M.S.S.R. Battlesuits Finished!

I finished up this squad of M.S.S.R. Battlesuits this morning for our Solar Empires setting.  These guys will make an appearance or two in our "Station 42 War" campaign as part of the units from the Martian base on Titania.  These are made from the same M.A.R.S. robot toys that the battlesuit I use for my Hell Knights are made from.  They cost about $2.00 each and come in packs of three.  I picked mine up and a local Dollar General.  They stand between 9 and 10 centimeters tall.  Even though they are a squad they are also considered small walkers so they are vehicles and can act independently like a larger mech.
Hopefully we will have a battle with these guys and the rest of the Martian forces up soon.

Martian Troopers and Wolfhound Veteran finished!

 Well we had a productive December 25th and we managed to finish up the troops on the paint table.  I got the Wolfhound Veterans done.  I'm not quite as happy with the way they turned out for some reason.  They look okay to me but not quiet as nice as the other Wolfhounds for some reason.  I did some object source lighting on the plasma gunner and I think I got a bit heavy but OSL has never been one of my strong points.

My wife shamed me by finishing up 13 M.S.S.R. troopers in the same time it took me to finish the 6 veterans I painted and I think they turned out really nice.  The old Vor troopers look a little large next to the Pig Iron troopers but I think they look good.  They are standing straight up and almost all the Pig Iron troopers are crouched a bit.  We may replace the Vor troopers eventually but at the moment we are trying out best to use the things we have and not spend a lot of money.

Martians and Wolfhounds on the paint table!

 We have been working on more forces for the Station 42 War the last couple of days.  Above are some Martian Soviet Socialist Republic forces my wife has been painting.  They are just about finished.  All she needs to do is finish up the bases.

I'm getting pretty close to finishing the Wolfhound Veterans and Assassin as well.  I still have the metallics and bases to do on them.  Hopefully they were all be finish later today or tomorrow.  We hope to have a small campaign skirmish tonight as well so these might not get done as soon as I would like.

Jägers Painted!

 Well I got the Jägers painted up today.  This brings the total Wolfhound force up to 18 troopers 2 tanks and 1 APC.  Not bad so far.

I was kind of worried that the color for the bases would blend too much with the color of their coats but I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out.  It seems one of them lost his canteen along the way but I may be able to fix that some time in the future.

I'm really happy with the way they turned out.  I was also kind of worried that using the same heads would look goofy but I think it worked out well.  Pretty soon I think we are going to have a battle between the Wolfhounds and the Hellknights.  I would bet we have close to enough Wolfhounds for a 1500 point battle as it is.  With those super heavy tanks we might even have more than that.

Jägers on the paint table!

I started painting my Jägers today.  I used a WWII German camouflage pattern as inspiration for their coats and some German Camo Dark Green paint from Vallejo.  I'm planning on painting their flat caps and Packs German Fieldgrey but most of the rest of their kit will be black.  I'm pretty happy with the way they are progressing.  Hopefully we will see more Wolfhounds in our campaign soon.

Wolfhound Infiltrators build.

 I spent part of the weekend putting together a few more figures for my Wolfhound Freikorps army.  The assassin is a Reaper miniature with a SMG from the Wargames Factory Male Zombie Survivors boxed set.  The Jägers are built from Wargames factory Shocktroopers using the flat cap head for every member of the squad.  They will be infiltrators for the army serving as scouts but they will have veteran stats so they will be more like Rangers or Commandos than Scouts.

I used entirely too much kit for these guys and used entirely too many kits to scavenge the pieces.  I even scratch built two sets of grapple lines out of green floral wire.  They are kind of ruff and I considered ordering some better bits to customize these guys but I decided I should stick with some stuff I already have because my game budget seems to get tighter every month.
These guys will probably be a pretty expensive squad since each member has a rifle, pistol, and hand to hand weapon as well as grapple lines but I think they will be effective.  They are also going to be a pain in the butt to paint.  I will probably paint their coats in some kind of Germanic looking camouflage.

Wolfhound Freikorps: Shocktrooper Squad Painted!

Got the new squad of Shocktroopers painted up for my Wolfhound Freikorps.  This is the second squad for that army I have finished.  Next up is the veteran squad then I need to assemble some more.

The first step to solving the problem is admitting you have one.........

 I wasn't sure if I should make this post or not.  I took these pics over a week ago and was going to do this post at that time but then I decided against it.  Now I have changed my mined again.  A few weeks ago I decided that I seriously needed to re-organize my game stuff and purge some of the crap I have collected over the years.  I do this fairly often with varied amounts of success.  I have not done this since my last move and things are getting very out of hand.

