Near-future 6mm Sci Fi figures and models from GZG (Ground Zero Games)
Back to the Mechanised Future!
Having done some wargamer-scale "dabbling" in 1/300th Moderns for a while now (erm... 3 whole large armies and a lot of eBay fishing...) I'd been strangely drawn to the idea of supplementing the increasingly futuristic looking tanks and rather indistinct infantry with some SF Mechs and Walkers . This new habit had an unfeasibly restrained initial outing after Warfare 2014 where I picked up a handful of Mechs and Walkers from Ground Zero Games, which you can see painted in NATO and Warpac colours on my blog here.
There is lots more of this stuff on my Links Page
After a suitably proper delay, I finally cracked and picked up somewhere north of £30 of 6mm & 15mm (ie drones in 15mm that look like mechs in 6mm) stuff from the GZG website, fleshing out the handful of Walkers and adding 2 lots of infantry as well to the half-dozen or so futuristic vehicles I already had. Typically, I don't have any rulesets for this stuff, and no idea of army lists or the like, but who's never done that before eh...?
This is the full set of stuff in process of being painted - infantry in the foreground, then Walkers and mobile suits. If you just want to see the painted final versions you can skip this page and go there now. I also used this as an excuse to repurpose a number of modern and WW2 vehicles to kit-bash (ie stick different turrets on them) some SF AA and light attack vehicles, which you may spot on a variety of non-standard chassis in the photo.
Real mechs (in films..)
These are GZG 6mm infantry from their pack DSM-127, NAC Infantry. The whole lot of infantry were based before undercoating on 30x20mm bases, with GW sand glued on to partly hide their bases (I frankly couldn't be bothered to build up the bases of the infantry before sanding as I planned to use static grass anyway later). Normally I used builders sand, but with 6mm I have tended to go for the GW stuff as it is more evenly graded with smaller grains and with 6mm figures you don't want the base eating the figure!
The whole base and figures were sprayed in Humbrol 29 dark earth, and then drybrushed in whatever Bleached Bone is now called by GW, then in Uniform Grey (my go-to light grey paint). These chaps have had the highlights / stand-out bits of the models highlighted in a desert sand tone, with dark blue visors and a dab of pale blue to give a vague impression of highlights on glass - sort of a less succesful version of the greenhouse in the professionally-painted house model in the top picture on this page.
These are the humanid mechs - VBP-2 TORTOISE Infantry Walkers and Pkz VII STURMKAMPFER Infantry Walkers . The Tortoise Walkers are in the foreground and look slightly chubbier. I have painted these in a mix of modern NATO 3-tone cammo and a plain green (which I use for my Soviets). The ones in brown are just undercoated at the moment - these are all based on pennies
The Walkers are in the background here, so you can see them in scale next to the infantry. The interesting stuff in this shot is however the KX2 chassis and BRMD chassis, both of which now have WW2 German AA guns mounted on them, stolen from Skdfz 8 (?) half track AA platforms. The recce units (who am I fooling - I don't even have any rules...) are an infantryman based on a penny with a WW2 soviet early war armoured car with a few more lights than might have been the case in 1939! The groups of infantry on pennies are NAC Power Armour heavy weapons crew
Something for the shed...
Two ranks of Ground Zero Games Medium and Large Mecha Units - the smaller ones are 18mm tall and come in a 4-pack, the larger ones a bit bigger at 20mm and are sold in 3's. These will all end up in NATO 3-tone as I have a vague plan/theory that the Soviet designed Mechs will be the round-lidded Spider Drones (so sort of share a design heritage with the T-55-T72 series post-war Soviet tanks..), but that NATO has evolved a more "Leopard-2-esque" blocky style of 2-legged Walkers . In The Future, of course...
Meanwhile, in the foreground you can see some modern West German Puma Armoured car chassis with WW2-era Russian T34/85 (and I think a KV85) turrets on them to create SF-style 8-wheeler fast-attack vehicles.
NAC Power Arrmour suits - painted in pale grey to stand out from the regular infantry and look more robotic. These are now essentially finished, with static grass as the finishing touch, although I might at some stage consider doing different highlights on them to break them up into 3 platoons. For those with "shoulderpads" I used a bright green as some sort of Sci-Fi light thingy - arguably these might be rocket pods or something but that would have been just a black blob so a bright green light looked more sci-fi to me.
These are the NAC infantrymen, in some sort of body armour from The Future. Having done a few test-bases with pale yellow armour I had decided that the yellow looked a little too "outer space" for my theme of Western European post NATO/Warpac combat, so I adopted a more temperate climate green for the vast majority of these NAC infantry - some of the yellow guys can be seen at the back. They still all have however the same blue facemasks, which in my world is what clear glass looks like.
Some of the bases are padded out with a power armour suit, which the more I think about it will represent some sort of robot infantry in these forces, meaning that the bases with the armoured suits are effectively squads with a mobile support weapon platform. I did toy with the idea of painting the suits the same as the infantry but then, realistically, they would be indistinguishable at normal gaming distances - and who wants that eh?!
Both the NAC Infantry pack and NAC Power Armour packs are described as containing "30+ assorted figures including support weapons, more than enough to make a full platoon", however I seem to have been sent enough to populate more than a dozen bass of each, all with 5 figures per base so 30 is a pretty large underestimate! A handful of the figures in each pack were miscast and unusable, so maybe GZG oversupply these units so as to offset casting challenges? This is also a better view of the vintage armoured cars.
