I thought I would put together a post about the terrain pieces I purchased at the Salute 2012  show in London This April.

I love wargaming, for years I pretty much exclusively played games workshop games, but  a few years ago I decided to branch out and look for other games systems. The thing that really caught my eye was Flames of war. A World War 2 15mm wargame made by Battlefront Miniatures. The thing that First drew me to the game was the terrain. I was so used to playing on pretty much a barren surface, with 3-4 buildings made from pringles tubes, yogurt pots and the odd games workshop building on it. That used to be fine, until I saw a FoW gaming table. It honestly blew me away. I had been living in my own little bubble for years, blindly thinking that “my” game was *best* and it didnt get any better than that. Oh how wrong I was.

I’m so happy to be able to say I came to that conclusion! The FoW game I first saw was at my local wargames club (find their website HERE), and to be honest, the table wasn’t even that great, but It still looked stunning compared to the wasteland tables that are 40k tables.

Now, to be fair to 40k, if you go to any Games workshop store and look at the gaming tables they will always look fantastic, but, they’ve spent many many man hours on those tables, people who work in the shop getting paid to make terrain, and they use all the fancy GW produced buildings and pretty much have an unlimited budget as long as they don’t go silly. So they look brilliant. But you average “home” player’s 40k table will probably only have a couple of GW buildings on it, and it’ll look pretty barren.

By contrast, Flames of war tables are usually COVERED with terrain. I personally play mainly late war, Normandy type games, set in France in mid 1944, after the allied invasion. These tables will be full of fields, bocage hedgerows, buildings, roads and rivers.
At 15mm scale you have much more freedom to put a lot more terrain on the table, as the area covered geographically is much larger than if you were playing in 28mm scale like 40k is. Another great thing about 15mm scale is that the terrain is usually cheaper than 28mm scale. Because it’s smaller! This means you can get a lot more terrain for the same amount of money. More terrain means more variation between games, and more stuff on your gaming table!

So. What did I buy? well. I bought a few things. I mainly bought buildings. Thats what my terrain collection is lacking at the moment. I have plenty of bocage hedges, rivers and some roads (im currently making more roads at the moment! more on that in a later post!)

Here are a few photos of what I bought! along with my feelings about these purchases.

"american" set by battlezone scenics

This first Set was an “American” set of buildings which I bought from some unknown seller on a small stall, he had no point of sale up to say who he was, only a load of terrain. I got a bit excited when I saw the PRice of £9 and I bought the set. £9 for 3 buildings! wow! thats a great deal!
Yeah, probably would have been a great deal if they weren’t shit.

These models come from “Battlezone Scenics” I have to saw that when I got these buildings home, I was eagre to see what they looked like, even in the clear plastic bag they weren’t exactly clear, with the resin dust fogging up the bag a little, and the excitement of the show clouding my judgement. I have to say these buildings are a real disapointment.
They were marked very clearly as “15mm”, now, I’m not an expert. But I’m pretty sure that 15mm scale means that an “average” 15mm human model, in the standing position will measure 15mm, from his feet to eye level. This gives you an Average height of about 6′ being 15mm. The overall height of a 15mm model should then be 18mm tall.
When I measured a selection of my 15mm models from battlefront, Plastic soldier company and peter pig, I found that they were all between around 17mm tall to 20mm tall. This was pretty standard after some research done online.

So, you would think that a 15mm building, designed to be a representation of what an 18mm tall figure might live in would measure up to that? yeah? no. wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I mean, there are buildings of all shapes and sizes everywhere round the world. and Yes, I bought an “american” set, but I thought they looked alright, and would do for my rural games. But seriously, the doors on these buildings are about half the size of my troops.
They are tiny. Nowhere near big enough to fit in 15mm miniatures. The 15mm troops look like giants next to them. I unfortunately don’t own any 6mm troops to see if they match up, and that the buildings are just mislabelled. I hope thats the case. but I doubt it.

One of them doesnt even stand up straight! it leans over to one side, the barn building looks like its bloated in the middle. The detail on all three is OK, but it’s nothing special. From a distance these buildings will probably look pretty nice when they are painted up.But the good points are way overshaddowed by the fact they are really way too small. Overall I am pretty disapointed with these minis.

I’ll still paint them up, and use them in larger games where I just want something to put down on the table, but they’ll definately be my “back up” buildings, and I doubt i’ll ever look at another Battlezone scenics model again.

here is a couple more photos of the buildings close up so you can see them a little better.

leaning tower of buildingness

Best out of the three. its just way too small

the bloaty barn

The next purchase I made was a bridge, I really like bridges, it comes from my time in the royal engineers, I used to love combat bridging, its now rubbing off onto my wargaming! I bought this bridge from the plastic soldier company, cost me £5.50. I beleive it comes from the “mainly military” range. But I could be very wrong here. So. Here it is. The bridge!

Bridge

For £5.50 its a pretty nice bridge.
It has a pretty good level of detail to it, the parts are solid (it came in three parts), however there is no detail on the “inside” edges of the bridge, I found this to be a little strange, as these parts are not hidden. So why not detail them? Anyway, it’ll sit nicely over my river sections, and for £5.50 I’m pretty pleased with it. It’ll be a doddle to paint too.

For scale purposes, here’s some posing paras to let you see how big it is.

paras on a bridge

This next building was my personal favourite. I bought it from a company called “milicast” I honestly do not know whether they made this, or just sell it. But that’s who I bought it from. This isn’t strictly speaking a proper wargames terrain piece, as it is only half a building! it was designed to be sold as part of a diorama set for 1/76 scale tank models, where you place this building on the edge of the base, only seeing the front. I just loved it though, so I thought I would buy it and try and build up the back side of the building and make it a bombed out shell. it cost me about £11ish. I cant remember exactly. but I was pretty pleased with the purchase. The level of detail is superb

milicast building

I’m going to do another post on how I put this building together, but for now, here is the finished building from the back view.

constructed

I’d like to point out that I was a bit confused with this building’s scale too. it was supposed to be 1/76 (15mm scale is sold as 1:100, but is actually closer to 1:107), when i measured the door (i usually base the scale on a normal sized building by the height of it’s door. Windows can vary in size, but a door should be proportional to a human, unless its something like a church where the door could be huge).
the door on this model is 24mm tall. Thats a SMIDGEN too big, but really, It looks like it fits perfectly from anything more than 20cm away (and you arent holding a ruler up to it). This mini was sold as being 1/76 scale, but, as far as i can see, it’s really close to what I think a “true” 15mm building should be. When comparing the scales to other buildings, and to measurements of my own house, its pretty much spot on as a 15mm building. But. It’s sold as 1/76.. *sigh* oh well. at least it looks awesome!

The following two pictures are two ruin buildings by Kerr and king. They were very cheap, I cant remember the price exactly, but I think they were around £6 each I was very pleased with this price.

kerr and king ruins

kerr and king ruins

These minis have a great level of detail, I don’t think they were intended to be used on a normandy table, probably a stalingrad type one, but to be honest, I’m not really bothered. They look really cool. So I’m gonna use them! There are no doors in either of these buildings, so it’s hard to judge the scale, but the brickwork is about the same size as the close to perfect 1/76 scale model, and they are about the same height. So I think on a table together, they will look really good. The only thing I don’t like is that the windows seem a little small for my liking. But really that’s just me being picky. There is nothing wrong with these minis. They are great. Especially for the price.

One Thing I would also like to point out about kerr and king minis too, I have a few of their basing sets, and everyone I know who plays 15mm ww2 loves the basing sets, they are very high quality. But I’ve always stayed clear of their buildings, because the pictures on their website make them out to be a bit ropey. I have honestly NOT purchased kerr and king terrain in the past because I thought the quality of the models was very low. After seeing them “in the flesh” however, I have MOST DEFINITELY revised that statement! WOW they are superb!! There is a whole range of buildings that, unsurprisingly, had totally sold out by the time I found the kerr and king stand at Salute, the guy only had the painted example models left. I’m most definitely going to be putting in an order soon, as they were hands down the BEST quality 15mm wargames terrain that I have seen so far. The pictures on their website really do not do them justice! Highly recommend the kerr and king stuff!!

Well, that’s all the terrain I purchased while I was at Salute, I hope you’ve seen something you like! Thanks for reading my blog, please comment and pass on this post to others who might like it.

Chris.

Hi,

I thought seen as I upgraded my mac mini’s RAM today I thought I would write a blog post about how to do it.

Many people look at computers, either mac or PC and seem to think the inside of them is made from some form of magic. This simply is not true!

Self upgrading components can be a very cost effective and easy thing to do. With Mac’s you generally have a lot less freedom to upgrade components than with PC’s, and even less freedom with the example here, the mac mini.

I wouldn’t suggest trying to upgrade any of the other components in a mac mini, the thing is so “neatly” put together it would take someone with great skill (and confidence) to take it apart and put it (successfully)  back together again.

But a RAM upgrade is a VERY simple thing to do, and very cost effective.

I’m based in the UK, so my example is in Pound sterling, at the time of writing this, the mac mini that I purchased costs £529. This comes with 2Gb of RAM, and a pretty good i5 processor and a 500Gb Hard drive, while this machine is certainly competent at running most basic tasks, upgrading the RAM can significantly boost its performance.
To buy the 8Gb RAM upgrade from apple costs £240. Thats nearly half of the whole machine! I purchased 8Gb of mac compatible RAM from Ebuyer for £36.99. (find the RAM i bought HERE)

Yup. £35.99. thats £204.01 difference. lets spell that out. Two hundred and four pounds difference.

As you can see, this isn’t a couple of quid. this is a SIGNIFICANT difference.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that I don’t know what kind of effect upgrading the RAM has on the warranty, I didn’t look it up, there is a guide on the apple website for self upgrading (find it HERE, its pretty much the same as what I’m writing!), which doesn’t mention it invalidating the warranty,  but I wouldn’t like to say for sure that it does or doesn’t. I also don’t take any responsibility for your computer if you follow this guide and break your machine.

The RAM you will need to buy for this (as that link above probably wont work forever, and will be useless if you live outside the UK), is DDR3 1333Mhz SO-DIMM memory, SO-DIMM memory is most commonly used in laptops.
The mid 2011 mac mini also only supports a maximum of 8Gb of Memory, so don’t waste your time buying more than 8Gb. It won’t register more than 8.
Also, there are only two slots in the machine. You can either use one module or two, In my example below I bought two 4Gb sticks, a total of 8Gb of RAM.

Anyway, here goes.

Here’s the “about this mac” page before we begin

To start off with, Turn off your mac mini, and unplug any cables attached. Turn it over to see the underside.

Find the dots at the top, and the two circle impressions on the black baseplate.

Twist the base plate to unlock it.

