Megablitz Red Steel 2: The 1st Guards Tank Corps

I decided to take a brake from the Modern stuff and paint another Megablitz unit. The next scenario I'm planning will be late war Eastern front, so I've started with a new Soviet tank corps. I've finally came up with a standard for the size of my Megablitz stands. My battalions size units will for the most part have a frontage of 1km or 3/4", while my brigade size stands will be sightly larger at 1". I usually use a soviet flag to identify my Russian unit; however, since these are guards, I decided to give them a nice banner instead.  First up we have the main combat units: the 15th, 16th, 17th Guards Tank Brigades, and the 1st Guards Mechanized Brigade.

Each of the tank brigades has a motorized infantry battalion. The 17th GTB has an extra T-70 stand, this is for 1942-43 scenarios. The 1st GMB is 3 Mechanized battalions thus has a larger base.

 Next up we have the Combat Support which includes: the 1269th SU regiment, 80th AA regiment, 455th Mortar Regiment, and the 13th Motorcycle Battalion, strangely having no motorcycles.

I may add some more units late such as a IS-2 Regiment and artillery regiment. 

 Now for the Combat Service Support which only has the Corps HQ and supply.

The highlight of these units are the awesome new fuel and radio trucks by GHQ. I lucked out and got these just before GHQ jacked their prices up again. 

 Finally we have the whole unit together. A match for any German division.

That's the new unit. From now on I'll probably be going back and forth between Modern and WWII miniatures.

The Outer Air Battle 1963

Last Sunday Me and Christian managed to play a game of Shipwreck. The scenario was a bit different this time. A Soviet air attack on a US carrier in 1963. I liked this game as I rarely able to use one of my big carriers. I ended up playing the Soviets, while Christian got the Americans. Here's a picture of Christians fleet as first deployed.

In the center is the Big E. Christian also had 2 CG, 2 DDG, and 2 DD. The aircraft at the front is an E-1 tracer, precursor to the E-2 Hawkeye.

 The first turn began with the arrival of my Target Acquisition Group. This consisted of 2 Tu-95 Bears, and two Tu-16 Badger D.

For some reason the Christian mistook the Badger's as EW birds, when they were in fact the recon version.

 At the same time I was lucky enough to get two Juliet SSG. Unfortunately the Juliets had to surface to fire there missiles.

A number of my recon birds were shot down. Then in turn 2 the US fleet turn to get better ADA shots at the oncoming Russian attacks.

Also during turn 2 part of the EW group arrive. The Tu-16 Badger E Chaff Bombers arrived and started to make their chaff corridors. One was shot down after barely starting, but the other made a fine wall of chaff.

Finally turn 3 and the bomber groups arrive. One from the North and one from the east. Here's the Northern group as it entered.

Each group represented 10 aircraft. The stands representing 3 Badger Gs each and a Badger J EW bird in the rear.

 Meanwhile the Eastern group entered with the advantage of having the chaff wall in between them and most of the ships and aircraft.

Unfortunately there were still several fighters about and they started to shot down my bombers.

The most effective weapon in these attacks were the F-8s 20mm cannons. 

 At the beginning of turn 4 my bombers were finally in range and every one fired. Starting with the Juliet subs and not a minute too soon as the USN helicopters were almost on top of them.

The Northern group fired just as a group of fighters were about to jump them. Most of the fighters turned to engage the missiles.

Meanwhile the Eastern group passed through the chaff wall just long enough to fire their missiles. This group had be heavily engaged with fighters and had lost several bombers. Thus they couldn't send out as many missiles as the Northern group.

In the end, as is my bad habit, I didn't get any pictures. Needless to say the game ended in a depressing defeat for the Soviets. Of the 29 missiles fired, only 3 reached their targets, all of which missed. Christian committed the plane and missile movement was too slow, and allowed too many shots. After looking into it, I found that he was right. The aircraft and missiles should have been going twice their movement, which would have given Christian less chances to hit.

Anyway now I think I'm going to concentrated on my Modern ground forces for FFT. I'm also going to start making more units for Megablitz.