Survivor Friday- Tank Crew!

When I was making the M60 tank for the Walking Dead Wednesday (here), I got this great idea for a scenario. I am going to play it tomorrow with my buddy Tom, and once I have played it through, I will get it up here on the blog for you all to play!

The story goes like this....

“.. me and every other reservist got called up when the panic hit. There were four of us from farms near Hanksville, Sean, Hank, Ian and me, Thomas. The rest of the crew made up a pretty clever acronym of our name, which they used to prefix whatever we are doing at the time. It was all because we hung out together all the time and made a pretty good tank crew.

Anyway, so the panic hit, and you have a few hundred reservists kicking around the base, with f all to do. There were no orders and a total comms blackout. We weren’t the first to abandon our posts, and I am sure we weren’t the last. Guess we are the interesting ones because we did it with our training tank. She was an older M60A1, supposed to be retired as a training tank since ’05, but since the replacements hadn’t come through, we had kept her running. She was known as ‘Accident’ as a moniker for the number of training drivers who had driven her so “expertly” into anything and everything.

It was easy enough to grab ‘Accident’, after all, we were the ones on duty guarding her. So we made sure she was filled up with gas and whatever MG ammo we could scrounge and then set off. We picked up the gate guards on the way, they were in on it.

The going was pretty good, we didn’t have any trouble on roads. That was where we found our first walkers, and when we lost the two gate guards riding on the back. We were moving slow, trying to weave through traffic, trying not to throw a track. The two guys on the back didn’t stand a chance. One got grabbed, the other tried to help. I watched them tear those guys apart from the safety of the turret cupola.

We were moving through the outskirts of some town when our luck finally ran out. The engine gave this almighty bang, and then quit. We had all hopped out to see what the problem was, taking turns suggesting fixes. Might as well have been smacking it with a hammer for all the good it would do. So Ian and I grabbed some guns and headed out to the farm nearby, figuring if we were going to be stuck we should try and see if there was any chow to be found, or a place to bunk for the night.

As it turns out running a V-12 twin-turbo engine to push a 60 ton tracked monster around isn’t exactly quiet. Hank and Sean had been “fixing” the engine for all of 5 minutes before they started turning up. Ones and twos to start, easy enough to keep away from the guys working. But before long it was a whole lot more of them, more than they could keep away with only E-tools. Hank reattached the fuel hose, while Sean covered him with his M4. Once the hose was reattached, they both hopped into the safety of the tank.

Ian and I had just finished grabbing whatever cans of food were left in the house nearby when we heard the V12 shudder into life. We bowled out of the front door, only to find that a whole lot of Zeds had heard it too, and were heading to the tank.

There was another loud bang from the tank, and black smoke began to rise from the engine deck. We knew at that point that ‘Accident’ wasn’t going anywhere any more. Hank and Sean would have been able to see grotesque faces leered through the vision ports as hands clawed at the hardened steel armour. Ian and I just looked at each other, realising that there was no way that the zombies could get in, and that our buddies were going to need our help to get out…”

Now of course, I was going to need to make up the four tank crewmen for the game.

I started with the plastic Mantic USMC models, from their Mars Attacks! range. Big pro tip here, wash them with hot water and dishwashing liquid before you try to paint them. Mantic must use an oily mould release, which leaves a bit of residue on the model. I am not a huge fan of the original models, the scale is slightly off for me. But, that won't stop me from using them!

These are the four I started with:

Next step was to decapitate them all, plus remove the arms on most of them. I then used replacement parts from the Wargames Factory male and female survivor sprues. The net result is:

So with the assembling done, it was time to get some paint on them, and this is the final result:

And of course, we need the shot with the tank:

We will be playing the scenario tomorrow, so we will see how the crew go, and should have a write up here over the weekend!

Chris