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Hello there. Is there word yet on when these will be available to those not in the KS?

 Cypher-xv wrote:
Hello there. Is there word yet on when these will be available to those not in the KS?

Unfortunately there's not even a solid timeline for those of us in the KS... And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple models were available before the full/final shipments go out to KS backers.

I wasn't as much commenting on fluff as aesthetics.

What do you mean with Victoria miniatures? Are they having a kickstarter? No chance they decide to bring their range into real scale instead of heroic?

Victoria doesn't need a KS to get her products up for sale. Well, that might change later this year, but so far she's released several kick-ass modular ersatz Guard regiments and will in a few months be releasing the very first female Guard regiment:

You can hardly tell what gender they are with their heels all pointing together.

I'm planning on getting some of those as well. I figure if I dip the ladies to the knee in hot water, it should be easy enough to point the toes at each other.

That, that's..



We finally get good, decent multi-part ladies and the first thing you monsters do is ruining them? Why?

so... "ersatz" is an English word now?

No, but words can be adopted by other languages.

I beg to differ. Ersatz has made its way into the English language by now. Or judging from my computer's auto-co-wreck, at least the French language...

Az: They are releasing these minis in Wave 1
The Jailbirds: Blondie, Bernadette, Mimi the Radio, Yoko, Cruz, The 5 Lulus, the Freebie Lulu, Harry the Hippo

The Kurganova Shock Troops: Shashenka, Tarja, Irina Vega, Volga Potemkine, Charlie the war bulldog, Natasha

The Iron Empire: Drusilla (Kickstarter exclusive), Mortaria, Vera Krabbenhöft, Lady Hilda von Stroheim, Jinx

Some of them are KS exclusives, others are freebies, but that is only 12 heroines. I was being facetious a bit, you could cash out, but you'd get one of each, and that might be sub-optimal (but great for your psyche, as you'd be at peace, free from the wait)

If victoria did a KS I'd back it immediately.

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:
I beg to differ. Ersatz has made its way into the English language by now. Or judging from my computer's auto-co-wreck, at least the French language...

Az: They are releasing these minis in Wave 1
The Jailbirds: Blondie, Bernadette, Mimi the Radio, Yoko, Cruz, The 5 Lulus, the Freebie Lulu, Harry the Hippo

The Kurganova Shock Troops: Shashenka, Tarja, Irina Vega, Volga Potemkine, Charlie the war bulldog, Natasha

The Iron Empire: Drusilla (Kickstarter exclusive), Mortaria, Vera Krabbenhöft, Lady Hilda von Stroheim, Jinx

Some of them are KS exclusives, others are freebies, but that is only 12 heroines. I was being facetious a bit, you could cash out, but you'd get one of each, and that might be sub-optimal (but great for your psyche, as you'd be at peace, free from the wait)

Yeah I at least thought the troops of each would be in the first wave.

That was the plan, but they wanted to re do some of those.

 JWMarines wrote:

 Cypher-xv wrote:
Hello there. Is there word yet on when these will be available to those not in the KS?

Unfortunately there's not even a solid timeline for those of us in the KS... And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple models were available before the full/final shipments go out to KS backers.

I thought those of us that backed RRT had it bad.

It's slow going but I like what's being shown (eventually) so I shall carry on waiting

(with occasional sarcasm)

but I knew fulfilment would be a train-wreck right from the start.... Artists, known to be very slow, known to keep 'redoing' stuff, French and did I say artists

(but I suspect I'll pay extra shipping to get wave 1 stuff when it ships rather than waiting)

 Cypher-xv wrote:
I thought those of us that backed RRT had it bad.

OH, you do. Best last minute pledge pull ever.

Yeah victoria miniatures has some really nice things it's a shame it's heroic scale or I would have gotten loads. I'm still considering getting some of her stuff despite that it'll look weird with my warzone real scale minis.

Unfortunately it's mostly the heads I want and that's the biggest difference between realscale and heroic.

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 Wehrkind wrote:

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:
" [domestic manufacture] is a way to beat the stagnating economy. "

Not to single you out or anything, but as an economist statements like this make my skin crawl. It is just so wrong. So wrong, in fact, that the opposite is in fact true: finding the lowest cost producers of a good is beneficial to the economy, no matter where they live or what language they speak.

Ugh, sorry. I really don't mean to go after you, just the idea.

I am quite curious myself how the economists explain how this is beneficial, when its main effect is unemployment something evident in all western world.

Sure it lowers the products cost but money must be generated for the consumer to be able to buy the product even at a lower price.

And having an export balance rather than an import balance for a country is *generally* seen as a good thing. Again, specific cases can be built against it too. But we're going OT. If only Raging Heroes would give us something to talk about...

Sorry, was out of town for a week and didn't check Dakka! (Madness, I know!)