You should see something like this:

The blue Chip on the right is the RAM module.

Identify the silver pins which hold the RAM in place, there will be one on each side of the chip. There should be two chips inside the machine, one on top of the other, slightly offset from each other (you should be able to see part of the chip underneath the top one)

Use your Finger nails to gently pull the silver pins away from the memory chip.
Pull outover, and do both sides at once, the chip should “pop” upwards, only being held in place at the base.
The pins will only bend a couple of millimetres, don’t try and completely remove them or be rough with them, there is no need, you will only damage the machine.

Repeat the same process for the second chip.

The above picture shows the machine after the first memory module has been removed and the pins have been moved to get at the second one, hopefully you can see that it has “popped” up, and can now easily be removed.

You should now be left with something that looks like the above image.

Notice the “notch” pointed out by the lovely green arrow. As you can see this is not in the centre, take this as reassurance that you can’t go wrong and put the new memory module in the wrong way round.
Only SODIMM memory modules (or “laptop RAM”) will fit into a mac mini, and also only DDR3. the placement of the notch in the RAM module will  line up with the notch in the machine, if they line up, then you have it the right way up. if you don’t, it’s the wrong way.
There is literally only one way to get it in.

You can also see the silver pins better on this image, take note of where they are and how they hold the memory chips in place. They are pretty much the key player in this upgrade!

Here is a picture of our new RAM module.

As you can see I’ve pointed out the notch in this chip again, it will really only go in one way up, so you know you’ve done it right!
Also, note the cutout notches on the sides of the module, these are where the little silver pins latch onto your RAM module. Just so you know!

Once you’ve got your new module the right way up, it’s time to install it!
Line the module up so that you can push it into the bottom slot, push it in from the back, it’ll go in the exact opposite way that you took the originals out.
So push it in at a bit of an angle, it will have to be pushed, and once it’s in you’ll only be able to see a small amount of the gold coloured contacts on the bottom of the chip.
Once you’ve pushed it in, push it down to lock it into place, the silver pins will “click” when it’s installed correctly, thats them snapping into the little cutout’s in the side of the chip.

Repeat the process for the second module. When I took this picture I hadn’t actually pushed this module in far enough, so as you can see there is still a lot of the gold contacts showing, when installed correctly you should only see a small amount of the contact showing.

Thats pretty much it!

Now just replace the back cover, and screw it back into place, the exact opposite way you took it off in the first place. This is probably the hardest part of the whole job as these little buggers are really awkward to get back on!

All done!

The whole process only takes a few minutes! and can really boost the performance of your machine!

To test to see if the process has worked properly, simply plug the machine back in, then turn it on, if it boots sucessfully then at least one of the modules has been correctly installed, Click the apple logo, then select “about this mac”, you should see immediatly that it will read “8Gb of 1333Mhz RAM” (assuming you upgrade it with that of course!)

if you only have 4Gb registering, or if your machine fails to boot at all, you probably haven’t pushed the modules far enough into the socket. remove the back cover again, and push the modules in further. (push them into the socket, dont push directly “down”).

This is one of the most simple PC/Mac upgrades you can do, the concept is the same on a Desktop, laptop on mac and PC, but how you get into the machine will be different. I.e. on a laptop you’ll have to unscrew a plate, on a desktop you’ll have to take off the side panel. But the concept is the same.
If you don’t feel confident with doing this upgrade yourself, then ask someone who is, this article is only intended to be a guide to help you through the process, I don’t take ANY responsibility if you try it and end up breaking your machine.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and it has helped you understand more about upgrading your machine. Please feel free to comment on the article in the comments below.

thanks for reading.

Chris

Hi there,

I’m a new Lightspeed user, from England (UK), Installed the demo and have been playing with it for a while now.
I just thought I would write about my POS journey, possibly blog about how I get on, hopefully this post (and any follow ups) will be of use/mildly interesting to some people who stumble upon it.

I’m sorry if this is more of a ramble than a short and sweet post, but hey, im a techy, not a writer…

A bit about our company:
I work for a company called Design-a-cake, We are a specialist sugarcraft retailer in the UK,
We currently have one retail outlet, and we sell online (shipping internationally), you can find out more about us at [url=http://www.design-a-cake.co.uk]Our Website[/url]

We are growing year on year, and are currently in our 15th year of trading, growing from two blokes in a small industrial unit to a company with 25 employees spread over two buildings, with plans to expand furthur still this year!

A bit about my POS journey so far

So far here at DAC, as the shop and website has grown, the till point has been ignored. Completely. Even when we moved to bigger premises the till was ignored.

we’ve been selling in store for 15 years, and we’ve went through a couple of tills, but they have all been roughly like this:

Some form of Casio electronic cash register. The only programming the till has had was to program our receipt to have our address on it, and to have a VAT and nonVAT categories. Pretty basic stuff I’m sure you can agree! it’s done for 15 years, but now with a shop selling over 5000 products, and with the website selling another 2500 products on top of that, it’s about time we got some form of stock control, and gained some real sales stats from what we sell.

So, I was tasked to look for an EPOS system that would give us the ability to sell stock through the till quickly, efficiently and most importantly, give us some real data back to show what we are selling in store (currently all of our sales stats come from our website, sales in the shop are a bit of an enigma!)

I started off, naturally being a PC user, looking at PC based systems.

I contacted some “pre built” system suppliers, who were going to charge us up to £10,000 per till unit (we are looking at having two, ideally). Alot of them would also charge very high yearly fees on top of this too. Making this a very very costly endeavour, and not giving us very much control at all over the resulting product.

After this I decided I would look for a system I could build myself, after looking at systems that would cost £10k+ each and ONLY function as a till, I decided that I would look at the complete other end of the scale, and go for the cheapest build I could get, I started to source second hand pieces of equipment, built a cheap PC unit for £100, and tried out using the Ubuntu operating system to keep costs even lower (its a free operating system).

Here is where I met my first set of problems, and I’m very glad that I did. I started to find that second hand equipment is usually second hand for a reason, and that reason is generally that it doesn’t work very well. Or, is very near the end of its life.

I wasn’t really trying to be “cheap”, and didn’t expect this stuff to work in my final system, the second hand equipment was more that I was experimenting, and I didn’t want to pile money into an experiment that could possibly come to nothing.

The Things I found from this were, Ubuntu, while a fantastic operating system in it self, has very little support for POS systems, the software is few and far between, and is either wildly expensive (which is rediculous seeing as it’s built for an open source operating system), or it simply didn’t have any features at all, and was written by people who have no clue about what shops need even as basic features.

So, I moved onto Windows. Initially I wanted to stay clear of these systems, as, I felt that paying for an operating system that was an expensive part of the build was unnessasary, Windows also has many versions which are currently available. Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, these all also come in both 32bit and 64 bit versions.
Most POS systems built for windows are built for windows XP, which, I found has no support any more from microsoft (extended support is ending in 2014). Vista, was a horrible operating system which I wouldn’t touch with a shi….. *ahem* so, windows 7, while being the most current OS available, is not supported by many of the POS systems available, and while some may work, others do not, This problem is compounded when you start looking at the 32bit and 64 bit versions of the software.

Again, moving back to hardware now, I realised that in our office we have around 8 PC’s… each one is completely different. different specifications, manufacturers, not one component is the same over all these machines. This could prove a problem when building a till system, while the initial purchase might be easy enough to buy multiple units that are the same, we are planning on expanding the business very soon, even in 6 months time it maybe impossible to buy units which are the same, never mind if a unit fails and needs to be replaced. Which may cause problems with compatibility with ancillary units (scanners, receipt printers etc), in a small company we simply don’t have the time nor money to spend testing many different products before actually using them “live”.

This then led me to look at a mac based system (finally I hear you cry!),

Looking at the releases of macs over the years, the releases have ahd a natural progression, each year (or couple of years) new macs have been released, but they seem to be very similar in terms of compatibility, and you know where you are with a mac.
Also, the platform seems to very stable. While being mainly a PC user (and i use linux as well as windows based systems), I also use macs, and very very rarely hear of one failing, they just. work.
This is a major selling point to me. The less time I have to spend fixing tiny little problems the better, and with Mac support being so readily available, and, being so GOOD, if anything does go wrong, a system can be back up and running very very quickly, with very little fuss.

So, I started looking at Mac software.

As we are all mac users here, its no surprise to say that we are in the minority when it comes to releases of software, although over the years as macs become more mainstream this gap is narrowing, and we are getting more and more software available to use.
However, it doesn’t look like the POS market is quite there yet!
That being said, it looks like the quality of the software available for macs is higher than that of the stone age varients available for the PC.

I came across a piece called “checkout” which was initially looking very good, I found it on the apple website, and it came in a pack, very reasonably priced and included a receipt printer and scanner.

I took a trip to my local apple store (Metrocentre, Gateshead), mainly as a recce (recon for you Americans..) mission to check out the mac mini, but I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that they actually had a copy pre-installed on a macbook air, and I could make an appointment to get a demo!
I found this absolutely incredible, it can’t be often that people need to purchase POS software, especially off the shelf in a retail store, so I was extatic to find that they had trained staff who were more than happy to help me out.

I had a nice long chat with the gentleman who was trained on the software, and had some hands on time with it in the store, unfortunately it was lacking some vital features that we require. The search continued…

Luckily, when googling “checkout”, Lightspeed also pops up.

So, after looking from afar, and doing some outside research I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the demo version of the Lightspeed package. I also purchased a few bits and pieces (which I will list further down the page), pretty much everything so far has just worked, straight out of the box, with minimal setup.

I’ve been working with it for the past couple of weeks now, and can confidently say that I have found nearly every feature we need to use. With many I have yet to explore.

I’m pretty pleased with the software so far, it looks fantastic, and it works very well. The workflow is a little different to what I am used to, compared to other sales software, but this could be because it is primarily aimed at a US/Canadian market, where I am based in the UK.
Still though, we’ve found workarounds for most things so far, and I am quite confident that we will be buying full versions of the software (along with some more shiny new hardware) very soon.

Our Setup So far

The current “test” machine, which is a fully functioning unit, running demo software is as follows.

• Base unit:2011 Mac Mini
• Monitor19″ widescreen monitor -connected via apple Display port to VGA adaptor(in live model will be a touchscreen)
• Keyboard:Apple wired Keyboard (with numeric keypad) – connected via USB
• Mouse: Apple wired mouse – connected via USB
• Receipt printer: Star Micronics TSP143 USB printer
• Barcode Scanner: MS9520 Voyager Scanner – connected via USB
• Cash Drawer: KAMI Cash Drawer – Black – Economy Range 24 Volt RJ11
• Optical drive: External DVD-RW usually not plugged in.
• Office printer: just our standard wireless printer, available over the network

Problems so far

So far I think I have only had one major problem, being the Cash drawer would not open.

