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Friday, November 21, 2008

Bombed Out but Not Knocked Out




Often when the cities were bombed out, the Germans continued to use the buildings, if they were not in immediate danger of falling down. I have taken my J&R Miniatures building and built two rooms of furniture to continue to use the damaged structure. This is the office. Included is a safe. Ration coupons for fuel to fly the planes, money from people buying plane tickets all have to be safeguarded. Sometimes I like to toss in a role playing element or two and so such details can be very useful in an otherwise standard wargame.

I took sheets of styrene and cut them to fit around the bombed out rubble inside the two rooms. The front room is the lobby with polished wooden floors. There are benches for people to wait on and a ticket counter for them to buy tickets from Luft Hansa. As you can see the floor sits on top of some of the wreckage, but it is flat and it simulates having either a crawl space or basement.



These are the two inserts standing alone. The one of the left is the office. I painted the floor gold to simulate a gold carpet and then dull coated it so it looked more like fabric and less like metal.




Here is the lobby from the outside looking in. I made the furniture on styrene removable to make the use of the buildings more flexible. Of course the Nazi posters will tend to make it a WWII European building, but I can use if for more than just a Luft Hansa office. Note how good the 1/72nd scale figure looks with the 15mm scale building. I try and keep my eyes open for buildings of all kinds because often you can use buildings that are not the exact scale. I have buildings that are HO, 15mm, O scale, and 25mm and 28mm in size and they all work together well.

6 comments:

Nuno Cabeçadas said...

This last figure can be obtained unpainted from a Presier set and is among my favorites for conversions. The riding officers are made from it:

http://soldadosminiatura.blogspot.com/2008/08/o-corpo-expedicionrio-portugus-de-1917.html

Mike Bunkermeister Creek said...

Nuno, that is a great conversion, I like the truck too! You do good work. It is great to see what can be done with other existing figures to make other armies.

Nuno Cabeçadas said...

Thanks. For those who try to have a small Portuguese Army, there is no other path than to convert existing figures. Unfortunatly manufacturers realease more figures from small unknow states than from a Army who mobilized more than 200.000 men during the Napoleonic wars or 100.000 for the Great War.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek said...

Until I read some of your comments elsewhere I had no idea that Portugal had troops in WWI.

I did do some research a few years ago on Portugal in WWII and found it very interesting.

Nuno Cabeçadas said...

I always try to place such information in foruns, hoping that any brand decide to made a set, but never had any suceess. Maybe I'm using the wrong arguments, choosed the wrong place or the idea is just unactractive from the economical standpoint. If you know somebody thinking about making previously unreleased figures, let me know.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek said...

As soon as they finish my to do list, I will let you know! :)