Review - Heavy Rocket Mortar Battery (SBX32)

Hello All

I picked up a couple of boxes of the new Heavy Rocket Mortar Battery (SBX32) to expand my Soviet army as for some reason I didn't have any artillery. So lets have a look at the models.

Each box set contains enough to make two BM-31-12 Katyusha Rocket Launchers with extra crew, an observer and a command team.

The trucks are attached to the bases, I wasn't a fan of this before this set as I normally like to paint my infantry on the bases and with the trucks on the bases to painting them would be stupidly hard. So I decided to try and give it a go and paint the infantry off the bases. Each box also come with 3 drop ins to add extra detail to the bases, these come in the form of a tree stump, a rocket on the ground and a rock, I loved this great options as with the commander of each rocket it really adds an extra level of uniqueness to each base.

The set came with no instructions and as the website hasn't been updated to include the instructions when I made the set I had to use the pictures on line to work out a few bits, mainly the struts that attach to the rockets.

These were a bit of a pain, take your time to make sure they fit.

One problem with structuring the rocket crew is that each pair of the crew, the man holding the rocket has the arm of the man in front sculpted onto the rocket itself. To make sure this wasn't a problem after painting the men I did a dry run with each of the crew and then numbered the bases so I knew which one was so go with which rocket.

The two sets ready to paint.

One last thing I did was with the second set I used an observer and one of the men from the command base as the rocket commanders to add more verity to each base.

 Painting the rockets was a lot of fun and they were quite quick to paint, I think this was partly down to the models being simple to paint and partly down to having painted so many Soviet models in the past few months.

I'm happy with the end results of the model, painting the crew of the base didn't surfer as I thought it might have been.

In the game these guys are quite brutal if slow firing. With AT 3 and Firepower 1+ anything that fails a save is dead, but they are super rockets so after any time you fire you have to either not fire the next turn or risk a skill test per rocket to fire the next turn. I'm not 100% sure they are worth the points, but they look fun to use for sure.

The set is very nice if slightly awkward to to put together with the struts (but from what I hear no were near as hard to put together as the normal Katyusha). Personally I would have preferred the trucks to have not been sculpted to the bases but thats personal preference more than anything, but the end results as worth it. They were a fun set and I would recommend them to any Soviet player looking for something new to paint up.

Overall I give the set 8 out of 10.

Thanks for looking

Ben