I have seen a few people asking about this who have had varying degrees of success with dealing with the issue.

Bascially, The cash drawer in question is a cheap unit, purchased new, off ebay long before I was considering getting a mac based system, I had no idea how to use it, and it came with no instructions, it really is the simplist and most basic cash drawer ever.

It plugs into a receipt printer via an RJ11 cable, however the receipt printer I had was broken (would sit doing nothing, then when asked to print, would start spewwing random characters continuously until the unit was turned off or ran out of paper..)

The reason why it would not open, I have since found out is that when connecting a cash drawer via RJ11 cable to a receipt printer, the computer sets the cash drawer to “Do not open” as a default.

This can be changed quite easily, if you know where to look.

I first managed to get the drawer to open when turning on “print with dialog box”. When you then get to the point in a transaction where this box pops up you can change the settings, using the “printer features” menu, then changing the “feature sets” menu to “cash drawer controls” and change the “do not open” to “open drawer 1 and 2″

To do this: First start in “station setup” and find this dialog box

Then go into the POS mode (either button or scan), make a sale, and when you get to the print dialog box it should look like this

change the options so they look like the options in the picture below:

As you can see, I saved the preset with a very “non PC” name, I recommend saving this info as a preset, on a live system I wouldnt recommend using my suggestion…

This will then open the cash drawer when this preset is used, but ONLY if you use the printer in “print WITH dialog box” mode.

As this isnt a very nice way of working, I wanted a way to make it work when the dialog box was turned OFF.

This is how I did it..

Go to http://127.0.0.1:631

This takes you to your CUPS menu.

As you can see in the image below, there is a meu along the top, click “printers” then click on the name of your receipt printer

Next choose the “Administration menu” and change it to “set default options”

Click “cash drawer control (shown in blue) then change the option to “open drawers 1 and 2″ from “do not open”

There might be an easier way to do this, this might not work for everyone, but this has worked for me. I hope this helps someone if they kind their cash drawer is not opening!

Things I cant seem to be able to find

Firstly, I would love to test the web store, is there any demo version of this? we currently have a website that works very well, but will be incompatible with the lightspeed system, we have very specific needs (in terms of postage, and discounts), and would love to find out if the various web stores are compatible with our needs.

None discountable products, I have seen a few people asking for this now, and seen a couple of work arounds, but not got one to work just yet (i think i need more hands on experience with he program to get my head round it.
but basically, I want to have some products which will NOT allow a discount to be applied to them, so we can offer say a 10% discount on the basket as a whole, but the products marked as non discountable will be ignored and still sold at full price.
Can someone explain to me how this can be done? and/or could this be considered as a feature request for a future version of the software?

The next feature we don’t like (although I can live with it), is that the system allows you to finish the transaction and still owe money.
This maybe a welcome feature to some establishments, but for me, it just seems like an opportunity for things to go wrong, in our shop, we only ever sell things which are wholey paid for in one transaction, giving the sales assistant the ability to finish the sale and still owe money is a problem for me, no matter how much we train our staff, simply hitting £10 instead of £100 and then clicking finish is a mistake anyone can make easily, but in the current situation might not be picked up on until its too late. Not going to happen often, but it could. I would prefer if we could turn this option off.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post, I hope it has been useful to someone, if you have any thoughts regarding what I have posted, then please feel free to add your comments below, or send me a message.

EDIT UPDATE:

I’ve now also purchased a 22″ touchscreen monitor to use with the setup.

The one I used was the http://www.iiyama.com/gb_en/products/prolite-t2250mts-1/

I bought it (in the UK) from ebuyer.com, cost me £213.

The manufacturers website states in their F.A.Q section of their website that :
[quote]The newer Mac systems (PowerMac and newer) can always be used in combination with our monitors. [/quote]

This is in fact a total lie.

the monitor functions as a monitor, however its touch function does not work. they claim that it is a monitor, and it functions as such.

I didn’t buy a monitor, I bought a touch-screen.

Anyway, after speaking to Iiyama’s technical support, who laughed at me (seriously) and told me it was impossible to get it to work with a mac.

I found a driver.

the company who produce the driver is called touch-base.com, they make touch screen drivers for many, many different touch based devices.

This driver did cost me £138. However, the cost of the monitor and the driver combined came to less money than the next available touch screen that said it was natively compatible with a mac system (even though this one said it was!)

So, I may have spent more money than I had hoped, but, I still spent a lot less than I could have, and I now have a working touch screen which I am very happy with, and is working perfectly with lightspeed.

Another update

Been using lightspeed for a couple of weeks now (full license), setting it up in a testing environment, along side other stuff I’m working on.

The touch screen is now functioning perfectly, its a little fiddely to use to exit windows, and for scrolling using the scroll bars in browsers, but other than that its absolutely perfect.

It works very very well with the POS screen in button mode on the till, and general use like dragging files and folders its brilliant. I don’t see this novelty wearing off any time soon!

I wouldn’t want to use it permanently though, as a computer, I think there will always be a place for keyboard and mouse. But having the function there, It definitely has its uses!

Importing Products

This has been surprisingly easy, with only minor errors that I’ve been able to fix through updates, so far nothing major has gone wrong.

We have over 7500 products on our current MsSQL database for our current website.
It took a bit of creative SQLing to get our data to match up to the required fields (mainly decifering what we called things as opposed to what lightspeed calls them!) but after a bit of playing we got it sorted.

One thing that is rather irritating, is that the Photos importing only finds files through one level of folders, as you can imagine with 7500 products we like to keep our product images in a few sub directories, lightspeed just did not like that at all, which meant that we’ve had to dump all the images in one folder, then upload them, not a major issue, but it would have been nice to just say “all the images are here. here is a file path” and it find them, however, no such luck.

Other than this we pretty much got everything in on the first attempt. Starting with one small section of around 40 products, then another of around 200 just to make sure everything worked.

Families, classes and POS categories

This is where we started to run into “problems”, families and classes weren’t so bad, once we exported these out of our current website into a text file I could copy and paste the entire document into the “new” box, and as long as each one was one a new line it worked wonderfully.

POS categories however were another completely different matter. Each one had to be copied and pasted in individually, clicking “new primary” then “new secondary” and so on, this took AGES. Considering how much of lightspeed is automated or at least has some form of import/copy+paste feature, i was surprised to find that there wasn’t an easier way to add in the POS categories, assigning the values to the products was easy enough, we did this as part of the import, but actually assigning the actual categories has been a total nightmare.

Overall I’m still really happy with the software, and we are learning more and more each day. We should have a “live” system whic we can send into proper beta testing (i.e. mega amounts of dummy transactions). All fun and games!

Non-Discountable products update

After trying for a few weeks to get this feature to work, I finally gave up and contacted Xsilva Support, who suggested I try a few different things, eventually we came to the conclusion that this is actually lightspeed that is broken.

This feature doesn’t work if you use tax inclusive pricing, which here in the UK we have to use.

If you DO NOT use tax inclusive pricing, then it works just fine.

So until this gets fixed, I cannot use this feature.

Which to be honest, is rather upsetting as this feature was one of the main selling points to why I went for lightspeed, without this feature it’s going to make my life extremely difficult. Especially seen as I was told it works, and now find out it doesn’t. Hopefully this will get fixed shortly, and I don’t need to wait very long for the feature to be “back” up and running.

label printing
As well as failing to get the Non-discountable products to work, I’ve also had some issues with label printing, part my fault, part lightspeed’s and (possibly) part dymo’s.

I have a dymo Labelwriter 450 turbo, which when connected up worked straight out of the box. easy set up, very happy. Although They probably shouldn’t include so many clip art icons in their own software, while “testing” I think I spent half a roll of stickers printing clip art labels to stick on colleagues, amusing, but not productive!

Anyway, I experimented with the label feature in lightspeed, its a bit clunky, but it works pretty well once you get used to it, I imagine that I’ll end up creating a few different types over the next month or so, then probably never have to use it again, so I’m not too worried about it’s features only being about 70% user friendly.

What is rather irritating though is when you create a label on screen, then print it out and it looks completely different in print, I created a very neat looking label on screen, then printed it out and it was a total mess. To fix it, I had to mess up the way each element is displayed on screen now, some parts look like they actually overlap, but in print it comes out looking just right. And its consistant too, so I can save my “messy” label, and it does just what I want it to do. It would have been nice for it to have printed what it looked like, but, its done now, I now know how it works. I wont loose any sleep over it!

Printing UPC’s though, I might just lose sleep over!! I don’t really get why when lightspeed prints a UPC, it “looks” like a barcode, but no barcode scanners will read it? Yet I can print a product-id, which prints as a barcode, and is read perfectly? why cant they both just be printed as actual barcodes? it would seem that printing a UPC is infact pointless, as nothing can read it? if thats the case, why bother including it as a feature?

Label sizes, While I’m pretty happy with the way the dymo label printer performs, and I’m pretty happy overall with the labels I can customise within lightspeed, there seems to be a very disappointing number of options for label sizes available.
I haven’t looked too deeply into this yet, so I may be proved wrong here, but it seems that the label printer will only print labels that are of the fixed sizes that dymo produce. is that correct?

Ideally, I would like my labels to be around 32mm x 25mm in size, this gives me enough room to fit on a barcode (product ID), The product ID, and product code as well as price and description. Which is ideal for the amount of info I need on my product labels, as well as the size fits just about all of my products. not too big, not too small.
However there doesn’t seem to be anything near this in terms of actual label size.

51mm x 19mm is the closest workable size, although really its actually far too big. I would use the 25mm x 25mm square labels but everything is just too squashed on at that size, and some of my product descriptions can be quite large, meaning it’ll get cut off at the bottom.

I will probably have to make do with the larger 51mm x 19mm labels, which will be ok, but not ideal.

It’s not all doom and gloom!
I’ve been rather impressed by the receipts I can generate with lightspeed (although my main header image comes out very pixelated?), But I am very happy with the way the discounts are displayed, as well as the level of customisation I seem to have with the receipts.

I recently also started playing with the Purchase Order function, we have massive PO’s here at DAC, and lots of them are done pretty manually with paper and pen, its a long and time consuming process and it seems that (once I get all the supplier costs updated) lightspeed I can easily generate and process PO’s, it’s taken a bit of getting used to, but I think with a little practise this will will be a big time saver for the business, again, another selling point of this software that I’m just getting a chance to get to grips with now!

I have hit a few snags, but generally, I think I’m progressing to the point where I am not too far away from a completely workable system, especially if Xsliva fix the known bug with tax inclusive pricing + discounts.

