ESCI – 233 – Napoleonic British Artillery

Description:

Originally released as part of ESCI – 219 – Napoleonic British and French Artillery, ESCI later issued separately both British and French artillery sets, doubling the number of guns and figures, by releasing two sprue of each in each box, so this box include 4 guns, with 2 different barrels, and 16 figures, a crew of 4 for each gun.

ESCI set up during the 80s a standard in the quality of the plastic soldiers in 1/72 scale, but their production of artillery sets was very limited, in fact only these “two” sets of Napoleonic artillery were produced, and one set for the Russian Artillery in the Crimean War (ESCI – 221 – Crimean War Russian Infantry and Artillery) and in both cases issued the 4 x crew, including one officer, that would set up the standard for “short” artillery sets, later produced by other makers such HäT.

While this composition is rather short for static display modeling, it proved to be popular for wargaming, since a single box with 4 guns provide firepower enough to start a game.

Sculpture and detail of the figures are very good, as ESCI usually did, poses are not very dynamic in particular but they do their job. The carriages are simplified as you can expect, but looks good enough too and the two barrels matches 6 and 9 pounders original guns, which were widely used by the Royal Horse Artillery, the real subject that this set depicts.

A good option is to mix and match this set with the Airfix – 01746 – Waterloo British Artillery set, though tooled in 1972, the Airfix set is a very good depiction of the same subject, and mixing both sets you can increase crews and guns drastically as well as getting one limber. With some work, figures from HaT – 8003 – British Rocket Troops can be also adapted to serve as gunners. Same set was latter issued under Italeri as Italeri – 6041 – Napoleonic British Artillery.