Small Scale Military Headquarters

Long waited snow for a diorama, got it a few days ago and it is still there this week-end:



(OK, it's not the right angle for a helicopter start... But I had to do with some wind squalls)


Modified 3 3/4" GI Joe figures and 1:18 BBI OH-6 Little Bird

Wow That looks real! Great job Granch.
No snow here. We did get 10 inches in October, a freak Nor'easter
a week after the Hurricane.
Great pics, I always enjoy your outdoor dioramas!

Very cool!
Did you make the tents?

Yes, I made the tents. Solded copperwire structure and a vinyl cloth cut and cemented on the framework. Very simple, after a model of an alpine survival tent for 2 persons. The only thing is that I forgot to make the vertical pylons that go through the material at the top, and allowing a tension cord to be fixed. So, I added that on this more focused picture:

It shows better the GI Joe figures with miss-matched heads, the Powerteam Elite backpacks and the SIG SG-551 from marauderinc.com (the normal swiss army soldier has the longer SG-550 but the dio isn't supposed to be in my country)

That looks great. How did you make rhe snow look so real? :^)

Oh, thank you! But I think that this real snow doesn't look like real snow: it has melt and freezed again, so it makes too big grains for 1/18 figures. No solution in the Nature: fresh fallen snow is very light, but the snowflakes can also be too big next to small soldiers on very close picture ... do you have better ideas?

Looks cool !

Looks good, boy would hope hey would paint the helo with snow Camo -ha, ha!

Great job!!

Very nice The snow with the shadows looks great No substitute for natural conditions and natural light. Your guys look cold. Hope the copter is going to return. So the scene is not in your country. I think we can eliminate Mali. Where might the scene be

I did not import Mali in my imagination (lack of valuable modern 1/18 pick-up and no french tank availlable), but made this for the Foxhole 1/18 diorama contest; it could be somewhere in some mountain region of the Sahara:

WOW!
Incredible!!!
Great job, granch!!

Fantastic work.

Great work as always with your dios, Granch! Two questions: if not your native Switzerland, where are the arctic commandos envisioned? What other country uses the SIG-550 series?

And for the desert dio, are those all 1:18 diecast Land Rovers? They look great. I have a Bruder Land Rover Defender - more like 1:16 but it fits the larger figs great.

very cool...nice work

Those snow and desert shots just look like movie fragments. Great job!

Parrish333,
They are a lot of army users of the SIG 550, mainly warm countries, for the SIG 551: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Malta, Spain... Only few rather cold and or mountaineous countries: France, Poland, Slovakia... They are much more police, boarder corps and other law enforcement, for example the FBI, DEA, some canadian police corps, same in Finnland, Germany, Argentina. I was sure that the US Marines and Navy SEAL's had some, but could'nt find sources to confirm. So, thank you , but I have now to choose: hopeless finding a 1/18 french Puma/Cougar helicopter (our multipurpose helo in Switzerland) or changing my guys guns for the M4. And re-shot this difficult pic!
In the Sahara dio, all vehicles are 1/18 die-cast. The green UN forces jeep is the chinese BJ2022, I think it is a development of the chinese rebuilt of your HUMVEE. I could'nt find any 1/18 Toyota pick-up, the mostly used vehicle within subsaharian countries (revolutionnary groups and regular armies) as we can see now in Mali with the TV news. A guy in this board found a simple and toyish one, better scaled than the Bruder's, but I couldn't find any on eBay. The Ford F-150 could be an alternative, haven't got any untill now (price incl. shipping: 1 BJ2022= 2 Ford F-150). Of course, it's usually not possible to put a 1:18 figure in an 1:18 die-cast vehicle without removing the legs or seats, so 1:16 is a solution, but less realistic. Well, for the Foxhole Contest, I had only few weeks to make and send some pics, and I made with what I have.

Yes, US uses the SIG rifles too, not sure on which units used them. I remember a vampire movie from a few yrs ago where the US Police used them too. Okay that last part is not very reliable info I guess.

Incredibly real looking desert scene. Thanks for sharing.

Dauntless wrote:Incredibly real looking desert scene. Thanks for sharing.

That's quite feat, considering Granch is in Switzerland.



Great dioramas Chris!!

Great Dioramas,great subject

Thank you all for these comments!