When I first saw the television show "Battlestar Galactica" I was a little child. I loved the episodes and dreamed about reenacting the adventures of Apollo and Starbuck with miniatures. A few years ago I saw the re-imagined show and was really impressed that the series got even better than its parent.
It is now my favorite television show an last year I started searching for tabletop miniatures of Battlestar Galactica.
A few month ago I found the miniatures from Ravenstar Studios and I ordered them. When they arrived I started painting these great models. For the first steps I painted some ships of the civilian fleet of the show to get a feeling for spaceship painting. Most of the paint job was drybrushing the models in few steps and painting some highlights an details. The miniatures are very small (see the coin in the picture above) and I like how it worked. The pictures are an enlargement of the real miniatures.
For information of the ship names I used the Battlestar Wiki which is a great resource for the television shows. They have a lot of iamges of the spaceships, too, so feel free about comparing my models with the real ships.

My gaming club is currently preparing for a participation game at the annual german wargaming convention Tactica in Hamburg next year. We are going to present a Great War gaming table depicting the so called Kaiserschlacht in 1918. We preparing a 28mm gaming table showing a trench which is manned by the Ulster Division and attacked by the 6th bavarian Sturmregiment. 

I decided to paint miniatures and vignettes for this project. Therefore I am working on color schemes and dirt, blood and mud on the models which is not an easy thing to paint. 

However I think I can still add more dirt, as you can see. 6 of the models are cleen, because they were the first models to paint. The next 6 models look far more dirty. I must admit that I forgot to paint dirt on the helmets....

To be continued...

Several weeks ago we had a very nice game written and hosted by Rusus. The idea is quite simple: In a small town, the quarters have a football match against each other. There are only a few rules: no weapons, no other rules. Just get one of the balls in your home area. Every player has 4 miniatures and some houses representing the quarter. This can be any miniature of the players choice. We had some very funny combinations during the test game.

The game will be played at the German Tabletop Convention in Hamburg the Tactica, next year. I played with some WW1 miniatures and luckily won the game. However I can recommend to play some fun games with your stuff, too. This keeps us away from getting too serious.

Emezek vannak az új magyar Stukamak. These are my new hungarian Stukas. The Ju 87 D Models again come from armaments in miniature. This was my second attempt to paint aircraft so I made a lot of mistakes and now I know much more about how to airbrush 1:100 models.

First of all I will paint the parts separately in the future. Moreover I need to think about a way to add a handle for painting the model. I tried to mask the light blue bottom of the Stukas with liquid mask. This worked well, but to get ridd off the mask was a pain in the arse. Therefore I will use liquid mask only less complicated surfaces than the bottom of a Stuka with bombs attached.

The chosen color scheme is a kind of free style since I have no evidence of a aircraft which was spraygunned like the hungarian tanks were. It seems that a german style with edges was used for camoflage with hungarian markings.

However I wanted to have a similar look for the hungarian tanks I will paint in the near future. To be honest I am not that accurate when it comes to aircraft since in Flames of war they are mere counters. The Aircraft rules are not very attractive to me so I found a way to use them as objectives instead. Since the carrier is not retractable they can stand on the table just as they are.

I am quite happy with the bases for the aircraft since the are built from the scratch. A little hole in each Stuka and a piece of steel wire in the top of the acryl rod is a quite simple construction. I have chosen different heights and angles and I like the way the models are positioned.

The look of a game is very important for me. I never liked printed or plastic markers on the gaming table since they destroy the illusion of a miniature battle field. Therefore I prefer modelled markers. 

The idea is not new and was shown before, some of the markers in the web look much better than mine, but I am happy with my Fallschirmjäger markers. I did markers for "Gone to ground", "Pinned down", "Moved at the double", "Bailed out" and one tree for prepared positions for tanks and big guns in concealing terrain.

Since these are always used in game, they should get more attention by the players. My next set of gaming markers will have smaller bases in order to cover less space either in the miniature box and on the table.