The balance of trade is an old, OLD bugaboo. At least 255 years when Smith wrote on it extensively, and from what I understand some hundreds of years before that. The problem lies partially in looking at the stock of goods and jobs producing them as fixed over any appreciable amount of time, near as I can tell. If we imagine that there are only X number of jobs to be had making Y goods and services, it makes sense to compete over who has what. For instance, if highschool kids can only mow lawns, and there are only 10 lawns in the neighborhood, local kids are going to be without a way to make money if kids from the next town over mow the lawns. This seems to be the basic intuition most people have.
The trouble with this intuition is that the limitation is not the number of jobs or the amount of goods to be made. The limitation is the amount of goods that are capable of being produced with a given amount of resources (people, time, stuff). There is always something to do to for other people that they are willing to pay for, it just has to be found. The amount of human needs is tiny, but our wants are infinite. The sticking points are figuring out what those needs and wants are, and sorting ourselves such that we can provide them. Part of sorting ourselves such that we can provide them is to get the lowest cost (read: resource using) providers to make something, leaving more resources to make other things. The explosion of stuff, highly esoteric and niche stuff, is largely due to being able to save resources on things we don't need to make ourselves at higher cost.
Imagine in this case that you were REALLY serious about the balance of trade, such that you only consumed goods you could produce at home. I'd die, pretty quickly, but even if my vegetable garden could support life, I would be really short on books and games, not to mention tvs and computers. There would be no way I could make anywhere near the amount of stuff I currently own, even if I had some access to the knowledge of how to do it. I would be fully employed (busy as hell) but also comparatively impoverished. As it stands, I have a huge trade deficit of a sort (if we were to use international accounting standards) with my employer (well, back before I went back to grad school; it is a little fuzzier now, but my industry job was clear). If the company I work for pays me cash for services, and I use that cash to buy stuff, I have a trade deficit, despite living comfortably within my means.

So, that was sort of a round about way to answer the "Sure it lowers the products cost but money must be generated for the consumer to be able to buy the product even at a lower price" issue. It isn't the money that matters, it is the things you are willing and able to do for other people that generates value. Fortunately for our species, part of what we value is variety, so people don't generally all own the same pieces of art, or the same cloths and books and movies, or miniatures. Of course that leaves open the question of where unemployment comes from. The answer there is "those things that prevent people from doing that which generates value." Along with a dash of "incentivizing unemployment." There are many rules that stop people from starting a business, changing jobs or hiring new people. Mind bogglingly many, even for just hiring someone to demold resin models (I have checked for personal planning). It takes >1200 hours of class time to become licensed to cut hair in Pennsylvania. There are natural issues too, such as say an iron mine drying out and the local miners losing jobs, but generally those are small bumps over time compared to the structural, unemployment caused by various rules and regulations.

Anyway, tl;dr : it isn't the Chinese or anyone else putting people out of jobs, it is that those people can't be profitably employed for some reason or another. Even if the Chinese stopped making cheap models, you would just see fewer, more expensive models being made rather than the same number being made by Americans at higher wages. You can't become rich by not trading, you become rich by doing what you do best for other people and letting other people do what they do best for you.

 Wehrkind wrote:

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 Wehrkind wrote:

 Mathieu Raymond wrote:
" [domestic manufacture] is a way to beat the stagnating economy. "

Not to single you out or anything, but as an economist statements like this make my skin crawl. It is just so wrong. So wrong, in fact, that the opposite is in fact true: finding the lowest cost producers of a good is beneficial to the economy, no matter where they live or what language they speak.

Ugh, sorry. I really don't mean to go after you, just the idea.

I am quite curious myself how the economists explain how this is beneficial, when its main effect is unemployment something evident in all western world.

Sure it lowers the products cost but money must be generated for the consumer to be able to buy the product even at a lower price.

And having an export balance rather than an import balance for a country is *generally* seen as a good thing. Again, specific cases can be built against it too. But we're going OT. If only Raging Heroes would give us something to talk about...

Sorry, was out of town for a week and didn't check Dakka! (Madness, I know!)

