Tanksgiving Update: Two heavy tanks finished!

I finished these two tanks up today for my Tanksgiving Marathon.  This brings me up to four finished tanks.  Both are based on a $3.00 toy tank I picked up at the Dollar General store.  The green one is pretty much just a paint up and the camouflage one has had it's tracks removed and replaced with hover drives I scratch built from cheap razor handles.
Obviously the design owes a lot to my M1 Abrams MBT but it is a bit more narrow in design.
In my setting these tanks are produced by the same company.  The hover tanks obviously has less armor but greater speed.  The design designation will be the Laird MBT and Laird HHT respectively.  I've painted the hover tank up for my Hell Knights army with the company markings.  The tracked version I have painted up to be a part of a generic mercenary motor pool I am building so I have gone without giving it a company or national marking and have instead simply given it a name and number.
I intended to photograph these with some miniatures to show their scale.  They are pretty big.  Defiantly "heavy" tanks although they are not as big as the two Ligers I just finished. I'm happy with the way they turned out and they will likely be making an appearance in my campaign very soon.  

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.

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".