 I have been collecting miniatures for about 28 years now.  I started when I was 10 or 11 and I still have some of my "first" miniatures.  My wife started the hobby when we started dating 19 years ago so for almost 20 years both of us have been buying miniatures and collecting other hobby related things.  Our daughter is 17 and even though she is not at into miniature gaming as my wife and I are she does game and has acquired a fair amount of gaming stuff herself.  

Two adults and one almost adult can sure collect a lot of gaming stuff.  Like I said we have purged and re-organized several times in the past but our collection is still huge.  Thousands of miniatures.  Hundreds of game books and all the supplies needed to do the "hobby".
 
We are also very adept at building our own terrain out of both traditional materials and random junk as anyone who follows this blog is aware.  That makes for a massive collection.  Our half finished and abandoned projects amount to more than a lot of gamers collect and we have a large collection of finished projects as well.

As I said right now we are in the process of re-organizing and purging yet again.  The pics above were taken a couple weeks into the process.  If we don't do this every now and again our project progress becomes impossible because we end up spending most of our time either looking for stuff we have misplaced or trying to find table space to work on things.  The problem is that we are at that critical stage where the things is getting away from us because of the sheer scope of the problem.  The pics above only show perhaps a quarter of our "hoard" and they are also the result of two weeks of purging quite a few things.

To be perfectly honest I feel like I need to get rid of 75% of my collection and I would still have enough stuff to keep me busy for a very long time.  In reality I will be lucky to actually unload or pitch 10% of the crap partly because I"ll probably get burned out before I get done with the process but even that will help.
My biggest fear is that right now we have plenty of room for a gaming stuff.  In fact we could cram a whole lot more stuff into our gaming and studio space without it taking over the rest of the house but I can't be sure that we won't end up in another place in the future that just isn't going to have room for the stuff we have.

 We have been in that situation before and had it pretty much take over the rest of the house.  That's not really fun.  I'm not really a hoarder by nature and while I can put up with clutter in certain areas I can't stand when it takes over the house and it gets to the point that I am embarrassed to even open the door when someone stops by much less have company over.

Anyway the point is that even though I love to game and I am lucky enough to have a wife and family who love it as well that in itself can be as much a curse as a blessing.  It makes it easy to over collect and over spend on gaming stuff and that can cause real complications.  I hope to get on top of this situation before I give up on it and just shove everything back into boxes and back into the corners and closets which won't help a dang thing.

Building the Wolfhounds

 We've started building up some new squads for the Wolfhound Freikorps.  At the moment we only have one squad done and three vehicles.  Getting the force to numbers we can field is part of our Winter projects this year so over the weekend and the last couple of days I put together a couple of squads for the army.
Above is a regular Shocktrooper squad built from the Wargames Factory Shocktroopers box.  I added a vox caster from the Games Workshop Cadian Imperial Guard squad to make one of them a com specialist.

For my Veteran Shocktrooper squad I used heads from the Wargames Factory Shocktrooper Heavy Weapons squad box.  I used some small backpacks from the Wargames Factory Male Zombie Survivors box on 5 of the squad members and a communications pack from a Games Workshop Catachan Jungle Guard squad.  I used a Games Workshop Plasma rifle for one of the special weapons trooper and a sniper rifle from a Wyrd miniatures modern weapons pack. (Or at least I think that is were I got it.)

Hopefully I will have these squads painted up soon.

Tanksgiving: Project Wrap Up!

Well I went a little over my deadline wrapping this up but I'm okay with that.  I managed to get 9 tanks and armored vehicles finished in one month for my Tanksgiving project and since I didn't start till the end of the first week of November and I just finished these at the end of the first week of December I'm still pretty happy with my progress.
I finished four vehicles for my Hell Knights Mercenaries bringing their vehicle total up to 13.  Three of the tanks are for my Wolfhound Friekorps which is my next big army project.  Two of them I just painted up as generic mercenary tanks for general use.

Tanksgiving Progress Report: Heavy Anti-Grav Tank built!

I've been working on converting this $3.00 Dollar General tank to a hover tank for the last couple of weeks and it is basically built.  Enough to show it off anyhow.  The underside is a bit of a mess so I'm probably going to do a bit more finish work on it.
The drive is made from cheap shaving razor handles also purchased at the Dollar Store for $1.00 per 12 pack.  I used 8 to build the drive.  I used the same system on my "Hobelar" light anti-grav tank also for the Hell Knights.
The tank is shown here with my Hell Knights Mercenaries who use anti-gravity or "hover" vehicles exclusively.  This tank will probably be designated the "Laird" and it will likely be the heaviest tank in the Hell Knights arsenal.  
Hopefully I will have it painted up and ready for the table in a day or two.

