DEPARTMENTS

Friday, October 17, 2008

Achtung Wunderwaffen!

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t's really sad when good gaming ideas and miniatures lines go horribly wrong. Dream Pod 9's Weird War Two game "Gear Krieg" was a great idea that suffered horribly, IMHO, from bad marketing, bad editing and a bit of "before its time" syndrome. The game had a lot to offer, the same stuff that games that came way later capitalized on. The system got clunky for anything over a couple of units which, in my opnion totally defeats the purpose of playing in 15mm.

Anyhow, it produced some amazing miniatures cast to DP9's usual high standard and at it's core was an okay game and I managed to amass quite a collection of them over the years. Not all of them got painted but I did find some of them and thought I'd post them out of a sense of nostalgea and respect for the lovely figures they are.

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Here are several Loki Kampfers painted in early war colors. These were the first ones I had ever painted. One thing I loved was that there was an obvious progression of technology in the German walker designs.

Another thing that Gear Krieg did was to inspire a certain creativity for new units. As I played Germans, that is where my ideas centered. Other players in our group tried some other stuff and I'll see if I can get some pics of their stuff to post here. A quick note here on creating Weird War Two stuff - The Allies are hard to design for.

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This walker is what became known as Falschirmkampfers or as the allies called them, "Jump Walkers". They were meant as a sort of powered frame to accompany Fallschirmjagers on drop operations, providing mobile heavy weapons support that could still be transported on conventional air drop transports. They are made from the old DP9 Ferret gears from their Heavy Gear Line

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This flyer was not wholly my idea. Inspired by a picture of a conversion of a Sharkit 1/35 WW2 German Jet Bike, I built this one out of a Crimson Skies fighter. It was meant as a scout as well as close-in air support for infantry operation, operating below Allied air cover but above the ground. The concept for these was that they would be transported on large halftracks and launched by catapult into local operations. We called it a Kampflieger.

These minis were really fun to paint up and convert. Perhaps when I have a chance to work on them a bit I'll do some individual walk around/technical reviews of the machines they represent. It's unfortunate that DP9 priced themselves out of my reach as I had some nice plans for some of their models.

Hope you have enjoyed this little jaunt down memory lane.

Take care,

-Eli

3 comments:

  1. I like the kampfflieger a lot. How did you convert the figure to lay flat like that?

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  2. Um...I'm trying to remember. I msde that thing 5+ years back. I believe the pilot is actually a standing gunner.

    If I recall correctly, I had to splay the legs out. I remember one of the legs broke and I had to resculpt part of it. I bent the head back and concealed the gap in the neck using putty to make the woolen color of the flight jacket.

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