Last night I attended my first meeting at the Supermondays group in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Supermondays is a group for IT enthusiasts, who hold monthly talks and socials which are of interest to the IT community.

I’ve recently began going to a few meetings like this, so far I’ve been to one of the @Designinterest group, who are a smaller group, more interested in design/development where the Supermondays group is a more general IT based crowd,

I’ve also attended one meeting for the  @uxnortheast where we discussed Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen P Anderson.

I thoroughly enjoyed all three events, and plan to attend all three groups again, and urge anyone who in works/is interested in the IT or design  industry to try out an event like this, I’ve already met some like minded people, and hopefully I can make some likeminded friends because of it (that sounds cheesy as fuck…)

Anyway, about last night. Oh, I would like to point out, that this isn’t a review of the talks, i’m just writing down the thoughts it provoked after listening to them. (Which means its going to be a whole load of rambly bollocks).

the night started off with a table full of sandwiches and  drinks, which was fantastic for a free event, and hosted in a Newcastle uni lecture room, which was great, really good venue for the talks, as it was my first time there I don’t know if it’s always there, or it moves around, but it was still great to see it being able to be hosted in such a fantastic venue.

The Subject for the night was  Internet Privacy and Security, which involved two talks, by  @skipchris & @Infosanity,

I found both talks really interesting, and while @Infosanity’s talk wasn’t something I usually look into much, it really should be. I’m the kind of person who loves learning, I love finding out new things, acquiring new knowledge, which is one of the main reasons why I’ve started going to these talks, to find out new things, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to learn everything I want to learn!!
I think, after last night though, I should devote a little bit more time to finding out more about internet security.

I mean, I’m a geek, I’ve built my own computers for years, heck, between me and one other colleuge at work, after receiving a quote to install a wired network in our office we decided (and successfully completed!) to do it ourselves, so I’ve probably got more of a clue about computer hardware/setup than your average user on the street, but still, my knowledge of computer security pretty much extends to “have I got a firewall? and is it up t date? yes? awesome. everything is fine then…”

A few years ago, I attended a British Computing Society lecture (back when I was a member, but thats another story..), which was along similar lines, which was hosted at Northumbria Uni,
That was another great talk about internet security, and it really opened my eyes to the kinds of attacks that are out there, before I went to that talk I pretty much thought that hackers only targeted a small number of computers, and you were only really at risk if you were stupid enough to have all of your passwords and bank details in a text file on your desktop, but as it turns out, I was REALLY wrong.

Hackers attack indescrimently,  and pretty much any system can come under attack, at any time (the internet never sleeps..), anyway, the thing that stuck with me from that lecture was a photo taken from someones webcam, there was no reason to take the photo, it was just a photo, of someone using a computer, it was the fact they COULD take it that made them do it. The way they violated that persons privacy was what struck me the hardest, needless to say, since then whenever I get a new laptop which has a built in webcam, I uninstall the drivers, then put a piece of black tape over the lens. Paranoid? maybe. well, probably. But I really don’t like the idea of people watching me, especially when I now know how often it happens..

So, that said, I still didn’t really know much about computer security, but last night’s talk really made me think about it. I’m not in charge of any kind of website thats important, I mean, I have my blog, but nothing thats critical to a business or the like, and I don’t ever intend to move into that side of the IT world, so I doubt I will ever know as much as I would like to about computer security, but I think I’m going to make a real effort to look into it a little bit more. I realise that my website could also be hacked, to use the bandwidth or whatever, so I suppose I should really look into seeing how I can make my site more secure, and I found everything that was said really interesting,

Especially when he told us the (no doubt simplified) workflow that the testing process of a system goes through.
The second talk by @Skipchris was the one that really grabbed my attention though.

Chris’ talk was about internet privacy, mainly focusing on the subject of a persons identity. Chris wanted to stimulate some debate from the crowd, and his talk certainly did that, I really enjoyed listening to his talk, and listening to the debate that was spawned from his talk.

When the slide went up that said “multiple identities” (and yes, I saw what you did there! ),  for some reason, my mind went straight to Batman. No, I wasn’t thinking about playing arkham city..

Everyone was talking about things that were all very serious, and I was too, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about Batman.

What would bruce wayne’s online handle be?

That brought me to think about something else too.

There was a quote in one of the slides, which I now cant remember, exactly, but it basically said that a persons identity is built up of a collection of their thoughts, decisions and views (i hope I haven’t just got that completely wrong), and when Chris talked about HIS identity, he said he had two, his “real name” and Skipchris, and he didn’t mind if the two crossed over.

I totally agreed with this, I’ve had an internet persona, or “handle” since I joined the internet in like 1997, back then I was a BIG fan of Red dwarf, and, the film hackers. I was like 11 at the time, the “handles” like “crash override”, “acid burn”, “lord nikon” were all really cool, me and my friends all picked names we thought at the time were cool, I ended up picking “Killcrazy” which i basically copied from a character in red dwarf.

The name stuck, some of my “real world” friends still call me “KC”, and whenever I sign up for something, I always end up choosing the username Killcrazy, more out of habit than anything else, its become part of my identity. Something I chose myself, when I was 11.

So should I change it? now, no one knows that killcrazy was a character who made a brief apperance in season seven of red dwarf, and it’s not exactly a name that makes you think “calm, perfectly normal person”, but, I know i’m harmless, and I’ve had the name for 14 years. How CAN i abandon it?

That leads me to my next thought, I’m Chris Sutherland, I found it hilarious when people were telling tales of their names when they’d googled their own names, One bloke (who shared his name) had killed someone with a car, another bloke shared the name with someone who was in a boy band.
In “real life” there can easily be many people who have the same name, your name forms a major part of your identity, and as the talk suggested, for online websites like Facebook and google, your name is VERY important to them, but yet, it doesn’t have to be unique?

In REAL LIFE. out of the cyber realms, your name doesn’t have to be unique, however online, it does. how does this work?

My identity online is killcrazy, or kil1crazy, or Kil_crazy, thats three variations. and still, when I sign up to things, I am constantly strugling to actually use my own identity. sure an Identity that I created for myself, and, one that I “stole” from a character on a TV programme, but, still. I’ve had that identity since 1997! and I still find it difficult to use it.

Take battlefield 3 for example. Firstly, I hated the way I had to install this program, and the way it runs. I had to install origin, then create an account, then run the game through a browser, which is basically a menu screen, when I pick what I want to do, THEN it launches the game, urgh, from a usability point of view its horrible.
anyway, I digress. So, when I tried to sign up for origin, so I could play the game, Killcrazy, Kil1crazy, KilCrazy, and all the possible variations I could think of this were taken, I had to think of a new name on the spot.
I was being FORCED to pick a NEW IDENTITY.

What did I go for? well, I love batman, but thats too obvious, so I went of HarlQuinzel. It was all I could think of at the time, (add me on BF3! btw!!), So, this made me think about my online identity, In the real world, there can be many Chris sutherland’s and noone cares.

But online, there can be only one Killcrazy. well, one killcrazy per site.

So how far out does my identity stretch? what is my identity online? is it killcrazy? or does it just depend who you are interacting with at the time?

Imagine, when you are at home you have one name, then you go to work and you are called something completely different. Well, I suppose that isn’t a great stretch of the imagination really, when you are born with a name like Christopher, there are so many variations of it, that it’s entirely possible that I could get called different things in different groups.

But they are all variations of a theme, christopher, chris, chrissy. What If at work I was called Dave? that kind of change isn’t really the norm in real life, but on the internet it seems quite common place.

When I log into Battlefield three, I’m known as HarlQuinzel, but when I’m on twitter I’m Kil1crazy (someone is squatting killcrazy… the bastards…), and most of my online names revolve around killcrazy, depending on the different forums, user groups and services I use.

How does that effect my identity? Should there be a way of standardising usernames?  The gravatar program seems to be doing quite a good job of giving you th option to have a standard avatar across many sites, why cant this same process be used for usernames?

also, why can’t we have an extra box for logins? I know it could be a pain, but email addresses have to be unique, you usually have to use an email address to sign up to an account for pretty much anything these days,
why cant we have username, password AND email address? the email address could even be second screen, or, a popup/appearing div box once the username/password are input..

I talked about this with a friend last night after the talk, and he brought up the argument of “but what if there are two people with the same username, how would we tell you apart?” well, I agree that could be difficult, but we manage it in real life don’t we??

When I was at school, in my design technology class of around 15 people, 5 of us were called Chris. Yeah, the teacher had a hard time, but he managed. Even with the same first name, we still managed to keep our separate identities?
Online you can differentiate between people with the same username by having a different avatar, signatures, maybe you could have randomly applied colours to profiles or something? Why limit usernames to be unique, when they can form such an important part of a persons identity, especially when usually the internet is a place which (unless you live in china), gives a greater level of freedom than you can get in the real world.

Getting back to batman, (it always comes back to batman), If you’ve ever followed any batman story lines you will know that robin, his faithful sidekick, has actually been more than one person.

I’m not going to go into great depth about Batman comics here, but a brief rundown, for those people who don’t know, robin was/is batman’s sidekick, The original robin was a character called Dick Grayson (this article on wikipedia about DG is pretty comprehensive if you want to read up any furthur, find it HERE), Dick took on the persona of Robin, his superhero alter ego, which was a way for him to hide his real identity and go out and fight crime, this could have been one to discuss in the lecture actually, when people were talking about real names and such, but anyway, to cut a long story short, after a while, dick feels he has outgrown his role as Robin.
Robin will always be batman’s sidekick, or his protégé, So he decides to give up the role, and take on a new persona, as Nightwing.

This Character is a fully blown superhero in his own right, he’s no one’s sidekick, thats all great, but his intention to do that is to open up the role of robin for someone else, so they can learn from batman. As Dick feels he’s learned enough, and can now go out on his own.
but surely robin is an already defined “identity”? As a vigilanty, technically, in the eyes of the law, he’s also a criminal. Dick grayson, is, in reality, a criminal. and he gives up part of his identity, so that he can pass it on to someone else.

How does this work? can an identity be transfered? I know i’m talking about a fictional character/circumstance here, but it still makes me think, Does the new owner of the robin costume take on all of the “crimes” commited by dick grayson? If robin is ever caught by the law, could he be tried? “robin” commits the crimes, obviously its Dick grayson who actually does it, but it’s dick grayson AS robin.
once dick grayson gives up being robin, who can be tried?
Dick? robin? Dick AS robin? the new robin?
If dick is convicted, can the new robin still use the name robin? as robin is a convicted criminal? Or, is it Dick that is the convicted criminal, and robin isn’t?
Who then gets to say Which identity is which? Is dick grayson robin? or is robin dick grayson?

