Not really caring for the quality of Pre-dreadnought battleships found on Shapeways, I recently came across a new source for Pre-dreadnought battleships. WTJ cares a full line of plastic and pewter Pre-dreadnought battleships. WTJ offers ships in the following sizes 1/3000, 1/2400, 1/1800, and 1/1500. Pre-dreadnoughts battleships from various nations are available.
The Steel on Sand Blog wrote extensively on these WTJ Pre-dreadnought's.
I recently downloaded the following titles to my Android tablet: The Rainbow Trail, The Call of the Canyon, Desert Gold, Riders of the Purple Sage, and the Young Forester, by Zane Grey. These titles will be fodder for my winters reading. It has been a while since I have read anything of Zane Grey, but I do remember reading Grey’s work sometime ago.
Grey brings the imagery of the frontier to your imagination and keeps you interested with his characters and plots. “A hundred miles of desert travel, with its mistakes and lessons and intimations, had not prepared him for what he now saw. He beheld what seemed a world that knew only magnitude. Wonder and awe fixed his gaze, and thought remained aloof.” (The Rainbow Trail)
Grey was a prolific writer and many of his titles were put to film. Zane Grey stands up there with the likes of Louis Amour as great writer of westerns. Project Gutenberg and Feed Books both feature numerous titles by Zane Grey. These titles will transport you back to a time where the American west was still rustic and raw.
I have wanted to build some type of structure out of paper for some time. Looking through my collection of plans I came across plans for the Tallman Smokehouse. Smoke houses were once common on most farms as they provided a way for the occupants to cure and store their meat products.
The Tallman Smokehouse is a two story structure, and as you can see, is built primarily from stone. Thomas and Hanna Tallman built this smokehouse in 1757 for their homestead in Moorsetown, New Jersey.
Looking through my collection of materials I noticed that I have a couple sheets of embossed paper stone sheets. I also have several different types of paper shingles. The elements, such as hardware and trim could be manufactured from paper. I will use card board for the sub walls and a few pieces of strip wood to give the structure some rigidity.
Materials for Construction.
Milicast is purveyor of highly detailed model kits that are cast in resin. Milicast has added several new 1/76 scale models to their line of products. You really must see the detail of these models to truly appreciate their quality.
Imagine that you are out bear hunting and you have to make a pit stop to relieve yourself and just at the right moment the hunted comes out to see what all fuss is all about. I suppose you can reach for your gun, which is just out of reach, pray, or just hope the bear doesn’t care for the current state of affairs and vacates the premises.
Woodland Scenics manufacturers many fine products in N, HO, and O gauges, including figures, detail pieces, structures, and terrain and scenery supplies. I own quite a few of Woodland Scenics metal detail parts and structures.
The Bear Hunter is one such detail piece that helps the model railroader to complete a scene. Just add the three pieces to an empty turfed area on your layout. In the back ground, add a tree or two and let your visitors admire your “bear hunter” (“snicker, snicker, snicker, ahum!”).
There is small little train that makes its way around Santa's magic ball. Santa is checking his lists and checking them twice to see if you were naughty or nice.
I have often thought how I could make Pirates of Mysterious Islands more challenging and came up with the idea of creating situation cards. There are, if you remember three unique actions, a move, shoot, and explore actions.
I created situation actions for explore, and move actions. There are thirteen actions each, for the explore and move actions. I will divide the cards up into red and black desks and tie each situation to numbered card. Ace through 10, the Jack card is 11, the Queen is 12, and so on
There good and bad situation cards for each action. Some situations require a roll of a die or point to the rules for certain game pieces. The cards will be read at the beginning of your turn for these actions and the situations implemented during that action.
As the “British and Commonwealth Navies at the Beginning and End of World War II“ title indicates the page lists the size and vessel types of the British and Commonwealth counties at the beginning of the war. The page goes on to list the losses by the Royal Navy by the hands of the axis navies and visa averse, it lists loses of the axis navies by the hand of the Royal Navy.
