Military Tuesday : Julescrafter – Military Papercraft

Found Julius Perdana’s aka Julescrafter’s site while loooking for UFOS quite a while back.

While UFOs definitely don’t make a Military Tuesday post no matter what you say about WWII German wunderwaffen, conspiracy theories about Area-51 or even the USAF’s Project Blue Book in the 1960s but Julius’ papercraft models of armored fighting vehicles do make a worthwhile post.


© Julius Perdana

A FV101 Scorpion light tank model can be downloaded from Julescrafter.com for free as well as a model of a mythical and supposedly WWII-vintage Haunebu II flying saucer in German field grey.


© Julius Perdana

The plans for other vehicles can be had for a small fee. Here’s a preview of some of the papercraft armour models available for purchase.


© Julius Perdana

A Russian BMP-2M. My favourite model because of the turret detail.


© Julius Perdana

A Russian T-64B.


© Julius Perdana

An Israeli Merkava Mk II.


© Julius Perdana

A French LeClerc.

Download (or buy) these papercraft Julescrafter.com.

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Sega’s Tiger I Papercraft Model
Papercraft Paradise – A Paradise for Machine Papercraft
How To Operate a Tiger Tank

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Wallpapers Wednesday : Warhammer 40,000 Wallpapers from Firebase Magazine

A set of five awesome wallpapers from the free quarterly Warhammer 40,000 fanzine Firebase as featured on the Bell of Lost Souls. Artwork by Jason Heuser, Nacho Fernandez, Tim Divar and Pavel Zolotkov.


© Tim Divar

Tim Divar’s artwork of an advancing Adeptus Mechanicus column is my personal favourite – artwork that feature these supplicants of the Machine God are simply hard to come by, much less excellent ones like this – even the Black Library’s official Art of Warhammer 40,000 book dedicates only a few measly pages to these half-man, half-machine servants of the Imperium.


© Jason Heuser


© Nacho Fernandez


© Pavel Zolotoko

Don’t miss out on other Warhammer 40,000 artwork from these artists – check out Jason Heuser’s artworks of a Necron Warrior and the Thousand Sons Primarch Magnus The Red, Nachos Fernandez’s Eversor Assassin and Battle for Macragge and finally, Tim Divar’s Eldar vs Tau and Lost and The Damned. I’m quite disappointed in not being able to locate Pavel Zolotoko’s website because his Slaanesh Chaos Space Marine is downright nasty stuff.

Download these wallpapers from Bell of Lost Souls.

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Warhammer 40,000 – Squad Command

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Random Monday : Be Christopher Columbus and Discover The New World

Arcadetown’s The New World is a resource management game which puts you in the shoes of a captain sailing from the Spain (The Old World) across the Atlantic to the New World (the American continents) and emulating Christopher Columbus’ first vovage to the West Indies in August 1492.

This game will test your ability to handle unforeseen events like heavy storms, rats infesting the cargo hold and other Things That Happen™ on an epic journey like this and you will have to juggle the very limited time points between the different tasks needed to keep your ship seaworthy and the crew’s morale to prevent them from erupting into open mutiny, in order to reach the New World alive.

By consulting your daily logbook, you can make better decisions on your priorities for the next few days. Judicious timing for food rationing is also essential due to the lack of supplies on the smaller ships : while ordering half rations for the crew lowers morale, it still beats forcing them to sail on zero rations in the hold.

Three different types of ships – the caravel, nao and carrack – await you in the docks to cater to different playing styles – the caravel is fast but carries less crew and stores while the heavy carrack is the exact opposite. The other ship, the nao, is somewhere between the two. Personally, I’ve only completed the 3,000+ miles voyage with the caravel by pushing ahead as aggressively as possible by emphasizing navigation, sail maintenance and crew morale at the expense of hull maintenance and crew health.

Play The New World at Arcadetown.

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Military Tuesday : 1848

1848 is a wargame sponsored by the Hungarian Ministry of Education and released by Hussar Games as a free download in 2006.

The game is set during the violent era of the Hungarian Independence War of 1848-49. 1848 was a year of revolutions. Most of the uprisings were crushed quickly, but Hungary was an exception. While Austria was occupied in dealing with the independence movements in Italy, Hungary used the time to train and deploy a competent army.. The newly created Honved Army suffered some set-backs in 1848, but in the 1849 spring counter-attack, the whole country was liberated. Victory was sweet but short for Hungary – in the summer of 1849 the Tsar of Russia intervened with 200,000 troops. In history, this force could not be stopped. Can you change history?