I guess this all boils down to where the law currently stands on a persons identity,

If the law says that “robin” is the criminal, then the new robin could be convicted of a crime that “dick grayson AS robin” actually commited, is that fair?
the new guy (or girl, there’s been at least one girl), will know the risks involved when they take on the role, they would know what was involved, and possibly even know exactly what crimes had been commited. But does that mean that Dick grayson gets away with it?
Should dick be ALLOWED to give up the identity of robin? or should he have to keep it?

This then gets brought back to the real world, where if someone commits a crime online as their online persona, who is it that commits the crime? how can they be tried?
I know people who sell World of warcraft accounts, they play for a while, level up the character, then sell the passwords to the account so someone can jump straight in at a higher level (im pretty sure this breaks T’s and C’s…), but could this be done in the “real” sense?
How are we, in the eyes of the law seen online? are we a machine? Is it the IP address that commits the crime? are we the “user” of the machine? i.e. killcrazy, or, is it the person behind the computer who commits it? Chris Sutherland, at the moment, its probably just taken as fact that it’s always the end user, the “real name” behind the computer that gets convicted, but how is this proved? I haven’t looked into any high profile legal cases, so I’m not sure if this has ever came up before, or whether its something that at the moment isn’t an issue, but could be in the future, if so, how will we police what a person’s username is and can be? and how easily they can change it.

We are getting into an age now where its becoming more common place to leave a mortgage in a will to your children, than to actually leave them a property with property prices being what they are, at one time this was unheard of,
could we in a few years time be able to leave behind an identity? or even to swap identities?
What would that entail?? we can already change our “real names” by deed pole, which some people do to avoid debt etc, bascially leaving behind their old identity and taking on a new one.

Or, is it NOT leaving behind your identity? is it simply adding to it? are we using the TERM identity too loosely?

I don’t know whether I’ve totally missed the point here, hit the nail on the head,  or am just thinking about it far too much (and im very sorry about the wall of text, I did warn you at the start it would be a ramble!)

But this talk really did make me start to think. I hope comparing identities with fictional characters hasn’t put people off, but it just seemed to illustrate the points I was thinking about (i don’t know if i’ve actually MADE any points here, or just rambled around some), or if i have come to any conclusions, but This was just litterally supposed to be a collection of thoughts dredged up by the talk, written down. Whether it makes any sense or not I’ll let you decide!

Thank you for reading this if you’ve got this far! (wordpress tells me I’ve written 2832 words to this point… oh dear.)

I hope that this article hasn’t been a total waste of time, and hopefully it’s made you think, or you at least share some of my thoughts, either way, please feel free to comment.

Thanks again.

Chris/Killcrazy.

Hi!

Welcome to my blog,

This post is an After Action Report from a game of Flames of War I played at Morpeth Wargames club On tuesday night with three other guys (two of which I hadn’t met before).

The game wasn’t really planned, so we all just turned up with a 1750pts list, paired off and played a 2v2 game, which was a mismatch of British Para’s and Soviet Heavy armour facing A german Grenadier list and a German Panzer Lehr list.

I attempted to write down the highlights and take a few photos, this will be my first attempt at a proper flames of war AAR, so please bear with me!

Here is the table after we finished setup.

Sorry about the Quality of the photos for this review, I had REALLY shaky hands for some reason that night! and for the one above I was standing on a chair, and this is a photoshop stitch of three photos, as my mini camera couldnt get the whole thing in at once.

We rolled Free for all (probably for the best as we had limited time), and used a board that was 10′ x 4′

I was pretty surprised by the board actually, most of the terrain you can see on there is my own (you might recognise it if you’ve been reading my blog!) I managed to cover a table this big, and still had a TON of terrain left in my terrain box! I think i have an addiction!

Anywhoo.

The Axis players rolled to be the attacker, and we set up as you can see above. The paras and the soviets are at the bottom of the picture, and the german players forces are at the top.

I cant say for certain what the other guys had, and we had a couple of proxy units on the field but I can say that the soviet list was the IS2 list, mine was a british parachute company from Turning tide, and one of the german forces was a Panzer Lehr force from Earth and Steel, with the other being (i think) a grenadier company from cobra

Turn 1: Axis

• Panzer IV’s move up the field in the middle of the table, Take a pot shot at the 17pdrs and the soviet AA guns, missing both.
• Pumas fly up the flank, coming round from behind the woods after their recce move, They shoot at the commandos (who’ve deployed in the open), kill one stand but don’t manage to pin them (and here begins the pathetic infantry saving throws from Chris!!)
• One of the Tiger’s manages to pop off one of the soviet AA guns.
• The Pak 40′s split fire and manage to take out a 6pdr gun, but fail to touch the IS2′s

View from the Allied side of the table in turn one

 

Turn 1: Allies

• IS2′s take shots at the advancing PZ IV’s and miss!
• The Tetrach’s move up beside the Puma’s, managing to kill one of them, while the commandos take refuge behind the woods.
• 25pdrs range in on the enemy NW42′s (who didn’t get to fire in the first turn, as its a mobile battle), killing one gun and pinning the entire unit.
• Typhoon air support is called in and range in on a Panzer Lehr platoon hiding behind the woods in the top corner of the table, pretty pathetic rolling from me meant I only killed one half track!

Aircraft range in on the panzer Lehr

Turn 2:Axis

• The NW42′s fail their moral test and stay pinned! (even with the help of the company commander!)
• The Pak40′s manage to bail one of the IS2′s with a side armour shot
• The Panzer IV’s take out another one of the AA guns
• They Also take out a 17pdr, after failing to kill it with Main gun shots they manage to take it down with MG’s! typical!!
• The artillery from the far corner decided to range in on the remaining 17pdr, but fails to hit the mark
• The Tigers Snipe another of the AA guns (these guys are just being bullied now..)

 

Side armour on the IS2

 

Turn 2: Allies

• Air craft come in in the same place, only one aircraft this time, and kill another half track
• IS2′s manage to kill two of the three Pak 40′s
• Tetrach’s manage to get up to the HMG platoon, take the chance on a risky assault, one is taken out, one is bailed, but they manage to kill enough of the HMG platoon to force a moral check and they run off. (Tet’s pass theirs)

tetrach's after the assault

 

Turn 3: Axis

• Puma’s move back up and kill two more of the commando platoon.
• Panzer IV’s make a move on the paras in the woods, but only take out one stand
• The NW42′s fail their moral test again and stay pinned!!
• The artillery that failed to range in on the 17pdr changes its target and goes for the IS2′s, has far greater success here, taking out one more of the AA guns, who then fail their moral test and run away, and kill an IS2 outright!
• The tetrach’s in the open prove too much of a tasty target for the tigers to pass up, they take out one more (by sheer luck the other one survived)

Dead IS2

 

Turn 3: Allies

• Aircraft manage to arrive on the table, and even though they’ve bombed the same place twice already, they fail to range in.
• Tetrach’s manage to rally up and flank the puma’s who have exploited their position and went for the commandos, with poor shooting they only manage to bail one of the pumas with main gun fire.
• Commandos move up to aid the tetrach’s and manage to bail another with rifle/MG fire in the side firing from the hip.
• With both Puma’s bailed, the commandos seize the initiative and assault, causing hits and no damage, but its fine, as they capture the bailed vehicles at the end of the assault.
• 17pdr takes a shot at the tiger who opens himself up after going for the tetrach’s, the shot hits, but fails to do any damage.
• IS2′s kill a Panzer IV
• Pretty much everything that could fire at them, fired at the infantry who have moved up to support the Panzer IV’s in the middle of the table, arty, rifle fire, everything. They get Pinned, but take no casualties! this was a serious amount of dice flung at these guys, and nothing hit home!!
• PIAT’s in the woods had a perfect opportunity to fire at the Panzer IV’s, but forget… idiots.
• Paras move across the table and emerge from the woods, think about assualting but get talked out of it.

Piats not firing

 

Turn 4: Axis

• Finally the NW42′s pass their moral test!
• Chris Passes two infantry saves! (believe me, this is worthy of note…)
• Paras in the open (who have just emerged from the woods opposite the NW42′s get shot by everything on that side of the table, they are pinned, and take one casualty.
• Artillery turns its attention to the remaining 17pdr, takes it out, and the command team fails its moral.
• Tigers take out a tetrach (only one left!)
• Grenadiers from the middle of the field, confident after taking no casualties last turn, make an assualt on the paras in the woods, Defensive fire kills one stand, and pins the unit.
• IS2′s continue their advance across the field

NW42's finally unpin

Commandos capturing pumas (last turn)

 

Turn 4: Allies

• IS2′s kill a tiger
• Paras decide to charge the Panzer IV’s, two die, get pinned
• Soviets also charge the Panzer IV’s, they manage to get in, and kill all the remaining tanks.
• Tetrach’s push up to the objective (its the last turn, why the heck not?)

Dead Tiger

 

Couple more photos

 

Couple more photos

 

Paras come from the woods

 

 

End of the game

Rest In Peace Steve Jobs

Truly an inspiration to the world of Computing, technology business and Animation.

I’ve always been inspired by Apple products, who for years have driven forward technology in the consumer market place, and brought objects from Science fiction and made them a reality.

A true hero.

R.I.P Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Hi, Thanks for checking out my site,

In this post I am going to show you how I made some terrain pieces, in particular I am going to show you my 15mm river sections.

First, a bit of background into how I got into 15mm wargaming, and terrain making in general, you can skip past this bit if you like!

Over the past year or so I have started to play a 15mm wargame called “Flames of War” by Battlefront miniatures, I am a veteran wargamer of many wargames systems, but the most popular being Those produced by Games Workshop.

My love for Flames of war started when I saw a FoW gaming table for the first time, to be honest, it wasn’t even a particularly good example of a historical wargames table, but compared to what I was used to, it was amazing.

Usually with your average game of 40k, the table will be a 6′ x 4′ board, painted either green or grey with textured paint, then a few buildings and or hills placed on it, and the coverage will be about 10-20%. For these types of game thats enough, you can get more but it can slow down the game and over complicate it, and the size of the figures means you wouldn’t be able to realisically play the game with a heavily kitted out board anyway.

This used to be enough to keep my interest, but then after seeing the FoW table, I knew I wanted to give this game system a chance.

So I got a copy of the rules, and bought a boxed set and set about learning the rules (badly), along with a few other people at my local gaming club we came to fall in love with Flames of War.

For most of the people they fell in love with the system, or just found it it a nice refreshing change from the 40k tables we were so used to.

For me though, the main draw was the terrain.

