My E-8C project is on hold for a bit while I wait on some more decals arriving. This pause has given me some time to focus on another piece for my Soviet Hind Commander force. Namely, I’ve put together a Rocket Artillery Battery. In Hind Commander these forces are off-table so there are no rules about base sizes or anything else. In fact you could just as well not have any miniatures for them. However, that’s no fun and rather than just having a single vehicle on a base I decided to put together an entire battery on a little scenic base.

I picked the 9K57 Uragan (also known as the BM-27) rocket launcher and set about doing some research to figure out how many are in your typical battery and what other support vehicles are present. I found the Army Guide website which gave me more information than I could ever want. The end result is that each battery has from 3-5 launchers, 4 rocket transports, a battery commander vehicle (based on a BTR-80) and an officer vehicle (based on a Ural-4320 truck).

I decided to go with 4 9K57s, drop the transports, use a BTR-70 APC and a Ural 375. I figure the two support vehicles were close enough, but I did want to modify the Ural 375. The miniature I have comes with the tarpaulin covered rear, I felt the command version with an enclosed rear was more fitting. The photo on the left shows what I have and the right what I wanted.

I did this simply by shaping a skin of green-stuff modelling epoxy and then shaping it to match. That was really the only hard part. After that it was just some paint. I’m using the modern Russian scheme that they bust out on Victory Day.

Aside from that I’ve just built a little scenic base using Vallejo Sandy Paste (26.215) to give some texture. The base was painted with Vallejo model colours and some Woodland Scenics items added (small talus pieces, fine turf and small brushes). Lastly some light brown pigment was used to place some mud tracks where the vehicles traveled to get into position.