Tanksgiving Concept: Converting tanks to APCs

 I was looking for an APC solution for my Wolfhound Friekorps which would be as economical as possible.  One of my goals with that army is to make it as cheaply as possible and use a lot of toy conversion.  Using the Wargames Factory Shock Troopers is a good start because I can get a box of them from thewarstore.com for about $15.00.  So far I have picked up a couple of boxes and some heavy weapons troopers so I only have about $45.00 spent on a heavy platoon so far.  I also picked up a couple of $5.00 toy tanks so the entire army is still under $60.00.  The problem is that there are far fewer toy APCs to convert than toy tanks.  My first thought was to find some type of toy Humvee and convert it but I didn't really feel like that would suit the style of the army.  I'm trying to build a mechanized armored cavalry platoon for under $100 so I needed a cheap solution.  That's when I came across the idea of converting tanks into APCs.  The Israeli Defense Force have converted a number of tanks to APCs over the years.  Above is a Achzarit APC built off the hull of a Soviet T-54/55.  

 Here is another shot of the Achzarit from the back showing the added troop hatch.  I really like this concept in particular for the Wolfhounds because it fits some of the things I have in mind for their background.  They are not a very resource rich mercenary company but they do improvise a lot.

 Here is another IDF APC called the Namer based on a Merkava tank.  This is obviously a much more modern design than the Achzarit.

 Here is a shot of the Namer with some U.S. soldiers using it during a test.  It is a very large APC which I think might be good for the powered armor troopers I play to add to the army in the future.

 This is an IDF Puma.  More of a combat engineering vehicle than a true apc.  I just wanted to include it because I thought it might make a nice project.

 This is a VIU-55 Munja.  A Serbian combat engineer vehicle also based on a Soviet T-55.

 This is an IDF Nagmachon based on a Centurion Sho't hull.  It is ugly as sin but I think it might be an interesting concept to design for a future project.

 The IDF Nakpadon is based on then Centurian as well.  It looks very heavy with all that reactive armor.

 Another shot of the Nakpadon.

This is an Indian Tarmour based on a T-55 as well.  It's also pretty ugly but looks like a simple conversion.

The Port Doxie Project: Nose Art WIP!

I started painting up the ship today with the nose art.  I found this cool Twi'Lek mudflap girl and I thought it was perfect for the ship.  Right now I'm just laying in base colors because I'm going to do an over all wash with burnt umber and a spot of dark blue.  I will then paint the details in a bit more before weathering the ship.

The Port Doxie Project: Model built.

I finished the model I am going to use for the Port Doxie today.  It was a very simple kit.  Just 52 pieces and it is all snap fit.  It went together well enough.  I used a spot of glue to hold down one of the side pieces and I had to glue the guns in place but other than that everything fit just fine.

Next I'll be coming up with a design to paint onto it and some nose art and then the weathering.  I'm not entirely sure what I am going to paint on the ship yet but I'm sure I'll figure it out now that I have it together.

I found a gallery with several more shots of this model being used with some WotC 28mm Star Wars figures on this page.  I'm feeling even better about this choice after looking at these other photos.

The Port Doxie project. A YT-1300 for our Star Wars campaign.

While I'm taking a break from running our Savage Hyboria game one of the other members of our role playing group has started a Star Wars Edge of the Empire game.  The group has a YT-1300 transport we have named "The Port Doxie".  I picked up this Revell Snap Tite Millennium Falcon kit to represent our ship.  This kit is actually very under scale for the 28mm miniatures we will be using for the campaign but I knew that when I picked it up.  Although the box doesn't list the scale most modeling sites list it at about 1/72 scale and I would say that is pretty close.  It is a pretty chunky kit and it looks a bit on the thick side but this is for a game piece and not for a scale modeling project.  I would have rather had the AMT cut away kit but they are no longer in production and are getting harder and more expensive to come by.

The advantages of this kit is that it is not only in production but also very easy to put together.  I've put together my fair share of models but it is not my favorite part of miniature war gaming so that is a bonus for me.

As far as the scale thing goes that is also a trade off.  Yes it does look a bit small but if you check out this post in the Lead Adventure Forum you can see a finished version of this kit used with the WoTC 28mm Star Wars minis and it looks pretty good.  Also a true to scale model would be twice that size and take up a large section of the play table.  That's a pretty reasonable reason to scale back on larger ships especially since this is for a role playing game and the scene may change several times in a session.  Another thing to consider is that when they filmed The Empire Strikes Back was built substantially less than full scale to save money.  I've heard it was perhaps even 50% smaller than it would have actually been, so in some ways this model is more true to scale to the only actual full set build.

Ultimately it is what I could find in a price range I could manage and it should work as a game piece.  With any luck I will have it built and painted by next Sunday which is our next session.  Of course it will be a custom paint job because it isn't the "Falcon".  

Tanksgiving Update: Wolfhound Super Heavies Finished!

