Re: OFFICIAL - GZG: TWENTY PACKS of new 15mm releases almost ready!

On 30/01/2017 19:29, Jon Tuffley wrote:
> The difficult bit, Phil, is that Dickson's descriptions of both troops
and hardware are quite sparse as I recall - I've got no clear mental
image of what the ships would look like, let alone things like the
vaguely-referenced tanks (which appear to have energy weaponry, but
that's about it - as I recall these are never even seen by the
protagonists in the books, they are just an unseen threat advancing in
the distance). The device you're referring to is the "Electric Horse", I
think, which is probably one of the best-described bits of tech, as
"like a wheel-less bicycle frame hung between two rotors"…
You're quite right, Jon. About the only reference to the ships that I 
can remember is from /Dorsai!,/ where Donal disguises his "sub-class 
ships" -- which I take to be the smaller ones, possibly FT escort 
equivalents -- as "ships of the line" in what turns out to be a rather 
neat ambush. IIRC, the disguise changes them from the characteristic 
"ball and hammer" of the small ships to a cylindrical shape. I invite 
you to make of that what you like; us vacc-heads could do with some new 
metal. ;-) And an electric horse or two would be very welcome.
> There are some drawings of Dorsai troops in one of the peripheral
books "Spirit of the Dorsai", which has a lot of rather nice "arty"
drawings in it - they depict the uniforms and other clothing as rather
"retro-60s-futuristic", helmets with bubble visors, very "ray gun"
looking weaponry etc., and I don't know if you would want to consider
those drawings as "canon" or just as some irrelevant fluff to illustrate
the novel….
Probably a bit of both. There was quite a variety of weapons in the 
books, from the big, rather bulky "dally gun" in Tactics of Mistake to 
the gauss rifles more commonly seen in the Donal Graeme era, so a few 
"ray guns" combined with a lot of slim rifle-style weapons could work. I

don't remember much about helmets at all, but I'd expect them not to be 
great big bubbles; again from memory, unlike, say, Starship Troopers, 
Dorsai soldiers didn't use radio communications much within units, 
making do with hand signals, whistles and the like, so headgear would 
probably be like modern troops or even lighter due to better materials.
> My feeling for the Dorsai themselves would be that any reasonable
mid-tech troop types not in full combat armour would do, maybe the FSE
(helmeted versions only)….?
You're probably right, but we'd never get anything if we didn't ask. <g>

If you were going to put out almost-Friendlies, it seemed a good idea to

enquire about not-Dorsai too. We live in hope...

Regards,
Phil
----
"Flappity, floppity, flip,
  The mouse on the Mobius strip.
  The strip revolved,
  The mouse dissolved
  In a chrono-dimensional skip!"
    -- Frederick Winsor, /The Space Child's Mother Goose/
This particular Mobius strip can be reached at
atcliffe[at]ntlworld[dot]com