I actually downloaded this game back then but didn’t have time to seriously play it. Here’s my (three years late) impressions of this game after completing the tutorial and a brief foray in the Transylvania campaign.

The game includes a detailed tutorial scenario which should teach players the basics of this operational-level wargame very quickly. Kudos to the developers for producing the excellent in-game tutorial that does not require players to refer to the manual while playing each turn. In my opinion, 1848 serves as a good introduction to players new to wargames – the graphics are appealing and there’s no need to (overly) worry about supply and logistics or orders of battles. Most critical factors are abstracted as simple numbers which eliminates scary stuff like formulas or combat resolution tables although the nitty-gritty statistics and supply mechanics are explained in the manual if you’re so inclined.

One thing which I felt the tutorial taught but did not emphasize its importance strong enough was the need to detach cavalry regiments for battlefield reconnaissance. I learned this the hard way when I sent my forces blindly in the direction of the enemy during an actual campaign with fog-of-war turned on :(

I don’t know about the effectiveness of simulating interest in military history via wargames but I wonder if a similiarly-sponsored wargame on the Battle for Malaya and Singapore could interest local students in the what-if scenarios of repelling or containing the Japanese invasion of the peninsula in WWII.

Download 1848 or visit Hussar Games’ official site.

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Games Thursday : Stil Bomber 2 – RPGish Shoot-em’ up

Stil Bomber 2 is a freeware shoot-em-up by Tomaxko that I found at FullGames.sk. A bit rough around its edges but it shows a lot of promise from its attention to detail and sheer ambition.

From its creator’s own description of Stil Bomber 2:

… New 10 ships with other skills, more than 100 aliens, 250 Weapons, Mega Bombs and nuclears, about 20 different Upgrades …

It follows the familiar tradition of shooting, collecting credits and upgrading of some of the best shoot-em-ups I have played like Tyrian and Jets N’ Guns but eschews the linear nature of those games for a nonlinear map of a star system which you decide where to proceed after riding each successive area of marauding aliens.


Just a small portion of the starmap

As the crux of Stil Bomber 2 is in the ship upgrading and exploration, the shoot-em-up portion possesses only functionally attractive graphics. Ships explode nicely when fired on but repeatedly seeing the same type of enemy ships level after level really numbs the brain after several missions.


Watch out! An asteroid belt to the left

While graphically unappealing, the shoot-em-up does have its charms due to its attention to detail – destroyed enemy ships don’t always break up into pieces but often end up as floating lifeless hulks which pose as much as a hazard as they were previously while alive. At times, missions also occur in asteroid belts which can quickly deplete your ship’s shields as well as ravage entire squadrons of weakly armoured enemy ships caught in them.

While most of the pilotable ships can absorb quite a bit of punishment, not all upgrades are permanent and can be destroyed when the ship suffers heavy damage or is destroyed by either enemy fire or reckless piloting. In this way, players are prevented from utilizing brute force tacticsand are expected to possess a certain degree of finesse during combat with the enemy hordes which can number over 1000 ships in each mission.

Stil Bomber 2 is however, marred by an inconsistent difficulty level which occasionally alternates between blindingly easy to totally impossible. To be fair, purchasing the Detektor upgrade does alleviate this problem by allowing you to view the threat level of each hostile area before attacking.

Thankfully, lives are cheap in Stil Bomber 2 as your ship is controlled by up to 10 robots which can be affordably replaced with enough of the in-game currency known as CRE or Clear Regulated Energy. Losing your entire robot crew in a mission simply dumps you back to the main menu with all CRE collected to that point where you can re-equip your battered craft and pick another mission from the non-linear starmap.

What Stil Bomber 2 does excel then, is in giving players choices, and those choices start with the selection of a single ship from a generous arsenal of 10 different spaceships to deal death in. The weapon configuration of each ship is fixed so read carefully before picking one because you’ll be stuck with it for the rest of the game.

The Hangar interface for Stil Bomber 2 can be intimidating and unwieldy due to the myriad of upgradable components (with enough CRE or Dignity aka rank promotions) for your ship but should engage players who take a personal interest in tweaking their spacecraft for maximum killing power and survivability.


Even more choices – the complete list of powerups

In summary, Stil Bomber 2 is another one of those games which rewards players who are willing to invest time in it (I recommend at least 45 minutes) and place interesting gameplay over graphical eyecandy.

Download Stil Bomber 2.

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