The difference between the GW produced books and the FoW books is that in the GW ones, the terrain all looks fantastic, but you can look at it, and its ALL made from GW products, and it would litterally cost thousands of pounds to play on tables like that buying at consumer prices. Of course you could make your own, some of the best terrain makers still use pringles tubes and yougert  pots to make terrain, but the best results always come from the modular building kits they produce, they are fantastic they fit the “fluff”, but the price means that anyone but the most wealthy has to make do with using only a couple of these buildings, or, worse, playing on a “snooker” table.
However in the FoW books, the tables rarely have photos of battlefront products being used as terrain pieces, and for the most part, all of the terrain pieces look very simple to make.

Obviously they still lavish time and attention (and money) on these boards to make them the best they can for the books they produce, but they LOOK acheivable, which is what first got me thinking.

After a while we started to realise that we could play with unpainted figures (although some refused to, but thats a whole different argument), but we couldn’t play without terrain. So I decided that I would have a go at modelling some terrain, I started off with hedges, and moved on to some other things like roads, cornfields and train tracks. All of which I have either already blogged about, or will blog about very soon.

My latest project has been a river. As I have the British paratroopers, I decided that I would buy the “pegasus bridge” model, an obvious choice for fans of the paras in world war two (well, airlanding, ox and bucks regiment anyway), but I had no river to put under it! So, I decided that I would give myself an excuse to field my bridge, and make some river sections.

As I play 15mm wargames at various clubs, and play different scenarios each week, as well as not having a place to perminently play at home, I have to make my terrain “modular”,  that meaning I don’t make one 6′ river section to lay across a 6′ board, I make lots of little sections, that can be rearanged however I like, that make up a 6′ river.
This way, I get to make a variety of layouts from one set of pieces, and, I can expand the set by making more pieces, as well as having the ability to pack it away into a box (or four boxes as my terrain collection keeps expanding!!)

Here is how I made my river.

 Firstly, I’ll tell you what I used.

• Plasticard (Purchased from Modelzone in A4 sheets, for £2 each, I used about 4-5)
• Woodland scenics realistic water (also purchased from Modelzone 1 bag at £9.75)
• Games Workshop Scorched earth Static grass (around £4)*
• Games Workshop modelling sand (around £4)*
• ready mix pollyfiller (£1 for a pot, used 1.5 pots, from poundland)*
• Woodland scenics small boulder mould and some resin plaster (I’m not going to include the price of these, as these were used as a test, small stones from the garden/beach would do exactly the same job, for free)
• “Java bean” tester pot of paint from Wilkinsons (cost £1 a tub, used about a quarter of one) *
• Deneb stone (gw), graveyard earth (gw), necron abyss (gw) chaos black (gw), mordian blue (gw), dark/royal blue (vallejo)*

I forgot to take photos of this section as I was making it, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say that I cut the plasticard (with a scalpel blade),

Lolly sticks on base

plastic edging

 

after the first piece, I remembered to put in the plastic edging first! that way I get a nice neat flush edge for all my pieces to but up against each other. This was stuck on with mega cheap super glue. it only needs to stay on until the water is set, then I pull it off.

 

 

pollyfillered and rocked

finished Y piece

most of the completed sections and some of the crap on my desk

finished bend

Hope you have enjoyed this post/tutorial, please feel free to comment and tell me what you think! (i’m a comment whore! )I shall be posting more terrain articles very soon.

Hi, thanks for reading.

I’m currently making some terrain pieces for Flames of war, a 15mm world war 2 tabletop war game.

Unlike some lucky people, I’m limited for space, so all of the terrain I make is “modular” which means I can pack everything up into boxes for storage.
Modular terrain never looks as good as a static layout, which will always look more natural, and will flow a lot better.

This does however give the advantage that it can be repositioned into limitless layouts, which can be really handy for war games as every game is different, and playing on the same board would just get boring.

So, I never actually intended to make these guys. But while in hobbycraft a couple of weeks ago I spotted these hornby bunkers.
Usually, Hornby suff is far too big for 15mm wargaming, which is a shame as a lot of their stuff is really nice quality, and I could easily find a home for it on my gaming table! But these little guys looked at just the right scale, for a small bunker on a hornby set this will make a very nice medium sized bunker on a 15mm table.

As you can see its a nice little bunker from the front, comes fully painted and is textured to look like concrete. This little fella cost £5. I couldnt let a bargain like that go, so I bought two. I know I could probably have made one cheaper, or shopped aroudn and found an alternative or even the same one cheaper, but it was there, and it was quite cheap. so I picked it up.

I decided that this was a little bland, so I would take the bunker as a starting point, and add it to a base.
To make the base I used Plasticard (bought from modelzone), ready mix filler (from the £1 shop), matches, modelling sand from Games workshop,  static grass from Games workshop and brown “Java Bean” tester pot paints from Wilkinsons.

I started out with a sheet of plasticard and  placed the bunker on top, and thought about how big I would tank the entire piece to be, The bunker on its own is maybe a little too high to be right on a 15mm table (position of the windows), so the polly filler will be quite deep compared to how much I would put on a base for a normal figure.

You cant tell very well from the picture,but after I cut the plasticard to size, I scored the surface with my knife, this gives the pollyfiller and the glue something extra to bond to, greater surface area to stick to means more likelyhood what you stick down will stay put! I also scored the bottom of the bunker too.

once its scored, I glued the bunker down. Usually I would probably use a hot glue gun, but as this is a small project, I couldn’t be bothred to get the glue gun out, its very messy. Super glue worked just fine here, as the surfaces have quite a lot of good contact points. either would be fine for this project.

As you can see there I haven’t stuck this square” on the base, I did this by  design rather than accident, as there is a door at the back of the bunker, so I wanted to make a walkway to get in, which will obviously take up some room on the base. This is what the matchsticks are for later on!

After this was stuck down, I measured out roughly how big the area was I was working with and started to cut some match sticks.
You can buy craft match sticks, which are not expensive, but at the £1 shop, a packet of about 12 boxes of matches was (you guessed it) £1. I don’t mind cutting the heads of matches for the sake of £1. So, after I cut the heads off a few I laid them out to make a floor section, and then a mounting section for the steps (as I want them raised above the floor)

I must point out at this point, that pretty much everything was done over two nights. I only left the pollyfiller to dry overnight, then did the rest in a couple of hours after the pollyfiller was dry.
I’m quite impatient sometimes, last night was one of those nights. My usual workflow is to put the TV on with something I’m half interested in, then when I get to a stage that requires some drying time I put the model under a hot desk lamp, to quicken the drying, leave it for a few minutes while I focus on the TV, then go back to the model.
Other than the polly filler, every stage of this mini was done in this style, its not the best way to work, but I haven’t modelled anything for a couple of months, so I wanted to kick start myself again and get something finished in a short space of time.
Considering I was doing each stage on top of each other I think the project turned out pretty well.

Also, the thing to take into consideration here is that with terrain you don’t need to be mega careful with a lot of this stuff, its messy, and random. I would never work like this on an actual model, like a tank or anything, the techniques are totally different. But when it comes to waiting for a coat of brown undercoat to completely dry before covering it in PVA and then throwing static grass at it, you can be a bit impatient, and get away with it quite successfully!

As you can see I cut the steps from offcuts of plasticard, and stuck them onto a couple of matches to raise them up a bit.
After this I built a wall around the steps and the matchstick floor, which would act as the enclosure to keep the stairwell in. Then after that I went mad with the polly filler!

This was the first wall I built with matchsticks, and to be honest, its rather terrible. My granddad will be turning in his grave its so bad (he was a builder), the second one was much better, promise!

As you can see here I have added the pollyfiller around the model, this has the effect of sinking the whole thing into the ground, it looks very wet here, as I usually add a VERY SMALL amount of water to the filler as I use it, it just makes it flow a little better, and after all, its proper cheap stuff, I probably wouldnt use this on my walls, but for wargaming purposes its brilliant.

I would have put something underneath this big mound to help reduce the weight a little, but unfortuntly, this time my room is pretty “crap free”, so with nothing to hand, I just slapped on the polly filler. Its a small model, so I don’t have to worry about adding too much weight.

You don’t have to be too neat with the polly filler either, as its going to be covered with sand, static grass and paint. As long as it isnt too thick then it will most likely look just fine. Just get it to a shape that you like.
As I am using this on a modular board, I like to taper the edges off each side to get them as low as possible, that way there isn’t any harsh sharp edges jutting out into nothingness. Although its up to you how you do it.

 After I put the polly filler on, I had to leave it to dry overnight as the filler was done really thick. If this was a base for an infantry stand or something, it would be really thin, so by the time you’ve finished the last stand of a platoon, the rest will be pretty much dry.

After the Filler was dry the next stage is to put modelling sand onto the base.

At the moment I am using Games Workshop modelling sand. This is some of their older stuff so its more like ground up really fine cork than sand, and I really like it, their new stuff however is very coarse sand, which im not too keen on.

This stuff was applied by simply painting watered down PVA glue (about 10 parts glue to 3 parts water, so still quite thick), directly onto the model, then dropping the sand onto the model, then tipping the excess off back into the pot.

 Like I said earlier, I did this whole project in a couple of sittings, so I only left the PVA and sand to dry for a few minutes under a hot lamp before painting the model brown.

I left it again under the hot lamp for about 10 minutes before taking this photo, as you can see its pretty much dry over about 60% of the model, this is fine for the next step, which is applying the static grass. If this were a proper tank or something though I would leave it to dry fully before moving from step to step.

The brown paint I use for terrain building is a wilkinsons emulsion called “Java Bean”, its really nice for terrain building, it dries about the same colour as  scorched brown by Games workshop. This pot of paint is pretty thick, so it needs watered down even for terrain use, but at £1 a tester pot, it goes a heck of a lot furthur than a pot of Games workshop scorched brown, which costs about £2.25!
I would NEVER put this onto a proper mini though, this paint is used for terrain use only. most of the brown will probably never be seen, so using expensive paint would be a waste. even if applied via an airbrush for better coverage it would still be more cost effective to use the wilkinsons stuff. (oh, and NEVER put emulsion through an airbrush. thats just daft.)

 After I left the brown paint to dry under the hot lamp for a while (about the length of time it takes to watch an episode of the big bang theory, to be vaugely precise).  drybrushed the base with Games workshop’s graveyard earth, then a lighter drybrush with dheneb stone.

The light in this photo makes it look a little brighter than it actually comes out. Once the static grass is applied this will look really nice, instead of just a flat shade of dark brown, you have a few nice shades of brown to make it stand out a bit.

As yout can see here, I have applied the static grass to the model, so its pretty much finished!

the grass dulls down a little, as it was fresh on when I took this, so you can still see the PVA glue through the grass, once its dry you’ll only see a faint brown through the grass.

As you can see, I also painted the stairs, these were simply painted blak, then a very heavy drybrush of games workshop codex grey, this was the closest colour paint I had to the colour of the bunker.

