More Steam, Sir? (3)

Whereas work is slowly continuing on the last unit for my 19th Century Austrian army (as briefly mentioned here) I need to catch up on some figures that were finished last month but not posted!

These are rocketmen for my Victorian Science Fiction Earth forces in 20mm scale. The figures are by Elheim Miniatures and suitable for both VSF and 1930s pulp armies. I bought these figures years ago and they have very deep bases that needed carefully building up with base texture material (they’ve since been revamped by Elheim with much shallower bases). They come with a variety of weapons (two with carbines, two with “broomhandle” Mauser semi-automatic pistols and one with a Thompson sub-machine gun) that are equally at home for both VSF and pulp settings. I found the clothing details hard to follow so have painted them as best I can in long coats and rocket packs.

Originally I was going to paint them in generic colours more akin to the character in “The Rocketeer” film and have 10 figures in a unit, but I decided to go with smaller five-man units so I painted the first unit shown above as a Foreign Legion Rocket Infantry battalion and picked a colour scheme to match the Foreign Legion Airborne Auto-Rifle Battalion troops I painted back in June. The picture below shows the rocket troops with the Auto-Rifle Battalion figures for comparison.

I think I’d have preferred a darker colour scheme, but the pastel blue and white ties in well with the earlier figures, while bronze helmets and rocket packs give them a nice steampunk appearance. These are neat figures and relatively easy to paint and I’ve got enough figures left to do at least two more units. One of those will probably be in a more generic colour scheme to allow it to be used by any army, so the hard part will be in trying to decide which of my other Earth nations gets its own specific unit of rocketmen!