Being on-call sucks....

So this month has been pretty hectic so far and I’ll be glad when I get some time off from work during the holiday weekends. My work has me on-call for two weeks at a time and this past week was pretty ridiculous; work twenty-four hours straight on this past Friday/Saturday.

However, I have been keeping up on my reading and found the recent news about the impending ‘Nid release very interesting. I have an existing ‘Nid army that is fully painted and was previously about 2k in points and it hasn’t been out of the display case in well over a year. I found that when I tried to play them in 5th edition they just were not as effective as they used to be.

Most of the little guys got shot up too quickly to be effective so I set them aside because I didn’t really want to add a whole bunch of models to a backup army. See, for most of my gaming career, I’ve been a dedicated Dark Angels player and have only deviated from that path a few times when playing teaching games of helping others improve their game. The new models for the ‘Nids are very impressive but I think I’ll be holding off buying any of them until I actually get the new codex in hand. I’d like to see what has changed and continue following the information that the fine folks at BoLS have been posting.

On the modeling front, I have been able to do some work on the 1/35 King Tiger – Porsche last weekend. I have added most of the photo-etch details and I’m working on cleaning up the individual track links. For you WH40k players just be glad that GW hasn’t picked up on this trend yet with their tanks ;) One of the really nice touches the kit has is a turned aluminum barrel with a really nice turned muzzle break; includes some really nice photo-etch pieces to enhance this piece. This is probably pone of the nicest muzzle breaks I have ever seen on any tank model to date.

I’ve been researching which unit to model for this particular tank and while I have some ideas, I’ve been unable to find the ‘right’ one at this time. I’d like to do a complex ambush scheme consisting of Dunkelgelb, Olivgrun and Rotbraun but I have yet to find a scheme I like. My Tigers in Combat book includes nearly everything you ever wanted to know about the Tiger I or Tiger II, aka King Tiger but none of the schemes pop out at me. I’m leaning towards doing a King Tiger from the 506th or 503rd Heavy Panzer Regiments but I may decide to do a little artistic license with the scheme just so that I can really experiment with the weathering techniques and powders.

I’ve got another week of being on-call before I can really begin airbrushing the tank anyways so I should be able to select a scheme to do by then.