dispatched quite easily and quite quickly.  Playing Soviets I know I have...a lot more of these in my future, but it's not awful painting them, so I'm confident it'll be doable.

A mix of support units from the "Storm Group", and the PSC "45mm" gun pack.  I've got a 50mm mortar, two AT rifles, two Maxim machine gun teams, two 45mm "long" AT guns, and two 76.2mm infantry guns.  I have more crew/AT rifles/mortars ...but don't need them just yet and I have no spare bases to mount them on.

Using spare crew I made up two "loader teams" for optional use in Battlegroup.

My initial batch of Soviet models - waiting on static grass and some tufts to "finish" the basing on the infantry and support weapons.  Very happy so far with the results - now to order/buy/build some actual terrain to fight over!