I also added a little black paint to gyphonne sepia wash and gave the match sticks a heavy wash, to dull them down a little.
the match sticks I used were rubbish, so they were quite shiny, and didn’t take the paint very well, but they look OK.

Here are a few more photos of the finished model. I hope you like it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article, and like the terrain I’ve been making, please feel free to leave your comments, or send me an email via the form on my site.

I’m going to be making more terrain over the next couple of weeks, so hopefully I will find the time to document it and blo about it as and when it happens. My next project is some trees, and a river!

Thanks for reading.

Chris

Welcome to my second review!

This review will focus on one product from the Zvezda 15mm  range.

This miniature is a Snap fit kit, which requires no glue at all. and comes in only a few parts. The miniature also comes individually boxed, with one sprue in each box.

I first saw this boxed set at the Border Reiver show at the Metro radio arena (or whatever its called these days) In Newcastle Upon Tyne, which was held on the 3rd of September.

The show is a wargames convention of sorts, with a lot of stalls and displays from wargames clubs and companies from around the UK. One of these stands had a few painted examples of some of the Zvezda miniatures on display.

I was in the market for a few of these, as I wanted to turn my flames of War Panzer grenadier kompanie into a mechanised company, I was putting off the idea though due to the cost involved.
The Battlefront SD.KFZ 251/1 costs around £7.50 RRP (so you can usually pick it up for about 10-15% off that price. Plus, I would usually have to pay postage on top of that for most places.
The thought of having to get three of these JUST for my HQ, then four per platoon kind of put me off.

Then I saw these guys, and enquired about the price.

To my utter astonishment, the reply was “They are £2.50 mate, you want a couple?”

my retort went as follows: “Yes please, I’ll have ten.” (after wandering round for a while I worked out in my head that I needed 14, so I ended up buying four more in the end)

So, this review wasn’t actually planned. It just came about due to a bargain!

Here are the boxes!

Boxes

So Yeah, I went a little crazy, but at the end of the day, this little lot came out at £35, and I had them immediatly, no waiting around, no postage on top of that, they went straight in the bag. and then took home!

Now, Usually, I wouldnt have took a £35 punt like this, but, I saw a painted version and I instantly wanted one (or 14).

Purely based on the cost, these things are a total steal. to get fourteen of the battlefront minis, that would set me back  £105 at RRP (so your probably looking at around £90 + Postage)
Thats around one third of the cost! usually you would expect them to be at least one third of the quality, and while they might not be the best models ever, I think they are definatly worth the £2.5 each investment.

As you can see from the boxes, these things come individually boxed, which means one mini per sprue. This in one way is pretty nice, as I needed fourteen, so, I bought fourteen boxes, usually you’d have to buy a boxed set which would comprise of whatever the company making it wanted you to have, and inevitably it’ll fall one short, so you’ll have to buy another box, and end up with spares (I’m lookin’ at you games workshop…)

Box Content

as you can see from the above image, the box contains one sprue, and also contains a multi language instruction guide, as well as a card which I believe relates to a game, The game is called “Art of Tactic”, and these models are meant for the game, however they are just as easily used for any 15mm wargame.

Here is a close up of the sprue.

Sprue contents

As you can see, there are only a very small number of parts, and with the kit only being plastic, you can put this kit together with only a craft knife!

I personally prefer to cut out from a sprue with some flat sided clippers, then use a craft knife to clean up plastic, but a craft knife on its own would easily do the job.

In all honesty, you can tell by the feel of the plastic that this kit is a cheap kit, the plastic just feels quite cheap, and the detail feels a little bit washed out, there is still a very high level of detail in the kit, but I feel like if a higher grade of plastic were used, it would look even better.

It’s also easy to tell that it’s not the highest quality material when you use a craft knife on it.
With a kit such as the panzer  IV kit from the Plastic soldier company, (see my review HERE), which clearly uses very high quality plastic. Cleaning up the model is very easy, and the plastic feels hard under the knife, whereas with the cheaper stuff, its a bit softer, and can be less forgiving if you slip (ending up cutting a chunk out of the mini, instead of cleaning away just the flash).

That being said, this is a £2.50 kit. it was never going to be the best kit in the world, and realistically, it is very good value for the money. There is still a very high amount of detail, which can be seen in the wheels and tracks. It just could be better. and I think an easy solution to that would be to use a bit better plastic in the mould.

The first one I put together went together like a dream, there were no gaps, the pieces slotted into place nicely, and it went together very easily, all bar two pieces.
The two pieces that were a nightmare to put together were the two sections of the lower hull. these two pieces have to be interlocked together to fit properly, and then a peg (which is attached to one of the two pieces), goes through a hole in the other piece. This makes the model stay together really well, and when you aren’t going to glue it, thats great. But, it is very fiddly get these pieces to go together especially with the peg being quite long, the plastic has to be bent to acheive this properly, however when its together, its fine after that, and the part that has to be bent is on the underside of the mini, so once its painted, it’ll never be seen anyway.

After I snapped together the first one, and it litterally went together in a matter of seconds, I decided that I wanted to use glue on the other ones. I think this is just the hobbist in me wanting to get out, it just felt wrong to stick a model together without glue! I want to use these in a wargame, its not a toy from a kinder egg!!

So after deciding to glue the rest, I found that the back of the mini was very very thin, so thin that in all but one of them there were two very very small holes, where the glue ended up coming through from the other side when the parts were pushed together, again, this isn’t a major issue, and once its sprayed even with an undercoat you would never be able to tell, but it does again prove about the cheaper material being used (or just lack of the cheap stuff!)

about 8 of the 14 minis that I put together also had a slight blemish in the plastic on the bottom of the hull as you can see in the photo below.

Underside

I’m not really sure what this is, it doesnt effect the model, but a few of them have it in the same place. I’m going to make an assumption, and say that this is either a fault in the mould at this point, or, its the point that the plastic is injected to the mould. OR its a freaky coincidence.
Again, no real issue with this, its not going to effect the model, and once its painted you won’t see it. It also doesn’t effect the texture of the surface, its just a colouring issue.

As you can see, there is still a heck of a lot of detail in these models for being so cheap. I’m really pleased with the way they go together too, I think I probably would have paid up to £3.50 for them if they were a little better plastic.

Front view

the great thing about these minis is the fact that the wheels fit really well, on all of the ones I glued together, ALL of the wheelshave glued on straight, which is more than I can say about most companies who use a variety of materials to make their minis, resin hulls with metal wheels usually result in a poor bond between the surfaces (even when scoring) and the wheels never seem to line up correctly. But with these minis, the wheels all went on brilliantly.

Side View

As you can see, there is a great deal of detail still seen on the mini, and in the top section of the hull its very clean and defined. The tracks feel a little washed out, again, I put that down to the type of plastic used, but overall these minis will look fantastic painted up.

The machine gun on the top is very flimsy, and I forsee these all being broken in the first couple of times they get used on the battlefield. But, again, these were very cheap, and I have a million spare MG’s lying round from various boxed sets, so this will be a minor annoyance rather than a major issue. Also, “you get what you pay for” should definatly be taken into account when thinking about the MG’s on these little guys!

Side view

Overall, I am really really happy with this spur of the moment purchase.

My Flames of war german force started out as being a SS Panzer Grenadier boxed set for £30, then with the addition of 14 of these half tracks for £35 I have a pretty solid Mechanised force. The RRP of the Panzer grenadier platoon boxed sets that come with the half tracks is £38. That means for less than the price of two platoons, I have two platoons, a Fully kitted out HQ (with transports), HMG’s platoon, ( complete with half tracks, and a platoon of Pak 40′s.

That’s saved me a HELL of a lot of money, and for the price, I am more than willing to take a bit of a hit in quality, and hopefully, I’ve established that the quality is still pretty high, it just has a few little issues, that can be ignored.

I hope the photos do the mini justice too, it really is a cracking little thing, especially for the money. My recommendation to anyone looking for some cheap half tracks would defiantly be to give these guys a shot.
I wouldn’t suggest getting 14 though. I’d maybe get 5-6, and wait for the plastic soldier company box to be released later this month, although I haven’t seen it yet, judging by the quality of the panzer IV kit, its going to blow this one out of the water. (I’ll be picking one of them up to review as soon as they are released!) but still a great buy for the money, the Zvezda German SD.KFZ 251/1 personnel carrier is most certainly worth the £2.50 I paid for it!

(they are available at the moment in packs of 4-5 on ebay, and average £2.75 at time of writing, which is still a bargain, but, do give the plastic soldier company ones a shot at £16.50 a box when they are released if you are looking to buy in multiples of 5!)

Thanks for reading.

Chris.

Hi, Firstly, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this review, it’s just going to be my honest views about these products, I’m not entirely sure if I will be sticking to any kind of writing ‘style’, or whether this will be a particularly good review, it is after all my first ever real product review! But, here goes!

This review will focus on two boxed sets, both boxed sets are 15mm scale German WWII Panzer IV tanks miniatures, one produced by the new Zealand company Battlefront Miniatures , and the other by a British company The Plastic Soldier Company.
The Battlefront miniatures boxed set (product code GBX10) is specifically designed for the wargame  (which battlefront produces) called Flames of war, which is where my interest in 15mm scale models comes from. While the PSC boxed set  (product code ww2v1502) is aimed at either wargamers, or miniature modellers (it even states so on the box!)

Here’s a picture of the boxes,

Panzer IV boxed sets

typically, I forgot to photograph the back of the boxes, which actually has some interesting info on the back of each one.
The PSC box has a couple of pictures of different styles of panzer IV (all of which can be made with this kit), with the vallejo paint references for each style so you know which paints you’ll need to paint your miniatures.
While on the back of the Battlefront box we have a great photo of some painted versions of the tank in use, and the assembly instructions for the tank. This is a pretty pathetic diagram to be honest, as it misses out a few parts, and shows a couple of them incorrectly (such as the guide rail for the side skirts is incorrect, and it shows the back mud flap as pre assembled to the track, when it isnt).

On the whole, I like the packaging of the battlefront box best, even if the instructions are rubbish. I think its that picture on the front, It just looks a little bit more “epic” than the one on the PSC box, its got a whole platoon on the front showing part of a massive battle, and I like the way they texture the green outlines. Thats not to say that the PSC box isn’t good, it is good!  but, based on looks alone I think I would pick up the battlefront one every time. Luckily, I don’t judge everything by the box cover!

Each set contains Five miniatures, which are supplied in parts, unpainted, glue and paints are not included in either of these sets (as is the norm for most wargames related sets)
The Battlefront boxes set is a mixture between Metal, Plastic and Resin parts, whereas the PSC box is completely plastic. (each tank comes on its own individual sprue, which contains all the parts needed to make one tank)

Here’s the inside contents of the Battlefront box, as it comes out of the plastic wrapping.

