Limbers

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We all have these 'I could just...' ideas about our toy soldiers which usually involve buying even more shiny things™. There's a couple of *big* thoughts kicking around my head (my RoF really need a third line of musketeers, and surely I need to represent my dragoons mounted too) which get beaten with a metaphorical big stick every time they start making any sort of noise.

Recently a new 'I could just...' thought appeared, and before I could find the metaphorical big stick, I had placed two small orders. Jings and crivens*.

My armies field three types of artillery - light, medium and heavy (not including frame guns, or the solitary shared siege mortar). Each gun has its own limber. Light guns have a Naismith limber pulled by two horses. Medium and heavy guns have Museum Miniatures limbers and a four horse team.

My 'I could just...' thought didn't like medium and heavy guns having the same limber. It argued that heavy guns needed more horses.

by Jean Théodore de Bry

There's a contemporary woodcut showing a large gun being pulled by a sixteen horse train. Obviously I'm not going to model sixteen horses, but I could do six.

the 'new improved' heavy limbers

And so it came to pass; two packs of draught horses and a pack of longer bases ordered. Both orders arriving in just four days.

the medium (and old heavy) limbers

So from initial thought, new horses painted and limbers rebased in six days. Which would probably qualify as a world record, if such things qualified for world records.

the light limbers

As I sit here writing this, my 'I could just...' thought is berating myself, as I've approached this all wrong. What I should have done is bought completely new limbers and horse teams for the heavy guns, and just bought five new medium guns and crews. This would of course solved the rebasing conundrum, but would have caused problems with storage.

the full set of limbers, and a frame gun packhorse

Postscript: Museum Miniatures inadvertently sent me the order for draught horses again a month later. I emailed them, thinking they might have a glitch with their ordering handling software; thankfully it was down to a simple human error. They kindly said I could keep the figures.  Obviously they can't sit in my spares box, so expect Celtic baggage train expansion posts at some point.

Maybe it wasn't an error, I have suspicions that it was in fact a sophisticated guerilla marketing ploy to make me buy more baggage wagons.

* can you tell I spent time in Scotland over the summer?

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