15mm plastics

[martin goddard]

There is a new company making 15mm plastic Romans.  Looks very interesting.  Forgot what they are called, after seeing they have no address.

[Stewart 46A]

Their site is www.Grenzergames.co.uk and their rules 'at lances point' they have a few picture of their figures. It looks like a kickstarter deal later this year

[Colonel Kilgore]

They look nice, en masse but:

- poses in plastic are typically more limited than in lead (especially the nicely wide ranges from PP)
- weapons in particular can be fragile, and not easy to fix when broken
- the clean-up effort (even for hard plastic) can be at least as onerous as for lead castings
- there isn't the same heft as metal
- at the end of the day, they're just plastic

I bought some very nice-looking plastics a while back but, having cleaned them up, have now lost the appetite to actually paint them. I probably will one day, but will make rather more use of a spray can and less of a brush than normal..

[SimonC]

given the pictures on the site i think they have gone for realism over practicality for the proportions. All I see is troops with missing Pilum and Swords after a couple of games

[owaincaesarius]

Mythic Games' "Jean of Arc" boardgame includes hundreds of 15mm plastic figures. They are really very nice figures indeed.

[Colonel Kilgore]

There's been some discussion on that over on the Bloody Barons section, owaincaesarius: https://rulesforcommonman.uk/smf/index.php?topic=2000.msg17338#msg17338

The consensus seems to be that everyone agrees with you

[Smiley Miley 66]

 15mm plastic figures in General are very flat, as the have to cast them in "one" where's as 20mm or bigger they can cast them 2/3 + pieces if need be. So it can distort the figures pose. Martin could tells us more about the science behind it. They look nice because of being in plastic, but as a wargamming figure and the riggers of being handled etc. I think this one area 15mm plastic cant match metal.
Tank wise the scaling of vehicles from company to company seems better, as a lot of my vehicles have a mix of plastic and metal parts from various kits and companies, as you always get a bundle of spare parts on the plastic sprues nowadays. Very useful. A lot of my Churchill's for the DDay project are multi media and multi company.
Miles

[Leman (Andy)]

Those riggers should be in the Pieces of Eight thread - Bone Apple Tea!

[Mike6t3]

I tend to agree about the flimsyness. I have some Battlefront WW2 Soviets and several have weak ankles due to the pose. However plastic is easier to drill in order to fit Peter Pig Heads 
Personally in 15mn I prefer metal.

[Leslie BT]

So how do these plastic Romans paint up?

[Norm]

I have recently painted up some 15's plastics and thought it was okay. Shown below, these are the new softer plastic models from Plastic Soldier Company.

The one area where I think they will beat lead is for very long spear or pike, which with lead, unless replaced with a steel / brass rod, are very unpleasing to the eye with all of those wobbles and bends that such things naturally seem to attract. Some of the new elastic plastics seem pretty much indestructible.

EDIT .... sorry about the big picture, it isn't that big on my blog page!

[Colonel Kilgore]

That's nice clean painting, Norm.

I personally don't object to the size of the photo.

However, if you would like to make it smaller, you can go back and modify your post. Where it says "width=900 height=650", if you change the values you can change the size of the picture. If you don't change the two values in the same proportion, you will of course distort said picture! I tend to delete one of the values (the program will calculate what it should be) and change the other. So, if you were to change to width=600 and delete "height=650", you'd just get a picture 2/3 the size of what it is now.

Like this:

.

And I can see that the program has calculated a height of 433 without my getting a headache thinking about those numbers.

Does that help?

Simon

[Norm]

Yes - thanks, mine looks a bit like it's shouting :-)

[martin goddard]

Saw some pictures of the Grenzer Romans as they come out of the printer.
There are a  lot of supports which would be a real pain for an army of 200 figures.
However I have not had to do it for myself so maybe it is rapid??


martin