War in the Pacific saw some of the largest naval conflicts in history. Across the huge expanses of the Pacific, “two of the most powerful navies in the world found themselves locked in a death struggle.” Battles were fought in the air, on the sea and on many specs of land. Some of the more memorable battles were the battles of Guadalcanal, Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.
The site breaks the conflicts down by campaigns. Each battle within the campaign is listed along with its history.
Both sites are educational and interesting. They might add insight and historical relevance to the war-gamer.
Although Preiser does manufacturer horse drawn wagons, the wagons are of European prototypes and are prebuilt and are not buildable kits. Here is list of the available buildable horse drawn wagon kits of American prototypes that I am aware of. If you know of other sources please feel free to let us know of their existence.
Jordon Highway Miniatures
1/87 Scale Information
Jordon produces the following styrene kits. These kits’s usually consist of a spruce or two of some very fine machine injected parts, which can be very delicate, so be careful when removing them from the spruce. These models are finely detailed and run in the $5.00-9.00 range.
Musket Miniatures offers a nice collection of wagon kits that are manufactured in white metal. Some wagons can be purchased with a horse, mule, or oxen teams. These kits usually come with a horse or horses (2), driver, and load. (Will be indicated in the list).These kite range in price from $5.00-28.00. Most can be purchased for under $10.00.
Selley (A division of Bowser Products)
Bowser-Selley offers a few white metal wagon kits. These kits are in the $6.00 to 10.00 range.
Horse-Drawn Commercial Vehicles is a Dover publication, part of their pictorial archive series. The book measures slightly better than eight wide by eleven inches. Inside the covers there are 255 illustrations and black and white images of all sorts of horse drawn wagons.
There is a three page introduction, a wagon glossary, and 148 pages of horse drawn wagons of every description. Another book in this series that I will review sometime is Dover’s Horsecars, cablecars and omnibuses. Both books give you a fabulous glimpse in the past and into the nineteenth century’s stagecoaches, delivery wagons, fire engines, farm wagons, ETC.
Billy’s Place is a HO gauge Main Street Heritage model cast in resin. I have also built Main Street Heritage’s The Weekly Record. These kits are easy to build and are highly detailed. They are not priced so badly either. The prototype for this model is in Norton's Landing and has seen many diverse businesses come and go. I have re-purposed mine to represent a neighborhood Bistro. The model measures 2.1"W x 3.5"D. If you are wondering about the two holes above the door, there is a sign that will applied above the main entrance.
Use both maps and setup along the long sides. Place one Objective counters in the middle sectors on the center row. Axis ships start at one end while the allies start at the other end. Unless there are aircraft carriers, aircraft start on the off-map air base.
Each player rolls two die. The allies get a +1 added to their die roll because the USS Montpelier is flag ship. Add up the die outcomes. The player with the highest outcome gets the initiative and goes second. Going second is desirable in that you can see where your opponent is heading.
Aircraft attacking from off-map airfields and then returning to their airfield can only attack on every other turn. However, some aircraft have special abilities that might affect this rule.
The first player to accumulate 3 victory points wins. Points can be earned by achieving the following:
Axis and Allies War at Sea is a two person game that contains 8 miniatures (four allies and four axis miniatures), 4 die, 2 double sided playing mats, stat cards, a damage counter sheet, and rule book. The game includes several scenarios, full or short game scenarios, which pit two fleets against one another.
Each miniature comes with a set of statistics that holds the miniatures gunnery, amour, and basic movement stats for each of the miniatures. Although each miniature has its pros and cons the axis and allies piece statistics are balanced to provide fair and realistic battles.
Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi Real Languages; is a short video that explains that proceeding “languages” not real languages, but are what we call conlangs. It is interesting to note that J. R. R. Tolkien’s, elvish has about two thousand word vocabulary, and Na'vi has a fifteen hundred word vocabulary. The Na'vi are a race of extraterrestrial humanoids who inhabit the jungle moon of Pandora. The Na'vi are characters found in James Cameron's Avatar.