As you can see the parts are all really well packaged, I actually took a couple of bits of foam out of the box so you could see the contents. Each tank has its own little portion of the box to sit in, so its nice and protected from knocks and bashes it may sustain before it gets to you.

The first major difference between these two kits that I noticed was the price. I only picked up the Battlefront box because I got a bargain (a shop I sometimes visit is stopping selling Battlefront products, so was selling off the stock they have “cheap”).

The recommended retail price for the Battlefront boxed set is  £35 (based on their website price), I didn’t pay this amount, and if you shop around online you can pick it up anywhere between £25 and £30 (+ p&p).
The PSC boxed set has an alarmingly different price, with an RRP at just £16.50 (+ p&p)! which is less than half that of the Battlefront miniatures boxed set.
This would normally set alarm bells ringing as to why this box is so cheap compared to other companies. I mean, wargames are always expensive for what they are, if I told my none wargaming friends I was paying on average £7  for a 200g lump of resin they would think i was mental, but, thats the way it goes. Even smaller companies like Skytrex miniatures charge roughly the same amount for vehicles as what battlefront does, Peter pig are usually slightly cheaper, but I find I like the skytrex and battlefront minis better anyway.

So, its half the RRP, and there is no such thing as a good deal, surely? why is it a cheaper price?? well, If i hadn’t saw this guy’s first ever boxed set on display at border reiver show last year I would have probably just taken that as being that, and ignoring it just in case. But, having known the previous excellent quality of this guys work, I thought I would give it a shot.

The PSC box comes with five sprues, one for each tank, which has all of the parts on it that you need to make your tank, as well as some extra pieces. It also has an A4 instruction sheet on how to put your mini together, I thought that this was a really nice touch, as usually in historical minis (from my experience anyway), you usually just get a box of parts and have to figure everything out yourself. The inclusion of a very comprehensive instruction guide was a welcome addition to the boxed set, Especially the layout picture of the sprue, which had a colour coded key down the side so you know exactly which part is for which tank! excellent!

Heres a couple of photos of the inside of the PSC panzer IV boxed set.

as you can see there are quite a number of parts here, but luckily none of them are too fiddely, I would say that the wheels that go into the tracks are probably the wost part to work with though, they each have four contact points to the sprue, which are all very close together, and the plastic of the bit you are trying to get out is only about as thick as the actual contact point, so be very careful when getting these bits out, its even tricky using a craft knife. I only bent mine, but it could be easily snapped.
other than that, all the parts were well laid out on the sprue and came off it very easily, with each part then being very easy to clean up with a craft knife and pair of clippers, this is where the kit could have quite easily fell down, if the material was cheap it can often be difficult to clean up, but this was very good quality plastic.

the parts needed to complete each model is quite a few, compared to the very low number of parts needed to complete each of the battlefront versions. So in terms of speed to put together, I would have to say that the battlefront one wins, but, in terms of ease of putting together, I would say that the  PSC box comes out on top.

As you can see from the photo above, there are only a few parts to the battlefront panzer compared to the sprue for the PSC box. The PSC hull is in about 4 parts, where as the battlefront one is one solid piece for example.
The problems comes when you look at the fact that there are three different materials there, and each one needs slightly different tools and glues to get the best results when making the model.

With the PSC box I managed to completely glue the mini together only using (humbrol) polystyrene cement, and I managed to clean it up using only a craft knife and a pair of clippers, you could have just used the craft knife, but I prefer to cut the mini from the sprues using clippers, they are a bit faster, and are more forgiving when you are still on the sprue.
Whereas with the battlefront box, for the metal parts you really need to wash the resin before you start, as there is usually some release agent (the stuff they use to get the mini out of the mould it was made in) left on the model, then for the metal parts a set of needle files is the best way to clean them up.
Also, poly cement will only bond plastic, it’ll melt resin, and it wont do anything with metal, so, you’ll also need some superglue to glue these minis together.
This usually isnt a problem, and most model kits for wargaming these days come with a variety of parts, but, it is rare to find one that comes with resin, plastic AND metal.

The above picture shows the gulls and turrets of the Battlefront Boxed set panzers, all of the hulls are the same, which is quite a disapointment considering with most of their boxed sets they come with a variation of hulls in each one, and with the Panzer IV being one of the most widely recognised (and widely used) tanks in world war two, I would have expected that if ANY box had varient hulls, it would be this one. But, no matter.
You can also see that the tanks have a great deal of detail to them, the hulls have zimmeritt coatings, which in my opinion looks brilliant. I love it, especially on tiger tanks.

The PSC box versions don’t come with zimmeritt, they are all plain, but, I think this might be to do with the fact that this tank can be made into THREE different varients of panzer IV.
Something which I was REALLY impressed by, personally, for this box at least (oh yes, I WILL be purchasing more), I was going for the PZIV- Ausf H varient, mainly because I love the the shield round the turret, and also because thats what varient I want in my flames of war army!

I should probably take a moment to say that this is the only box I have come across that lets you do this with the panzer IV tank, if you want the F1/D varient from battlefront you would have to pay an RRP of  £19 + p&p  for three of these tanks, whereas with the PSC ones, you get FIVE for £18.15 posted. If thats not value for money then I really don’t know what is!!!

I would also go to say that other than the added zimmeritt on the battlefront tanks, the PSC ones have a much better sense of detail on them, they are alot crisper and cleaner sculpts. as you can see from the image below,

While the battlefront mini has the added tow rope on the back the detail of the exhaust system and the suspension mounting is FAR more detailed on the PSC kit.
I believe that (and i’m taking a wild guess here), that the battlefront minis were hand sculpted, then cast from a prototype, where the clean cut defined lines of the PSC mini (and the 3D render in the instructions) suggest that this mini was designed on a computer, or, at least refined on a computer before the mould was made.

This shows in the detail, the lines are just that bit more crisp, clean, and, straight.
The other detail on the models which can be seen in this photo is the rear mud guards.
On the battlefront mini these are separate, and need to be glued on, yet there is hardly any contact points to glue them too, and no clear instruction on which way up the parts go, so, I had to guess. this also seems completely pointless to make this part separate, it’s easy to break it, and its difficult to fix it on, I understand that this is a model KIT, and i don’t want it to be a one piece toy, part of the fun of the hobby is glueing the models together, but sometimes there is a part on a kit where you just think
“Why on earth is this separate?? it should just be part of this in the first place. oh great, I just stuck it to my finger….”

I also have a love hate relationship with the gun barrels on both of these minis.
The battlefront one is a metal barrel, I think this one is going to survive a lot longer than the PSC one, at the end of the day, I purchased this model to be a component of a game. It’s going to be used, handled, put in a case which will slide around the boot of my car, and then it’ll get used to game with, so it’s going to be handled, which means there is a real posibility that it will get damaged.
With the metal barrel, it has a bit more strength to it, but, when those things get bashed they NEVER go straight again, meaning after a while yu end up with a platoon full of droopy, wavey, bent barrels, which is a personal bug bear of mine, one that I wish I knew how to fix. (especially after the mini has been painted).
I won’t have this problem with the PSC ones, as its plastic! However, this means that with the same treatment, it’s probably going to get broken at some point. so, what I think I might do, is replace the barrel with a piece of brass rod, which should be a bit stronger. I’ll only do this after the first one fails though.
I’m saying that like it will definatley happen, I really don’t know if it will, but, judging on past experience, I think its a pretty sure thing that it will at some point.

When it comes to putting these minis together then. I would say that the prep time is probably the same for each, the plastic model has more parts, but they are easier to clean up, and use fewer tools. Where the resin and metal parts of the battlefront mini take a bit more time and attention to get them ready, and need a couple of differnt tools.

As for actual build time, I would say that the battlefront mini goes together way quicker, as it only has a very small number of parts.
The PSC one takes a bit longer, but, the parts fit together PERFECTLY, unlike the battlefront minis.
The problem with using different materials is that they don’t always go together as well as you have planned, and, when a model has been designed on a computer, you can get them to exceptional tolerances, which shows in the PSC kit.

I can honestly say that the PSC kit was an absolute joy to put together, I have only put together one of each before writing this, so I will post photos when I’m finished with both platoons, but when you’ve put together countless 15mm shermans, cromwells, stuggs, panthers, and then get this kit, it is a very welcome and refreshing change to see a kit that goes together perfectly like this one.

even some of the “big players” in the wargames industry, most notably games workshop, manage to get it wrong (quite often) and produce kits that don’t always fit together perfectly. To be fair, over the past couple of years GW seem to have invested heavily into CAD modelling for their newer products, so they are getting better at it, but its nice to see a smaller company like PSC also managing to get it right, with only such a small product range.

One thing that the box does lack however is a transfer sheet. Thats a big plus on the battlefront side. to be fair though, if I bought an individual tank from battlefront, or a tank from peter pig or skytrex, I wouldnt get transfers either, but, I get a transfer sheet in the Battlefront boxed set, and I’m reviewing the differences between the boxes, so, I kinda have to mention it.

Here’s a few pictures of the finished minis side by side so you can tell the difference.

Overall, I think I would have to say that my favourite of the two sets is definately the Plastic soldier company set.
The main reasons for this are that it’s all plastic, so its less fidly to put together, you can make multiple varients of tanks out of it, where you would have to buy multiple boxed sets from battlefront to do the same. and, its less than half the price of the Battlefront one! I also personally feel that the quality of the mini is a lot higher in the PSC box, you just need to look at the definition in the tracks to find that out.
I was a little upset that I didn’t get a transfer sheet, but, on the website in the news section it states that he’s working on one, and even if I buy this seperatly, its still going to work out a hell of a lot cheaper than buying the battlefront version.

Also available from the Plastic Soldier Company is the russian T34 tank boxed set, as well as a Sherman boxed set, and very soon will be some german halftracks!

I really hope they will be represented at this years border reiver show too like he was last year, its always great to be able to meet the people who make the minis we love so much, and pick their brains a little to see whats in the pipeline! as well as being able to give them face to face feedback about their products, which is usually well received,  and hopefully grab a bargain or two at the same time!

Check out the plastic solider company via their website HERE, and check out what other product lines he does, and whats in the pipeline.

Also, if you haven’t already, check out the fantastic and ever expanding range of products available from Battlefront miniatures at their website HERE, where you will find one of (in my opinion) one of the finest wargames currently on the market, and even if you don’t play the games, the books related to the games are worth picking up for their fantastic attention to detail, and the histroy segments in each one.

I hope this hasn’t been too boring a review, and if you’ve got this far then you probably deserve a medal.

Thank you very much for reading, and please feel free to add a comment below, or email me at chris@cjsutherland.co.uk

Chris