Hussite New Recruits

 New recruits to the Hussite army in the last battle were 2 units / batteries of gun wagons. These are effectively light gun batteries in Piquet terms but have the protective properties of the war wagons that the Hussite use. A gift from Les of 4 painted and based wagons from an ebay spending frenzy, were the starting point for these units. The wagons had no guns or crew with them but the sliding doors over a firing aperture gave me the idea. As I couldn't spot suitable tiddly cannons in the usual ranges of figures I buy, I decided to make my own - how hard could it be? (I had the fall-back position that these are early ramshackle devices and manned by peasants so they didn't have to be consistent or look machine made.)

I rootled around on my painting desk and bits boxes for suitable pieces of plastic tube and oddments of balsa and lolly stick and then set-to with the craft knife and glue.

Reinforcement bands on the barrels were thin slices of larger tubes and the ropes were splodged together from greenstuff. The finished models just about fitted in the wagons (What...measure the space?) They looked okay in action.

Some spare gun crews were hastily pressed into action to man them.

Another item in the Hussite inventory that I found interesting was the "Gun Palisade". These were described as quick deployment sections of the prefabricated defences that also sported light guns. Not being able to find any diagrams of this beast I decided to improvise. They had to be sturdy enough to both be a serious section of the wagenburg and also to mount light guns of some sort. What I did find in the bit box was some timber panels off the sides of a Disney Atlantis toy that had been modified for Back of Beyond use. Like this one:

With a fire-step added and some wheels for quickly moving them out of the way when required, I came up with my own (plausible?) version.

I added some small gun barrels on pivots and crew quickly knocked up from Perry plastic figures. A few Irregular Miniatures handgunners with bazooka style weapons were added to beef up the firepower.

The firing step wasn't quite right for the handgunners added in late but I console myself with the notion that aiming wasn't of primary importance for these early gunpowder weapons!

These chaps did their job in the game; causing minor casualties with their firepower and swinging open suddenly to allow a sortie from behind the defences when the time was right.