For something designed in the late 1930's, the chassis of this KV manages to look remarkably futuristic when seen in this sort of sci-fi-esque company! I haven't yet glued it down, as it still needs to be dipped in Armypainter Dark Tone and then drybrushed to pick out the highlights. Each AA base also has a NAC infantryman on it.
Hopefully I'll see these guys from the back far more than from the front (unless I end up with a set of rules where power-armoured space marines can rout!) so adding colour to their backpacks is important. The sand-coloured infantry have green backpacks, with a small red light painted onto each one for no apparent reason, whilst the green ones ended up with a rather unusual and non-modern-military-esque dark red, which isn't too garish.
The Cybermen (or whatever I call them) were a bit trickier to colour co-ordinate, as the pale grey armour sort of limited what could work - I ended up with a pastel blue!
This close up shows the backpacks more clearly, but also how painting just a series of stripes onto the brown undercoated figures has worked to create the impression of pieces of armour on top of a darker undergarment - I have now realised that the effect is similar to the Star Wars Stormtrooper, with their white panels over black.
Power armour. The one facing this way hasn't been glued on the wrong way round (although several of them were and had to be dug out of the basing and turned round once I started to paint them!) - he's just accompanying an AA platform on a 30x30 base, but that bit of AA isn't in this picture.
The GZG GMM-43 Small Walkers with Rocket Pods are at the front of this shot - they are 14mm tall models and come in a 6-pack.
At this stage I'd not really worked out that the rocket pods were on top of the model, and I had tried painting the open ends of the rocket tubes as the front windscreens, thinking that maybe these would be transport pods with the bit below the "windscreen" folding down to disgorge an infantry squad. Looking at them in more detail though its more obvious that these small Walkers have a big glass-enclosed driver position under the rocket pods.
A better shot of the two sets of Tortoise and Sturmkampfer Walkers with their big guns. I've gone a bit random on these, adding red and yellow to the large guns in a variety of semi-random set of lights and the like just to make them look cool.
The three T34/85/Puma hybrid light attack vehicles, scaled next to the Walkers . I glue turrets onto my 6mm vehicles as frankly life is too short to have to keep finding them when they fall off.
Super-closeup of the NAC infantry in desert yellow. I ended up with 3-4 bases of these, who will end up being some sort of special forces unit who are so cool they get to wear body armour that makes them easier for the enemy to see (assuming they are fighting enemies who can see in the normal baseline human visual spectrum of course).
I've added the small stripe of pale blue to the visors here - possibly its a bit too light compared to the visor itself, but thats the colour I had and on 6mm infantry having stronger contrast is probably the best idea.
The same guys from the back with a "Puma 3485" (mwahahaha! They now have a name!) just in shot.
These Large Mecha Units are sold as being usable for 15mm, 6mm and 2mm - they would be monsters in 2mm! The two on the left have not been varnished in Army Painter as yet, whilst the two on the right are part of my original purchase from a couple of years ago and have been varnished and heavily drybrushed. Because these models have a fairly deep base I built up over the bases with wood filler, then glued sand over the top to keep them consistent with the rest of the crew.
The two large Mecha units alongside a smaller one. I have painted in a vision screen onto the smaller one in the block at the top, but looking at these pictures there is an argument that the structure on the front of the unit should actually be the vision screen, giving them a sort of Apache helo-like pilot (driver?) position. I might have a think about testing that later.... although having the Mecha's as faceless robot things is pretty appealing too.
This shows one of the DF-W02 pack of three Talon Light Attack Combat Walkers next to the Mecha units. The Talon is more bird-like (admittedly a rather fat bird) in it's legs and the small turret makes it rather different to the Large Mecha units. Again it has a deep base meaning that the base (a 20x20 one for the Talon and the small Mecha, 20x30 for the large Mecha) was built up with filler before being sanded and undercoated. This one has a vision slit painted in above the turret, which looks a bit odd as this is more suitable as an air intake of some sort - so perhaps there is an argument that there is a driver position under the turret to be painted in ?
This time the GMM-43 Small Walkers have been repainted properly, with a helicopter-style driver/pilot position now in blue "glass" and the roclet pods painted in grey (to be distinct from the cammo body of the walker) above the driver position. I painted the whole glass area in blue, and then retro-fitted the frame in earth brown afterwards, which was easier than it looks as you are painting the edges of the driver position.
Adding black spots to highlight the ends of the rocket pod tubes makes them stand out - I did toy with cheesy red-tips for the rockets, but decided that was a step too far on these fairly pragmatic low-altitude helicopter analogues.
Here they are again - the ones which haven't had static grass do show that perhaps I should have built up these bases to, but with the grass its not as noticable. There are Spider Drones in the distance and another GZG small support droid gun platform from the 15mm range doing sterling duty as a heavy laser gun platform on tracks.
Here's pretty much everything all lined up so you can see the relative scales of these bits of kit
All three flavours of NAC infantry and power armour in one shot. There is a guy with a heavy weapon on the far left - I've just painted these black and might pick them out with some drybrushed metallic highlights when they are finally finished.
VBP-2 TORTOISE and Pkz VII STURMKAMPFER Infantry Walkers all together in perfect harmony again! The addition of static grass has hidden almost all of the lumpy bits where their bases stand out under the layer of glued-on sand. I will finish them off by using some grass tufts that have been used on my 28mm medievals, which at this scale will look like large alien bushes
Super-closeup of these 6mm figures
Walkers and H&R AFVs and infantry - the idea of having Walkers in the same force as an M60 just amuses me ....
The finished armies are now online - just follow this link, or see also