The balance of trade is an old, OLD bugaboo. At least 255 years when Smith wrote on it extensively, and from what I understand some hundreds of years before that. The problem lies partially in looking at the stock of goods and jobs producing them as fixed over any appreciable amount of time, near as I can tell. If we imagine that there are only X number of jobs to be had making Y goods and services, it makes sense to compete over who has what. For instance, if highschool kids can only mow lawns, and there are only 10 lawns in the neighborhood, local kids are going to be without a way to make money if kids from the next town over mow the lawns. This seems to be the basic intuition most people have.
The trouble with this intuition is that the limitation is not the number of jobs or the amount of goods to be made. The limitation is the amount of goods that are capable of being produced with a given amount of resources (people, time, stuff). There is always something to do to for other people that they are willing to pay for, it just has to be found. The amount of human needs is tiny, but our wants are infinite. The sticking points are figuring out what those needs and wants are, and sorting ourselves such that we can provide them. Part of sorting ourselves such that we can provide them is to get the lowest cost (read: resource using) providers to make something, leaving more resources to make other things. The explosion of stuff, highly esoteric and niche stuff, is largely due to being able to save resources on things we don't need to make ourselves at higher cost.
Imagine in this case that you were REALLY serious about the balance of trade, such that you only consumed goods you could produce at home. I'd die, pretty quickly, but even if my vegetable garden could support life, I would be really short on books and games, not to mention tvs and computers. There would be no way I could make anywhere near the amount of stuff I currently own, even if I had some access to the knowledge of how to do it. I would be fully employed (busy as hell) but also comparatively impoverished. As it stands, I have a huge trade deficit of a sort (if we were to use international accounting standards) with my employer (well, back before I went back to grad school; it is a little fuzzier now, but my industry job was clear). If the company I work for pays me cash for services, and I use that cash to buy stuff, I have a trade deficit, despite living comfortably within my means.

So, that was sort of a round about way to answer the "Sure it lowers the products cost but money must be generated for the consumer to be able to buy the product even at a lower price" issue. It isn't the money that matters, it is the things you are willing and able to do for other people that generates value. Fortunately for our species, part of what we value is variety, so people don't generally all own the same pieces of art, or the same cloths and books and movies, or miniatures. Of course that leaves open the question of where unemployment comes from. The answer there is "those things that prevent people from doing that which generates value." Along with a dash of "incentivizing unemployment." There are many rules that stop people from starting a business, changing jobs or hiring new people. Mind bogglingly many, even for just hiring someone to demold resin models (I have checked for personal planning). It takes >1200 hours of class time to become licensed to cut hair in Pennsylvania. There are natural issues too, such as say an iron mine drying out and the local miners losing jobs, but generally those are small bumps over time compared to the structural, unemployment caused by various rules and regulations.

Anyway, tl;dr : it isn't the Chinese or anyone else putting people out of jobs, it is that those people can't be profitably employed for some reason or another. Even if the Chinese stopped making cheap models, you would just see fewer, more expensive models being made rather than the same number being made by Americans at higher wages. You can't become rich by not trading, you become rich by doing what you do best for other people and letting other people do what they do best for you.

Oh goodie, just what this thread needed, Hayekian Fantasy Economics.

RoninXiC wrote:
so... "ersatz" is an English word now?

Any word can be an English word. You like "tacos"? How about "Tsunami"? "Zeitgeist"? "Deja vu"? They're all English words if you use them enough.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
I'm planning on getting some of those as well. I figure if I dip the ladies to the knee in hot water, it should be easy enough to point the toes at each other.

I like the cut of your jib.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

RoninXiC wrote:
so... "ersatz" is an English word now?

Any word can be an English word. You like "tacos"? How about "Tsunami"? "Zeitgeist"? "Deja vu"? They're all English words if you use them enough.

Or as James Nicoll put it:

James Nicoll wrote:The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

However, I still draw the line at "literally" meaning "figuratively".

It depends on if the speaker is using the ironic voice at the time.


For example, if someone says something mildly ignorant in your group of friends, you would be correct to say, "That is literally the stupidest thing I've ever heard in the history of all things ever."

However, if someone said something genuinely stupid, the statement above would forfeit grammatical legitimacy. English is a confusing language that way.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
English is a confusing language that way.

Tell me about it. I still struggle after speaking it (as a non-native) for 32 years.

Boys and girls, I really think we should take the macro-economic discussion to OT, or some such. I have a feeling some might get into a heated discussion... or name calling. Just my 5¢.

Yea, not really the place. Of course, who wants to go to OT ?*shudder*

Or take it to PM's.

Nah, it's fine. I have papers to write and models to make anyway Just hard to resist answering a question; why I got into academia and teaching after all!

Personally, I'm a big fan of the silent film star heads than the 'not-nazi' heads. I've never been a big fan of the gas-masky WWII look, but these new heads have actually made me consider switching several of my picks. (Definitely going to be switching Lt Parker out for one of the Iron Empire girls.)

Scale issues could be a major stumbling block here still, couldn't they?

Unless you go 'full on RH' for a 'counts as' army?

A few figures being slightly taller than other figures won't bother me. Even easier if they're in their own distinct units.

In their own unit, you're right. Mixing them comes with a whole other set of problems though as the styles might not fit. I thought I would use my Kurganovas as officers for my Eisenkern... but they are so different that it really makes them stand out.

And I'm an OCD conformist, apparently.