Just goofing off between projects and games, starting with a couple Haunted Tanks.
(Illustration: The 'Frits Driving a Mark II)
I. Grampy's Tale: On the 'Frits
My brother and I learned it the hard way: you don't laugh at Grampy, you sure as hell don't laugh at his War, and you don't laugh at the 'frits. "Dammit-a-hell", Grampy yelled one summer, while kicking the old monster black-and-white TV set that seemed to take up most of the dark, stinking lfarmhouse living room, sending empty beer cans and bean cans flying. "Damt TV's on the 'frits!"
My brother howled in laughter, and earned a cuff off the ear for his trouble. "Ow, Grampy! What are you talking about anyway? Damn Fritz."
"FRITS, boy, not Fritz, thee's a difference!" So Grampy kicked my brother and told him to shut off the old TV, ordered me to fetch another six-pack of Ol' Gravel's All-American Beer, and told us why you never laugh about the 'frits.
The 'frits are kind of like little people, not made of clay and mud like us, but out of the fire and dark and fog of war and curses of dying men out in No Man's Land, and they're carried on the winds of war, bringing trouble wherever they're blown.
You see the 'frits sometimes as lights in the dark; you dont follow them, they'll lead you astray.
Some of the flyers see them blowing high in the wind by night, glowing eerie in the dark, "Fool-fighters, they call 'em!" My brother laughed again, and got his other edar cuffed. "It ain't no laughing matter, you go follerin' them 'frits, and youwish you hadn't!"
Sometimes the winds of war blow the 'frits into people, and they come back all broken up, all "shell-shook", as Grampy put it, and my brother almost laughed again - "lots of boys came back from the Last War all wrong, but some of them boys was on the 'frits, and their eyes was all full of screams!"
(Illustration: The 'frits love machines, like this Iron Core machine gun.)
And sometimes, the winds blow the 'frits into machines. The 'frits, Grampy told us, are clever - they love machines, love to take them apart, love to see how they tick, love to put them back together all wrong. "Like the damt TV!", Grampy illustrated,kicking the poor set again.
One night, Grampy said, the 'frits must have blown their way into a busted tank, because, before you knew it, that tank was rolling through No Man's Land, running the boys over, smashing through defensive lines, and wreaking havoc. "A HAINTED tank! Hainted by THEM, it was on the 'frits, and we like to never got it to stop, even with grenades! You could hear them 'frits, beatin' and 'whalin' on that tank with hammers and crowbars and guns and whatever else they found to get it runnin' like they did, clangin' and bangin' out in the dark, way before you saw 'em comin outta the fog, burnin' and smokin' with the fire of hell itself, all wrapped up in barbed wire and covered in rust!"
Grampy rolled up his sleeve, pointing at one of his old scars. "Ye see this? Yeah, that's where I took some scrapple from the last grenade we had to toss 'em, a soovy-neer for me to take home. And THAT is why you don't laugh at the 'frits! Now, turn that damt TV back on, and ftune in Dragnet, and get me another beer!"
Maybe it was that last kick, or maybe it was the story, or maybe it was my brother managing to supress another fit of laughter from the word "scrapple", but whatever the reason, the TV seemed to work the rest of the night, and a long time after, but we never could find Dragnet on the air again.
Never could figure that out. Damn 'frits might have put that TV back together all wrong, I reckon.
(Illustration: The Last War: Haunted Tank, second try:)
This began its life as a 1/72 Mark II tank by Master Box, with some light modification, as a follow-up to a first try with a 1/35 scale model that was just a bit too big for my tastes to be suitable for a moving tabletop combatant - the 1/72 scale vehicle is technically underscaled, but just about the perfect footprint for what I was looking for. I widened the body just inside the treads by about one scale foot using styrene rods to help disguise the small scale a little, "bolted" on a styrene I-Beam bull-bar, scratch-built the rails on top and the I-Beam mounted on top of the rails (more styrene strips), hollowed out the sponsoon on one side (which had taken some light damage during the shipping, packaging, or manufacturing process anyway, with the modification allowing me to add a crew of Reaper Bones Gremlins to haunt the tank with. The Gremlins are armed with big knives off the shelf, but I used some 1/48 scale shop tool accessory kit bits to replace the knives with hammers and spanners... I figure the gremlins had looted the tank's tool box to soup up this ride and get it rolling into the Last War like this! The Reaper Gremlins set only included four guys, and I wanted to include a driver, so I improvised using an Oathmark Goblin Slave with scratch-built gremlin ears and hand-sculpted body - there's not much of him visible through the front window anyway. The two Gremlins in the sponsoon are armed with a modified Iron Core machine gun converted into a loose imitation of a Lewis gun, and there's some sort of pole-arm from a box of Wargames Atlantic Baron's War peasant levy. There's an unpainted (human) machine-gunner crafted from Wargames Atlantic Cannon Fodder and WWII Italian bits, posed with the tank for scale.
Overall, the tank was a fun and easy kit to build - there weren't many parts, they fit together nicely, and the kit was cheap (about US $15) so I didn't feel bad at all about nodifyng it so heavily for this project. 1/72 is by default visibly a bit too small for use with 28mm figures - some of the modifications I made (like widening the body a little, and raising the visualheight with the top rails and such) helped a little, and the tiny size of the Gremlins help disguise the scaling a little.
