Monday 26 January 2015

Brigade to the Rescue! DZC Bunkers (3)

Happy to report my search for a budget bunker for DZC has finally borne fruit.

Tony Francis and Brigade Models are one of the more established companies in the fringe of sci fi wargaming. They have quietly and reliably been producing their ranges for over a decade and have a large fleet scale "Full Trust" compatible starship range, a rather nice line in 15mm and 6mm sci fi, and they were doing the whole Victorian SF thing years before all these Johnny come latelys with their glossy books and expensive boxed sets. 

Tony & co have recently been dabbling in 3d printing and have started to digitally remaster some of their 15mm designs, and damned impressive they are too.

When I started playing Dropzone I was eyeing up their 6mm buildings and wondering if they would work for DZC, but they were just a bit too small. Needless to say I (and I'm sure many others) dropped some hints, and Tony has just obliged with some 10mm scaled versions of their 6mm Sci Fi  Desert Buildings range. Initial releases follow the 6mm range quite closely, so what you get are fairly low buildings reminiscent of Tatoine, but with some modern \ sci fi touches. Of the initial releases one immediately caught my eye - a building going by the modest title "Small Dwelling #1"  . This seemed to fit most of my requirements and was priced at the princely sum of £1.75 ($2.62USD) each. I ordered five on a whim to see what they were like "in the flesh" . After all, they could always be used as other buildings if they turned out to be unsuitable for bunkers, and the whole order including p&p came to £10.75. A few days later they arrived, and I'm a happy little troglodyte!

The first thing I should mention about them is the size. You get a fair brick of resin for your £1.75. Detail is simple but sharpe. They are styled as a simple building with one fairly heavy duty door, no windows and a domed roof. The squat shape and buttressed walls all combine to give them a no nonsense ferro-concrete feel. I was not so certain about the dome, but I can live with it.

As I said I have five, so there are plenty of options to think about paint schemes. For the first I have settled on a weathered concrete \ grey scheme, which I think helps enhance the "bunker-y-ness". I'm planning on picking up some decals at York next week to number them up and add to the sci fi feel, and I suspect these will also benefit from some urban style graffiti in due course. Here is Bunker 1 with a Bear to give an idea of size.



I'm rather happy with these, so much so that I am ordering some more from the range in the near future. The real treat will be if Tony decides it is worth continuing to reproduce the 6mm range in 10mm I will be first in the queue for a 10 mm version of the Vtol Airfield and the Docking Bay  to name a few



2 comments:

  1. Looks good. I might have to buy some.

    Cheers,
    Sword

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cheers Sword - I think they will make some nice alternates to the buildings we already have

    ReplyDelete