Thursday 10 March 2022

Dutch Artillery, 1672 style


Here's my first unit of artillery for 1672, a battery of Dutch guns.  These are mostly miniatures from the North Star range, with accessories from Bicorne Miniatures and TAG. I converted several 1672 pikemen to add variety to the limited number of poses of the gunners. Unusually, I painted most of these myself from scratch, and the guns, too. Ian added the static grass and I added the tufts. all the pictures are clickable.


I think I have the uniforms reasonably right, but, in any case, there is a very great deal of uncertainty about the Dutch uniforms. They possibly had orange sashes. Incidentally, the wicker basket in the left foreground holds grape shot.


Here is a close-up of the unit's officer, he is an officer from the Warfare Miniatures "officers with character" range, equipped with a TAG linstock. These recent releases from Warfare are very nicely sculpted and compatible, size and style wise, with 1672. Great buttons! The chap behind him, on the left, is a 1672 pike man equipped with a (Bicorne?) trail spike. 

I hope you like these, I do! I'm still a very long way from playing a game in this period, but the armies are coming along in the background. A big shout out to David Imrie for further lighting advice; I now have green grass, again!

In other news, I've been chatting with Andrew Brentnall and David Imrie about how to depict units in the Thirty Years War. David Imrie has recently painted and based a breathtakingly-lovely Imperialist unit and I am strongly resisting basing up a unit or two of Swedes. Andrew and I are in the early stages of discussing some possible tweaks to For King and Parliament to take into account some of the additional continental troop types and tactics that one encounters in the TYW.

11 comments:

Clive w said...

Will be very interested in the 30yw tweaks, would be nice to see the contrasting Swedes based
Clive

augsburgeroberst said...

lovely work Simon. Your artillerists are just the part

3rd95th said...

Looking forward to seeing the TYW tweaks.

Andrew Brentna said...

Lovely work, Simon. Abandon Dave’s Imperial Battalia is simply A maze zing! 🙀🙀

Friends Of General Haig said...

Loving looking artillery, Simon 👍.

I think the formation and depth for TYW units is still a really interesting area to be explored. There was definitely some evolution during the war. For the Imperial armies you have the classic massive Tercio, to 10 deep, to 7 deep and then to the generic 6 deep of the later 1630s/40s. For the Swedes there is the experimentation of the 3/4 squadron formation, but essentially a move to 6 deep to exploit salvee firing. It is fascinating to speculate what depth provided - was it an advantage in melee, was it to allow a rolling fire for the muskets, etc. Then, as formations suffered casualties did they sacrifice depth to maintain files/width or was it just too chaotic after close range fire started.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Happy Wanderer said...

Beautiful Simon!

Will these be a variant rules set of FK&P?

Happy Wanderer

BigRedBat said...

Thanks all! Hopefully a variant of FK&P, that's the current plan.

FoGH, we've been doing some digging and have the Imperialists as deep as 10-11 ranks as late as Lutzen, which offers a nice visual contrast to the shallower Swedes in their squadrons.

Friends Of General Haig said...

Great to know, Simon 👍. Are you thinking of something deeper than 10 as well, perhaps based on the very deep, classic ‘Tercio’ pictures so often represented in the battle art of the time? Os is the net effect of the same perhaps?

Happy Wanderer said...

FYI

I can’t see that last picture of the TYW stuff…is that visible to others?

Simon, are you able to reload that picture for us please?

Cheers

HW

BigRedBat said...

Hi HW, I can see it from here, how odd! I'll mail it to you later.

Happy Wanderer said...

Weird.

I just see a black box 🙄🙄😵‍💫😵‍💫