Station 42 more vehicles

I'm always on the lookout for things I can use to improve the realism of my spaceport. One of the things that is important to making any type of city or village or what have you look realistic is the extra details. Having great buildings just isn't enough. You have to have all kinds of other things that would exist in any settlement anywhere at any time. Having Vehicles is a very important part of my spaceport project. Not just vehicles for people to drive around in but utility vehicles as well.
The vehicles pictured above are examples of utility vehicles. One is a tractor toy I picked up at Dollar General and the other is a dump truck I picked up at Walmart. The tractor will be part of my fuel station. I'll probably be picking up a few of them. The idea is that not all shuttles and ships will be able to land at the fuel stations so these tractors would be able to service other ships at and outside the spaceport. With the truck I'll probably modify the bed and make it look like a regular truck and less like a dump truck. I'll be doing a heavily weathered pant job on both of these vehicles.

Station 42 building layout!

Well we managed to finish building all the buildings for the main part of the station. Of course we still have a lot of detailing to do. In stead of setting them up on a 4x4' or 4x8' table we used four of our 2.5x6' tables which make a 5x12' playing surface. This will allow us to put some other things on the outskirts of the buildings. At the moment we've got some larger ships set up on the extra space but we are talking about adding some residential buildings to at least one side. of the station but we may build them on another section entirely.

Here's a shot of the Venture Star base on the left and Rosie's Workshop on the right. We've used this section for a game of A.E. bounty already.

Here's another shot of the Venture Star base. This facility is the most complete of the buildings in the space port so far. Venture Star has these three mining vehicles as well as a small shuttle and a flat bed truck. I also plan to add a prospecting vehicle or two and 14-20 employees.

Here's the shot of some of the newer buildings. The black on in the foreground is going to be the new clinic. The building directly across from it will be a cantina and the building the the two attached platforms will be the fuel station. The platforms will have fuel tanks on them.

The other new building is the Nova Corp Security Station up in the top right of this picture. There are two landing pads for Skysweeper Patrol Ships and they will have four light patrol vehicles as well as a riot APC and some sort of paddy wagon.

Nova Corp's "Skysweeper" class patrol craft

I've been working on converting and painting the two "Skysweeper" jets for my Nova Security Company that I'm building for my spaceport project. I've pretty much followed the same method for converting this ship that I used on my original Skysweeper project. The only difference is that I have left the Missile and bomb pylons in place because I intend to fully arm the Nova ships with missiles and bombs.
I've tried to evoke the idea of the "Black and White" look of a Police car with my paint job. I'm pretty satisfied with the results. I will be adding a light bar and some Police decals as well as soon as I find something that will work.


Here is the ship sitting on one of the two landing pads I'm creating for my Nova Corp. base. I've got a lot of detailing left to do on the landing pad but the project is moving along nicely.

Nova Corp hired for Station 42 security!

I've started working on a new security company project for my space port. The project is based around the Nova Corp miniatures from Reaper's Chronoscope line. These minis have a great look for a futuristic security company. These first five troopers are ones I purchased when they first came out and Reaper only had two poses available. I've had them base coated for a while now but I only just started painting them yesterday.
I'm also working on some vehicles. The "Hummer" based vehicles behind the troopers are 1/43rd scale toys I picked up at a local Dollar General. They are from a company called Burago and I think they scale quite nicely with the minis. I plan to eventually paint them as black and whites and add light bars to them to give them a "police" look.
The flying craft in the background are a pair of G.I. Joe "Skysweeper" jets. I plan to turn these into aerospace patrol craft for the company. Just like the ground patrol vehicles I plan to paint these up as black and whites and add light bars to the tops. I've already finished one of these craft for the project. That project can be found here. For these security ships I may add back some of the missiles and bombs that came with the jets since a security company would be able to have the license for such ordinance.

Here are some new trooper blisters I picked up recently of all the new sculpts. This will bring my total number of troopers up to 12 which I think is a good number for the spaceport. I also plan to add a "chief" and a couple of detective teams as well as a few civilian personnel. That should bring the total number of employees to about 20.
I will also be building a station for the security company with landing pads for the ships and holding cells for prisoners.

Stargate Stuff!

I'm running a short Stargate game for my regular gaming group using the Savage Worlds rules system. I put together this "flying saucer" spaceship for that game. The ship is made from two microwavable plates glued together. I put a deck on the top made from matt board and plaster then I covered that with bits from a couple star wars model kits. I would like to have added more detail but time did not allow. I'm fairly happy with this as I was going for a cross between a retro flying saucer look and a more modern concept of a space ship. I think it came out well enough to use in a number of sci-fi settings.

Here you can see a closeup of the detailing on the ship. Most of the bits came from the "Battledroid on STAP" and a large X-wing model but a couple parts came from the "Anakin's Podracer" model.

This is a group of as yet unidentified "Aliens" that the SG teams in my game have encountered. They have found them extremely hard to kill but oddly armed with unusual sub machine guns that fire rounds marked "9 Luger". They seem to be the owners of the space ship. The figures come from East Riding Miniatures . They are nice little minis but not over detailed. I speed painted the whole group up in about an hour.

Here are some SG members made up of swat and militia minis from Wargames Foundry. I have 7 players in my Stargate game divided into two SG teams of four with on of the teams rounded out with an NPC.

Just thought I would show off the furniture I've finished lately. Unfortunately I'm not sure who made any of these pieces as the packaging got away from me. The lockers and containers are from a different company than the beds.

Another closeup shot of these pretty nice pieces. If I can find out who made them I'll make a post about it.

3 new ships for the spaceport project!

I just got three new ships for the spaceport project on Monday. These are all G.I. Joe toys I picked up off Amazon. The big dark blue one is a Cobra "Night Raven". The smaller white one is a G.I. Joe "Sharc Tooth" and it's suppose to be a submarine but I think it looks an awful lot like a small shuttle. The grey one is a Cobra "Gunship". I've already converted and nearly finished my first Cobra "Gunship" in the "Black Dog" project. This one I will probably tramp up a bit more. The "Night Raven" and "Gunship" both cost me about $18.00 each which is much lower than the retail price for either ship. The "Sharc Tooth" only cost about $8.00 so I think I got a great deal on all these ships.

Here are a couple close up shots of the "Sharc Tooth". As you can see the landing gear consist of really simple pegs. As I've said before I'm not a bit fan of scratch building landing gear and the gear on this ship does at least hold it level really nicely. I may still decide to add some simple runners to the pegs probably made out of plastic cloths pins but I'm not going to go crazy and do something complex.

Here's a couple shots of the "Night Raven". It's a pretty cool ship and a good size for RPGs. Large enough to look impressive and also large enough to be a party ship for an RPG but not so huge as to take up too much space on the table. It's landing gear are fine for this project but the little grey gun handle thing near the back of the ship has got to go. All in all I think it will be a pretty easy ship to convert and fix up for 28mm miniature games.

I didn't take any additional pics of the "Gunship" because I've already show it extensively in my "Black Dog" project.

AE Bounty Battle Report "Bloodborn Pirates vs Boons Irregulars"

We tried out first game of AE Bounty and we used out new spaceport terrain for the first time tonight. The game pitted Boon's Irregulars against the Bloodborn Pirates. Boon's men were trying to destroy a pirate starfighter which had been repaired at Rosie's workshop. The pirates were attempting to save their ship.


The Bloodborn Pirates
Standard Crew

Captain Cyclopes (Human Veteran Blooded Warrior Hero)
M/3 RC/3+ CC4 A/5(7) S/3 DR/5 W/3
Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field
Ability: Apathetic, Command, Get up and shoot!


Quartermaster Grimm (Human Regular Individual)
M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/5(7) S/2 DR/4 W/2
Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field
Ability: Apathetic, Issue Equipment

Quartermaster Vinnie (Human Regular Individual)
M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/5(7) S/2 DR/4 W/2
Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field
Ability: Apathetic, Issue Equipment

The Ductrats (Human Green Squad)
M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: LFR Slugthrower, Light Armored Suit
Ability: Apathetic, Random Equipment


Da Gurlz (Human Green Squad)
M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: Slugthrower Pistol, Light Armored Suit
Ability: Apathetic, Random Equipment

Dirty Trick: Scouts



Boon's Irregulars
Mercenary Large Crew

Sargent Carson Boon (Human Veteran Unkillable Hero)
M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/4(6) S/2 DR/6 W/4
Equipment: LRF Slugthrower, Personal Magnetic Field, Cybernetic Eyes
Abilities: Inspiring, Command, Get up and shoot!, Impervious (5+), Unstoppable, Night Vision, Aim

Redjack Unit Sniper (Human Regular Sniper Individual)
M/3 RC/3+ CC/3 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/2
Equipment: Slugthrower Long Rifle, AP Rounds, Cloaking Field
Abilities: Hunter (Human), Crack Shot

Smith and Jones Hired Guns (Human Regular Squad)
M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: LRF Slugthrower, Fragmentation Grenades
Abilities: Inspiring

Frank and Jessie Fresh Meat (Human Green Squad)
M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: Slugtrower Rifle, Fragmentation Grenades
Abilities: Inspiring

Bonnie and Mr. X Fresh Meat (Human Green Squad)
M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: Slugtrower Rifle, Fragmentation Grenades
Abilities: Inspiring

Chuck and Red Fresh Meat (Human Green Squad)
M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1
Equipment: Slugtrower Rifle, Fragmentation Grenades
Abilities: Inspiring

Dirty Trick: Satchel Charges

The pirates set up the Duct Rats as scouts. Armed with LRF Slugthrowers these guys did some nasty damage to the approaching mercenaries.

The fighting started to heat up around the objective. Early on it looked as if Boon's men might over run the pirates and end the battle quickly.

Things started to get nasty. Both the group leaders were trading shots and both sides were taking wounds and casualties. The particle rifles that the pirate captain and quartermasters started taking their tole on Boon's crew.

In the end the pirates prevailed pretty handily. The particle weapons and the personal magnetic fields made the pirate individuals very nasty to deal with. Vinnie the quartermaster was able to get to the fighter and fly it to safety although most of the mercenaries had been taken out of action by then.

Venture Star Prospecting Main Office

We managed to finish up the exteriors of the main office for the "Venture Star Prospecting Company" and their excavation machine. The "Venture Star" office is for our spaceport project. My wife made the two main buildings and I made the refinery station and converted and painted the vehicles.
We still need to make a couple access ramps for the buildings and a small landing pad. We have a small G.I. Joe shuttle coming that we are going to use for the company shuttle and I plan to add a semi truck with a flat bed to the company vehicle fleet and hopefully some kind of van or truck for the manager and science staff.
I've already got one mining crew of four half painted for the vehicles. We are also working on four scientist and a manager and assistant. We will probably also add a couple shuttle pilots and a couple of mechanics bringing the total staff to about 14.

The $1.00 Pirate Starfighter

Several years ago I purchased several little plastic starfighters at a $1.00 shop because they looked like they would scale well with 28mm ship. I think I bought 6 or more. After all they were only a dollar each.

They each had one of those pull back motorized gear boxes to make them roll on little wheels. I've never understood why you would make aircraft/spaceships with this kind of thing but I've found it's pretty common especially with cheaper toys. Anyway I took the wheels and motors off and messed around with a failed landing gear idea and them boxed them for over a decade.

I think they sat around that long mostly because they were too cheap for me to feel the need to put much effort into. They aren't exactly stunning looking either but they seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Well I decided yesterday to start digging them out and putting some landing gear on them so I could paint them.

I know I make a lot of ships out of cheap toys but I suck at making landing gear. In fact the gear on this ship is scratched from: some wooden stir sticks, wooden beads, a toothpick, and some plastic clothespins. They are simple and the hold the ship up and don't look too awful. I'm not a scale modeler and I'm not building these things for display.

Here is a shot of the new pirate starfighter along side two other ships in my collection also modeled from toys. I'm pretty happy with the way it looks considering it's cost in time and money. I've got another of these set up right now with landing gear but my daughter has claimed it. I'll post a pic when or if she finishes it.

The Ships of Station 42

I decided I should put up a new pic of my fleet of space ships for my space port project. I have a few others but this pic represents the ones I'm sure are going to be finished as functioning ships A lot of the others I have may end up as wrecks or junkers.

I'm going to try and get some of these ships ready to prime today and hopefully work on finishing up the "Black Dog" (the gold and black ships in the front row).

My goal for Febuary is to try and finish up at least one ship a week. A couple of these ships are going to take a lot more than a weeks work but there are several that won't need that much work and I need to make myself a deadline.

TMNT Spaceship!

Well today I was at a local junk shop and I ran across a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle space ship. It was a great size for converting into a game ship. The biggest problem I have with coming up with ships for my space port and sci-fi games is that toy space ships are usually no bigger than a large shuttle and only suitable for very small parties. The TMNT ship is larger. At least light freighter in scale and reasonable enough in size for most RPG parties.

Here's a few shots with some of my other ships. As you can see it's larger but not so large as to make it unplayable. I can wait to get started fixing it up.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign:3076 Raid on the Artillery Convoy

Tonights Battletech campaign game was quite a bit closer than a lot of the previous battles. Stone's mercenaries were ordered to capture a number of "Long Tom" artillery pieces from a convoy being supported by six battlemechs and a number of Arrow IV carriers. The Word of Blake forces fought a hard battle against the mercenaries supported by their artillery which had a devastating effect on the mercs.
Three of the mercs battlemechs were destroyed in the battle but they did manage to capture several artillery pieces.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign 3076: Supply Raid

We had another campaign battle for the Rio Jihad Campaign yesterday. Again I was playing the Opp. Force for the players with the help of my friend Mike. The senerio called for Stone's Mercenaries (the players) to break through the lines of the local militia and intercept a supply convoy. The militia consisted entirely of super heavy LRM carriers and infantry spotters.
Although Sone's Merchs had several mechs damaged in the fight they lost no mechs or pilots and were able to intercept the convoy.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign 3076: Assault on the Repair Base

I played the Opp Force in another Jihad campaign game for the local Battletech group. This battle was a Manei Domini assault on Stone's mercenaries repair facility. The mercs had just received a airdrop of supplies (the little white rectangles) and were in the process of moving them into the base. Additionally a group of pirates called Grimm's Anarchist had heard of the assault via a contact. They planned to raid the base for some of the supplies.

The Manei Domini brought 8 celestial omnimechs and the pirates brought 6 assorted mechs. Stone's mercs had a company of heavy mechs and a few vehicles. The mercs defended the base well suffering only a single mech out of action. Some of their other mechs were damaged including a Black Knight who lost his targeting computer half was through the battle. The pirates suffered the loss of a Locust who ran into a mine field at the start of the battle. The Manei Domini suffered at least 50% losses due to the fact that the defenders chose to concentrate on them.

This is a map of the Blake Protectorate. Rio is in that eastern peninsula near Tikonov.

Battletech Basic Training Training Scenario #1: First Run

I've been playing Battletech again at my FLGS for a couple months. It's been almost ten years since I was a regular Battletech player. My wife use to play Battletech before our daughter was born 14 years ago so we are both very rusty players. Since I've been playing with a local group I've dug out my old mechs and started painting and re-painting them. I've also started purchasing new mechs. My wife and daughter are both gamers so when my daughter expressed an interest in learning the game my wife decided she would start playing again as well. I've got the newest rule book "Total Warfare" but most of my mechs and record sheets are classic Inner Sphere so I turned to my 3rd edition boxed set for training scenarios. Fortunately Battletech has changed very little in 30 years compared to other games so this worked out just fine.
The scenario calls for Wasp and a Griffin as the Defenders and a Stinger and a Wolverine as the attackers. The first side to score a kill wins the simulation. I chose to run the defending mechs. My wife chose the Stinger and my daughter chose the Wolverine.


Early on the Wolverine took several hits but it's tough armor held out quite well. I chose to keep my mechs mobile through jumping and running. This also made it harder for me to hit but not that hard. My wife jumped the stinger quite a bit too but the Wolverine had no jump jets so it ran quite a bit which it why it took some damage.

Later on in the game all that jumping and shooting was really starting to overhead my Griffin. The old 3025 mechs have very poor heat management. Usually they have only single heat sinks and more fire power than they have heat dissipation. The 3025 Griffin-1N is notorious for it's heat problems since it carries a PPC and a LRM 10 launcher which generate 14 heat alone. With only 12 heat sinks you can't walk and fire for more than a couple turns without starting to take overheating penalties. Another problem is the PPC has a minimum range of 3 hexes and the LRMs are even worse with a minimum range of 6 hexes. This ment that I had to stay mobile to stay at range especially since my wife and daughter were doing the best they could to stay inside my minimum ranges. Eventually I had to start walking and firing only one weapon at a time but I was still having heat issues.

With my Griffin overheating I decided to try and get my Wasp into the fight a bit more. The Wolverine had taken some heavy armor damage at this point but had lost no internal systems. My Griffin's heat was going down but I was still taking movement and heat penalties. I tried to jump my wasp behind the Stinger to get in a physical attack and some close range back shots. Unfortunately I miscalculated the Wolverine's run and was able to get into physical attack range with me. The Wasp managed to shoot the Stinger but only managed to hit a leg. The Griffin missed entirely due to the fact that the Stinger had jumped the the Griffin was still suffering a +1 to hit due to heat. To make matters worse the Wolverine blew the Wasp's arm off in the firing phase. I missed my kick on the Stinger during the physical attack phase but the Wolverine connected sending the left leg of the Wasp flying off and knocking it on it's back.

On the last turn my Wasp managed to stand back up but it's SRM 2 pack did minimal damage to the sturdy Wolerine. I decided to fire both the Griffin's weapons at the Stinger in an attempt to get a draw. One good shot on the Stinger with the PPC could easily take it out and the LRM 1os can do massive damage to a light mech too. Unfortunately despite being at perfect range for the LRMs neither shot hit. The Wolverine completely opened up on the poor Wasp with everything it had blowing the 20 ton mech into several pieces.

The simulation was over with a solid victory for my wife and daughter.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign 3076: Battle of the Com Station

I played the opposition force again for the local Battletech campaign. This time I got the low down on more of the campaign details. The campaign is taking place on the planet Rio. Devilin Stone has hired mercenaries (the campaign players) to take Rio from Word of Blake forces. So far Stone's mercenaries have fought mostly mercenaries hired by the Blakest.
This particular battle took place near Orinoko City.
The Word of Blake had a com station outside the city they were using to jam communications. The facility was defended by four lances of the "Shark Hunters" mercenary company and some infantry. Stone's mercenaries brought about a company to assault the facility.

Again Stone's mercenaries pretty crushed the "Shark Hunters" effectively wiping out the mercenaries as far as the campaign is concerned. To add insult to injury the Word of Black sent an entire bomber wing to indiscriminately bomb the battleground. The bombers of course did more damage to the defending forces than the attackers. In the End Stones mercenaries took the facility with no casualties.

Classic Battletech "Battle at Wilson's Farm"

I'm still playing the opposition forces for one of the local Battletech groups. This week I was put in command of a force of 6 Manei Domini mechwarriors and battlemechs. We were stationed at the Wilson farm. Wilson was the leader of the local Blakest militia. A force of Inner Sphere invaders approached the far and met with Wilson. Unfortunately the Manei Domini commander observed the farmer and the invader's diplomats shaking hands at the end of the meeting. Traitors cannot be tolerated so the closest Manei Domini battlemech was ordered to fire on Wilson's truck vaporizing it instantly.

The Manei Domini sprung the trap and at first it looked like things were going perfectly. The Blakest Militia and Manei Domini were surrounding a single lance of Inner Sphere mechs and the other Inner Sphere lance was some distance away from the fight. One Inner Sphere mech, a Clint IIC was damaged badly in the opening salvo. However the Manei Domini commander noticed that the Blakest Militia did not fire nor did they make any moves to engage the invaders. A Militia Crab mech moved up to the road and appeared to be scanning the area where Wilson's truck had be destroyed.

Shortly after determining that Wilson was actually dead the Militia units changed sides which infuriated the Manei Domini commander. Unfortunately it left the Manei Domini battlemechs outnumbered over two to one. The Manei Domini concentrated their fire on the traitors virtually ignoring the Inner Sphere lances. The Clint IIC was forced to withdraw and the Crab mech of the traitor militia was destroyed. Some of the other militia mechs were heavily damaged and a few of the Inner Sphere mechs were damaged but the Manei Domini suffered the loss of a Malak and several of the mechs took critical damage. In the end what looked like an easy victory for the Word of Blake turned into a shameful loss.