Well my first two tanks for the Tanksgiving Marathon are finished!  I just finished up these Wolfhound "Liger" super heavy tanks for my Wolfhound Friekorps army.  Here you can see them both with a unit of Wolfhounds for scale.
I'm pretty happy with the way these turned out considering they are just $5.00 toys from the Dollar General store.  Hopefully the rest of my projects will go this smoothly.

Looking ahead to 2014 Projects Part 1

 We plan to work on two terrain projects for 2014.  The first one is "Titania City" which is the capital city of Titania the moon of Uranus and the planet our current "Station 42 War" is set on.  Unlike the station and surrounding areas which are very hardscrabble, dirty, frontier style locations Titania City will be a beautiful domed city full of elegant buildings and green spaces.

 There are several serious challenges to this project.  It is much easier to do hardscrabble, frontier, futuristic buildings and terrain than the slick and polished futuristic look.  Another issue is that while we want the city to look beautiful and clean we also want it to look lived in and established.  That will be a kind of hard thing to pull off.  The buildings need to show a bit of age and usage but not be heavily weathered like the station and other locations on Titania.

 Also building multi story buildings always brings problems of scale and playability.  Too many tall buildings can make it very difficult to play around as you tent to knock things over and damage them as you try and reach across the table to move models.  

 All of our current Titania based terrain is as fully playable as we can make it.  That is the roofs come off the buildings and the doors and windows work.  We feel this is very important with certain scenarios especially with role playing games.  Doing multi story buildings is not as simple as it might seem and dealing with them in play can be a hassle.  When you have to pick up upper stories to move miniatures around you can end up jostling the furnishings and miniatures in the upper levels and on the top which can lead to lost game time and even damage.
We will probably limit the number of stories in most buildings to three or four but make the stories a bit higher than usual and design  some of the buildings to have non playable spacers between some of the stories.  We will also probably make some "Space Needle" style buildings where the elevator shafts aren't playable.  

 The other project will be a very dirty and industrial city on the dwarf planet Ceres.  In fact in our "Solar Empires" setting Ceres is covered in one huge city similar to Coruscant or Nar Shaddaa from the Star Wars setting although not quite as overbuilt as either of those settings.  Although it is part of the Martian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ceres is the commercial port of Martian held territories similar to Hong Kong or Vladivostok and it is very commercialized by comparison.    

 Many of the same problems exist for this project as for the Titania City project.  Many of the structures will need to be taller than the ones that we have built and will require multiple stories to pull off correctly.  The good thing is that the dirty/industrial look is much easier to pull off and several of those larger structures can be purely industrial in nature.

One of the solutions I have considered is to make a multi-level table using milk crates or smaller storage crates to support each level than having smaller buildings on each level that are only one or two stories tall.  then having a cloud layer similar to the New York scenes from The Fifth Element and then making underground complexes for the lower levels.

Both of these projects are huge undertakings compared to Station 42 and I don't plan to finish either in one year.  In fact both settings will hopefully consist of several tables of terrain covering the points of interest in each city rather than attempts to do the entire city on one table.  Obviously that would be impossible for Ceres and would make Titania City unrealistically confined.

We are hoping to make at least enough to cover a 4x8 foot table for each project rather than trying to cover the 5x12 foot table that Station 42 sits on.  That table is already more complicated to reach across and we doubt it would be possible to put really large structures on it and still make the thing playable.

This may be more project than we can realistically handle but we are planning on setting our next campaign on Ceres and we have really been wanting to do Titania City for role playing games.  

Tanksgiving Update. Wolfhound Super Heavies painting WIP

Here is my first Tanksgiving update!  I've got the basic paint job finished on this two super heavies I am doing for the Wolfhound Friekorps.  I found some heavy machine guns to add to the turret for some additional fire power.
Next step is to put a wash on them then do the weathering.

Tanksgiving Marathon! Pass the armored pie.

As Tanksgiving approaches we take this time to reflect on all the armor projects we have collected and have yet to build.  Yes it's time to think about how tankfull we are and how tankfull we hope to be in the coming year.
The wargaming wife and I get a 5 day break for Thanksgiving this year so I have decided to do a tank and AFV building marathon from now until December 1st which is the last day of our break.  Hopefully we will be able to get in a large tank battle to wrap the project up.
I don't know if I will get all of these done in that amount of time but hopefully I will be able to finish a few of them.
Wish me luck!

Station 42 Phase 2: Tarmac complete!

 I finished painting the tarmac today.  I think it came out really well.  This is probably the easiest terrain project I have ever done but certainly not the cheapest.  I went through about 6 packs of cork tile and 5 cans of spray paint.

 I actually forgot one section.  I intended to make a piece to sit under the refinery behind the Venture Star offices but I can knock that out easily enough tomorrow.

 I added triangle pieces to the landing pads to make them look more interesting and I think it also helps delineate the roads.