Ideas for favorite unique figure poses

In reorganizing many of my various units some things this hobby come into focus.  My various units’ figures come a variety of different sets, made by several different manufacturers , each with their own style and often similar types of figures in their sets.  

Take Hat for instance;  many of their type of troop sets are fairly standardized to either;

1.  For a unit troop type they produce separate action, command and marching sets, with 6 different poses in the command and action Sets, and 2 or 3 in the marching sets, 18 figures total in each set.  The Bavarians, Prussians & Russians sets follow this pattern.  The upcoming Austrian sets will follow this pattern.

2. For a unit type they produce 1 combined action & marching set with 6 poses (either 1 or 2 marching), and then a command set of 6 poses, but that also includes figures for a similar, but slightly different type of troops.  Sets like this include the French light infantry chassuers, voltiguers and Carabiniers sets, and the Wurttemberg line and grenadier sets.   

I like this approach better than that of many other manufacturers that either include too many drummers or officers or flag figures, or even worse; a bunch of odd, not very useful figures, like figures being shot, oddly contorted charging figures, or those using their musket as a club. 

While Hat’s approach of focusing on the most useful poses, their sets are very efficient.  However, a downside of This approach is that many sets contain very similar poses, which can get a little boring when putting together a few hundred battalions.  Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t trade this efficiency for anything, but it makes me apprciciate those unique poses which fit into my units where the figure are available in sufficient numbers to do so.  Here are a couple of my favorite fairly rare/unique figure poses that I find useful.

The first is actually made by Hat; from the Carabiniers set, I find this figure helpful in braking the monotony of fire lines with stand fire in front and reload behind;

The next figure is from Armies in Plastic’s French infantry set, and while I typically try to avoid kneeling figures, this pose is useful as either a skirmish, front rank of a square, or a fire line.

Another figure is from Accurate’s excellent AWI British, which is very useful in rear ranks of advancing battalions (particularly when you run out of marching figures);

I will add more useful uniques later.  Cheers!

Comparison of Austrian, French 1808, Prussian musketeer 1806 & Prussian Fusilier 1806 firing lines

 During this period when most sets I would like to buy are either “out of stock” and not yet produced I have been studying Napoleonic warfare as much as possible.  It’s fascinating how much ISN’T known, or well understood about how these huge armies actually fought only 200 years ago.  

An example of things not easy to track down accurately is the composition and formations of the units in battle.  Look at 10 different sources and you are likely to find 7 different lists number and type of enlisted, NCO and officers in a battalion, and how they were arranged in the line of fire or columns (with at least a few of the agreeing sources being because one used the other as it’s source and they are both wrong).  Combing through all this I have tried to distill it into a useful and hopefully accurate record, and diagrams.

It is one thing to know that Austrian units official strengths was much larger than those of the French and other armies.  It is quite another to see it actually expressed. 

While not the best picture, this is a comparison of a battalion in line formation (from the top);

Austria (in white)

France 1808 (navy)

Prussia musketeers 1806

Prussia Fusiliers 1806

Interesting to see how huge the Austrian battalion is, including it’s much larger 6 companies, with each subdivided into half-company and zug (1//4 company) units.  3 Austrian Zug is larger companies of the other units.

Also; interesting is the nations difference in skirmish deployments.  While the French would send out anywhere from a company to the entire battalion in skirmish order, the Austrians used their third rank to skirmish.  The Prussian musketeers of 1806 had a separate detachment of about 50 schutzen to skirmish, but would sometimes also use their 3rd rank to boost skirmish numbers when desperate.  And the Prussian Fusiliers formed line in only 2 ranks, compared to 3 for all the others, and had a larger 80 men+ Schutzen for skirmishing or detached duties.

Cheers

Welcome to all my Singapore readers

According to Blogger over the last 6 months the country with the largest number of views of this blog has been Singapore.  Very flattered that people from across the world would be interested in what I’ve posted, hope you have enjoyed it.  

Thank you to my readers from Singapore and everywhere around the world.

Latest troops to join the army!

 I recently noticed some limited restocks of some Hat sets so took the opportunity to try to add some figures to reorganize my Bavarian units (and why not pick up another Austrian command unit if Hat is making noises about producing their Austrians troop sets).

While I ordered 10 Bavarian action sets, they only had 5 (sad face).  But that’s better than the nothing available for the last couple of years.

Cheers

Hat mounted Austrian officer on Hat French dragoon horse

 

It fits!

It is a challenge to find a 1/32 horse for the Hat Austrian mounted officer because the tails of his coat make him a difficult fit for many other manufacturer’s 1/32 horses; does fit well on Call to Arms, Italeri, or Armies in Plastic horses.  

However he sits quite nicely on Hat’s own 1/32 French dragoon horses.

It appears the long delayed Hat Austrian infantry sets are not dead!

 After just noticing an anonymous reply to my second to last blog post I checked out Hat’s website and it appears they have resumed work on these figures!  

They are at the stage of designing the spru, meaning deciding what combination of figures, backpacks and hats can fit, and therefore how many of everything that will be in each set (and if it requires 3 or 2 sets) to get it all done.

Very happy to see this, but trying also to temper my enthusiasm because there have been many false hopes on these in the 14 years since Hat first showed the master figures for these; https://www.hat.com/Prev/Austrian/Austrian.html

Cheers!

So sorry to be absent from the blog for so long

 It’s just that there has been so little to talk about given Hat Industrie’s failure to produce their Austrian sets, and the scarcity of many other critical figure types.

Yes I have bought the odd set, typically either a find on EBay or one of the online shops I regularly check, and very occasionally regular sets where I find a need. 

Not going to lie; it’s more than a little depressing to get so far as to have a largely compete French & allied army, and an Austrian army really only missing fusiliers & grenadiers, but with no near-term prospects for those troops to be produced.

If anyone has any contacts with producers they are able to share I would be very grateful. I will reach out to them to discuss producing Austrian sets and how much in sales $ they can count on from me alone.  Costing out my needs (Based on Hat’s typical # of figures per set and recent pricing) I estimate my needs to cost somewhere north of $3,500. A not insubstantial amount of sales to be able to count on upfront.  

One Napoleonic thing that has been occupying my brain is study of the 1806 campaign against Prussia.  Not so much to play it out in 1/54, but to better understand it.  In particular what stands out to me is that even with their less flexible army I believe the Prussians, with just a little bit more focus & leadership could have not only done better that historically (It would be very hard to do worse) but could have concentrated their army to beat Napoleon at Jena.  More on this later.  Cheers