Sunday, May 7, 2017

Russian Log Bunkers - A Tough Nut to Crack

Found a large bag of bamboo BBQ/Shish Kebab skewers in my tool kit and thought I'd finally give those Kursk-Ponyri Station Hill 253 log bunkers a go.  



Technically I should probably have built 3, but for my modest table, 2 will work just fine.  This was a nice Sunday afternoon project after all the madness and dust settled down around the house and the family got home from errands.  One is somewhat completed, just needs terrain and some more detailing but otherwise I am satisfied with it.  As opposed to have it coming out of the ground, I just ended up building this thing, which in my mind looks like an Appalachian Trail hiking hut/shelter and frankly made me nostalgic for backpacking.

A few quick layers of paint brought out the grain and detail in the wood and made these look more like logs instead of BBQ skewers.

Roomy, bulletproof and easily sleeps a squad of 8.  

Detailed the ends of the logs to bring out the grain in the wood and make them look more like cut timbers .


Will put ground cover, dirt, flock, and tufts down but so far I think it looks pretty good.  His counterpart will get the same treatment.

I don't have much experience with tabletop battlefield engineering, so these will make a nice addition to my bare bones collection of fortifications for Kursk and Ponyri Station.  I actually made these more with Battlegroup: Kursk in mind, but they'll work very well for Rapid Fire, housing almost a company of troops (in RF terms) and probably more aptly representing a fortification network, as opposed to a squad bunker.
Russian squad for scale


Russian squad inside of unfinished bunker #2.

Totally unintentional but this was glued down onto my "Close Combat III: The Russian Front" CD!  

HMG Team in Bunker #1
I was playing around with some log fences also but I ran out of time.  More to come.  Stay tuned!

9 comments: