Battlefront experimenting with high-quality polyester resin

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**Ghaz**

From Berlin Soviet Plastics Preview:

In particular, people's curiosity has been piqued at the mention of new resin staff team and observer figures. These are a new model material for Flames Of War - a high-quality polyester resin.

It is quite different from the familiar resin used in our vehicles. Rather than being hard and brittle, it is tough and slightly flexible, making it more resilient for smaller parts like individual figures. In fact, it feels and behaves quite similarly to the hard styrene of our injection-moulded plastic models (although it does not 'melt' together with plastic cement, so you will need to use Super glue instead). It is easy to tell the difference, though, because the resin is a much paler grey colour.

It would be great if we could produce all of the figures on a plastic sprue, but for some of the more specialised figures, which are required in smaller numbers, it is more practical to cast them in our own factory. Previously this would have meant making them in metal.

You may remember Open Fire! originally included a few metal plugs to fill in spare holes on the PaK 40 bases. This was an acceptable but imperfect solution at the time, before we had our plastic base-plug sprue.

However, it meant that we had to worry about packing the metal parts carefully so they weren't rattling around in the box. And with the stringent rules around metal parts, it potentially limited where and how Open Fire! could be sold. The new resin parts, on the other hand, are light, safe, and are attached to sprues, which means they can be included with all-plastic kits without the added weight or packing complications of including individual metal parts. And of course, resin allows very crisp, precise detail.

We're pleased with the new single-piece plastic staff tables, which are much easier than the old metal tables, which were always something of a challenge to assemble.

IMPORTANT NOTE: A few sharp-eyed readers have noticed the pictured resin figures don't look quite right. When we went to photograph them we discovered that, due to an embarrassing lack of foresight, all of the resin figures in our studio were already in the process of being painted, and every single one had already had paint applied to them. We could have waited for some fresh figures to arrive from the factory, but we wanted to show them off now!

The photos above have been digitally recoloured to give you a close impression of how the bare resin figures look, but the detail is actually a little crisper in reality.

Below is an uncoloured photo of the Staff Team sprue. The unpainted sprue shows the bare resin's actual colour.

**leopard**

Not sure on resin, however I do like the way they have textured the bases.

The textured bases, like the rural and rubble ones are very nice, but the effect is spoiled by the smooth plastic on the actual models.

The pics of the staff team built up and based look very nice though, and if this material means BF kick out some of the lower volume models in this level of detail I'll be a very happy little leopard.

Want the horse limbers in plastic now

**col. krazy kenny**

Nice to see the resin figures,i like them more than any plastic ones.I would most diffently like to see more models made like this. As for the guns they seem to me that they look flimsy.

**Hordini**

I'd still rather have 15mm figures in metal, quite honestly.

**MadMarkMagee**

Why am I thinking about finecast...

Though I'm pretty sure BF are smarter then that. We will see.

**dekinrie**

well if they switch to resin it should stop the big head syndrome

**Eumerin**

MadMarkMagee wrote:
Why am I thinking about finecast...

Though I'm pretty sure BF are smarter then that. We will see.

The new resin figures will likely be quite limited in quantity - at least at first. So far, the only place they've mentioned using them is as the staff team for plastic artillery batteries. BF has yet to announce a full-blown switch over to resin (not counting, of course, nearly all of BF's vehicles, which are a different kind of resin), like GW did with Finecast.

It's possible that over time they'll release full packages in the new resin. But if so, I would imagine that BF would only do so for troop types that aren't in high demand - for instance, Hungarian or Romanian infantry. By the time such releases happened, everyone would know whether the new resin was working out or not.

(and speaking as someone who actually owns BF's Romanian infantry, I wouldn't mind seeing a rerelease that got rid of the two-part infantryman...)

**leopard**

Expecting resin to be used only for stuff they don't want to do in plastic - the vehicles and infantry you want a few of seem to be going over to plastic, and pretty quickly.

Personally think the 'solution' for the oddball models, snipers, artillery staff teams, observers and others you don't want too many of is to have a small box for each faction that contains them on a single frame, a box they intend every player to have one of, or potentially two depending whats in there - have that provide better and different command models, snipers, observers, staff teams, a few character type models and other special bits you need but don't need many of.

Failing that scatter them about the other plastic kits in spare space