It’s a pretty seismic moment in the history of Bolt Action – we’re bidding a farewell to (metal) arms! This isn’t a late April Fool, but the start of a huge and incredibly cool project. As you might have guessed from our recent teasers and show-offs at Salute, we’ve begun the enormous process of replacing our extensive range of metal artillery and support weapons with plastic!
Want to know more? Of course you do – so read on, because this is a big old job! First, though, we need to take you behind the curtain, and explain some things about how miniatures are made, and the business behind it, so you understand some of the why before we explain the what.
As anyone familiar with our ranges knows, we work in a variety of materials, with plastic, metal, ‘traditional’ resin, and Warlord Resin being the ones we use for our miniatures. All of these have their advantages and disadvantages, and their specific use cases, but plastic offers the best blend of detail and ease of working. However, it’s by an order of magnitude the most expensive material to start making a kit in. The cost of the steel ‘tools’ required to make a single sprue start at thousands of pounds each, far more than a metal or resin mould, and the sprue itself requires exponentially more design work than making a similar set of models in any other material. However, the flipside is that, once everything’s set up, plastic sprues can be produced in huge quantities, far cheaper than any other medium – it’s essentially a balancing act!
When we think about making any kit, we have to answer a simple question: How many will we sell, and will that justify the initial outlay? Essentially, do we think that the product will make back its costs, and start becoming profitable for us! This question determines what material a kit is made in. For a metal, resin, or Warlord Resin kit, the quantity we need to sell to justify the cost of development and production is much lower. However, the cost to make each model over its lifetime is much higher than plastic, and we can’t produce anything like the same volume. This boils down to a simple maxim – it’s not an infallible rule, but it’s a useful benchmark:
If it’s going to be a mainstay kit that we plan to sell loads of – do it in plastic.
If it’s going to be a bit more niche – do it in the most appropriate other medium.
So, with all that laid out, let’s talk about guns – lots of guns.
Traditionally, we’ve made our artillery and support weapons in metal, as in previous editions of Bolt Action, players were usually limited to a ‘one of each type’ deal when building their lists. With Third Edition’s expanded Platoon system, and as Bolt Action’s community and player base have grown, though, we’re finding that we’re selling more and more heavy weaponry! This is great for us, but it also presents some challenges!
Firstly, it’s becoming difficult for us to supply the needed quantities of these kits. While it’s not a problem right now, we can see that in the not too distant future, we’re going to need to up our production sharply. In addition, each metal gun or team is at the mercy of fluctuating metal prices – it might well be more expensive to produce a kit on Friday than it was on Monday, and then down again by the next Wednesday, and so on. Obviously, from a business standpoint, that’s not ideal.
There’s also the elephant in the room. Multi-part metal kits can be an absolute nightmare to build! While our designers put a lot of effort into ensuring kits go together as nicely as possible, the simple fact of the matter is that any multi-part metal kit, particularly ones with small parts, is a serious modelling challenge. Add in the fact that you have to use superglue, which is notoriously unforgiving (and prone to sticking, well, everything together whether you want it to or not), and it can be a recipe for a frustrating hobby experience.
So – we’re out to fix all of that. How? It’s simple: the time has come to begin transitioning our metal artillery and support weapons to plastic, and that starts with our best-selling range – Germany!
The way it’s going to work is this: We’ve created a trio of ‘core’ sprues – in Germany’s case the PaK 40, support weapons, and crew frames. The weapon and gun frames are self explanatory – they build a PaK 40, MG 34/42 machine guns, medium mortars, and Panzerschrecks, with plenty of variants and additional options, as you can see below. Don’t worry – we’ll be going through the kits in detail a little later on!
The crew sprue is designed to work with both of these frames – and in future, other guns, which we’ll get to in a moment. You’ll notice that the uniforms are sculpted to match our plastic late-war Grenadiers, which can also be used to represent Waffen-SS with the simple painting solution of some camouflage helmet covers. We’ve designed these to be compatible with as many of our infantry kits as possible (which we’ll be covering in more depth) when we dive into the sprue in detail, allowing you to convert your crews to your hearts’ content.
But what about all the gorgeous metal crew sculpts for things like Fallschirmjäger, winter Grenadiers, or Afrika Korps guns and weapons teams? Don’t worry – they’re not going anywhere. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll begin rationalising the range with the new plastics. Some kits will be replaced entirely, others may become hybrid kits with the new weapons and metal or Warlord Resin crew, and some might have other tweaks and changes. For now, we’ve got the new kits themselves, and two updated starter armies (Grenadiers and Waffen-SS) for you to get your teeth into.
We do still have a few kits that are in the release schedule with the old-style metal guns – the new Soviet Naval Brigade are a good example – but once these have flowed through, it’s all plastic, all the way, and in due course those will become ‘hybrid’ kits as described above.
Now, this is just the first wave of a very big project indeed. Going forward, our intention is to have one ‘core’ artillery piece, a heavy weapons frame, and a crew frame for each nation that has a plastic infantry kit. Once everyone’s got that, we can go back and start working on more guns for everyone, replacing metal kits as we go, until eventually we’ve got our full range of artillery in glorious plastic! As part of this, we’ll also be looking to add other crew sprues where necessary to match the existing plastic infantry boxes, although this will be secondary to the weapons themselves. Work is already well underway on this, with the next wave coming sooner than you might think, and is planned to continue until the job’s done!
Told you this was a big deal! Plastic guns are here to stay – and you can get the first of them pre-ordered today!
