300 Post!

Well this is my obligatory 300 post mark post.  I just want to say thanks to everyone who has been following my blog and providing me with feedback and critique!
I really enjoy this hobby and I enjoy sharing it with other gamers and seeing their own creations.  Thanks for sticking around!

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.