Brigade Models: Salute 2016 - Hammer’s Slammers Hover Tanks and Light Autocannons

Brigade Models: We’re happy to take pre-orders to be picked up at the show – you can either email us a list if you’d like to pay on the day, or you can order and pay in advance from the website using the Collect in Person shipping option.

We will as always have a number of new releases across several ranges and it’s about time we started previewing them. But the first bit of important news is about something we won’t have. Although progress has been good, Salute has arrived ever-so-slightly too early for Imperial Skies. Robin has the rules in a nearly-complete state, but the lead times on printing and proof copies means that printed rulebooks cannot get to us in time. We therefore won’t be selling the new ships either since we want Kickstarter backers to get theirs first.

After the bad news, let’s move onto things that we will be releasing. We aim to have new items in the Small Scale Scenery, Spaceships, 6mm and 15mm SF, not all of which are entirely ready yet so it’s going to be an interesting time for us in the next fortnight :-). But a number of bits are ready to go, so we’ll take a look, starting in the largest scale.

We’ve been working with the co-author of the Hammer’s Slammers rulebook, John Treadaway, on some more HS-themed models. These are taken from the novel The Forlorn Hope, which is set in the same universe but doesn’t actually feature the Slammers regiment. Instead it focuses on Fasolini’s Company, a mercenary unit caught in a civil war between the Republicans and Federals on Cecach, a planet colonised by Czech settlers. The first model is this laser-equipped Henschel hover tank, a vehicle developed on Earth but imported by the Republican forces to bolster their indigenous designs. Next up are these two Oto Melara light cone-bore autocannon. Mounted on small tracked base units, the Fasolinis use them to provide heavy fire support, moving them long distances on the back of trucks (we’re using the existing South African Hippo model). The single-barrelled weapon is the one that appears in the book, but the quad mount seems a logical progression for a later upgrade (it’s in the detachment list in the rules as an option).