Well after a week out of the country I got back into the building, and on Friday I took the eye scorching green board down to the FLGS for it's innaugural test game. Spoiler: Green warning: meter says 3.6 You should be able to pick out a few more buildings than were present previously Also sacrilage: I've started moving into colours that are not green: Spoiler: gate walkway WIP So this board is now levelling off into gamable, it plays quite well. I may yet have to board up some of the windows as some of the buildings offer very close to zero full cover for a S2, an alternative would be to rule the buildings as see into and out of but not through. It could so with some more general scatter so cars, bins some planters, ideas welcome. This board in it's playable state is planned as a Sci-fi utopia however when the detailing is finished I'm aiming more for Dystopia, damage, dumping, graffiti, weathering, etc. Also in my initial post I mention being able to run an event for 14, yesterday I booked in an event at my local which will start advertied as 20 players and I'm considering whether I can elevate it to 28
My friend who was kind enough to bring my purchases from UKGE back with him drop round for a game the other day on "greenland" so here are a few gaming shots of the board in use, it needs more doing to it still but it's getting there. Greenland Spoiler: Greenland Raicho ready to display what a raicho does Overdron standing ready to do some parkour in the top corner Also some bonus pictures from our friday night group, who were using my 3D printed planters in a pleasing fashion, really need to check if that thing still works and if not see about a new one. Spoiler: Planters Crashed ship board So anyway, my friend brought me round the crahed imperial Raider I got from Tyr terrain and I started building it on Friday while the offspring was taking his nap and I was having a catch up with another friend (who's sarcastic commentry on me attempting to build this was actually genuinely helpful) So the box this thing comes in is small, that's because it's all pre cut HDF put in a box, it's not broken down in any other way. On the one hand no messy, time consuming knife work to remove stuff from the sprue, on the other hand no separation of components into sub assemblies in any way and a lot of these components are basically the same but catastrophically different if put in the wrong place. Your guide through this minefield is 4 pages of instructions, the words are basically useless being normally some varient on "glue this unnamed piece to this unnamed piece" what is useful are the thumbnail sized images which have clearly been reduced in size to accomodate the useless text. The images are just large enough that you can just barely identify whether the piece has pins or recesses to avoid the aforementioned cataclysmic failures. As for the parts themselves there were a couple of miss cut bits which had clearly got through quality control but on this build I think they add character (or surface area to glue on) so I'd call them acceptable. There was however one part to my knowledge which was just wrong and required me to cut off some locating pins on the mated parts and rotate the panel from the way it was intended. Since the parts were all just in a box it took me about half an hour to verify my suspisions that it was a mistake and not just an incorrectly picked varient with doppleganger in the box. Anyway, overall the kit took me around 4 hours to build. To paint it I: Hit it with a basic grey primer (I was out of texture but actually I'm happier with the end result) Blast of white primer on the panel surfaces Picked out the panel lines in P3 Khador red (a nice hot rod red) Washed the walls with Vallejo heavy charcoal Washed the floor with Vallejo shadow grey Picked out the exposed ironwork with vallejo german black/brown Dusted the devastated bits with a black primer to give a burnt or soot effect Spoiler: Pictures Add white Add the detail and then dust Tested the layout on a 4ft board, may use it without the four way internal junction as shown below: Szally for scale Anyway, this part of the ship is done for now, at some stage I want to put some decals and nameplates etc on it (the local vote is a pirate corvette so maybe Ikari company) I do have on order an engine section and a superstructure from Blotz terrin as well which will be joining this board but I can't make them until they arrive. I also want to add some smaller wreckage and some resin or 3D printed drop ons for internal details CA base I've not started it yet but I'm beginning to collate the materials required, I have a couple of TT combat buildings, the micro art tyranid broodhives and now I have 10m of Ø20mm plastic conduit and three more neon sprays including electric blue and neon pink. expect testers in a couple of days. So why all this activity? I've finally put up an event I'm going to run at my FLGS which will be a narrative campaign day, so by the 17th of August I need to have completed these boards and one other to be able to have suitable terrain sets for the missions I want to run.
You could use all the parts, but spread them a bit more, and also rotate them, a bit more than your first example. Also try upside down, or at least 90 degrees, on their sides. Impacts don't keep things in place. In Expo demo and your second, it's like if it fell flat from above, and did't bounce much either. Or if edges were sharp and paint "red primer", as if it was being assembled (think our current boats and ships). Later place all kind of cargo among the parts, as well as rocks and fallen trees, or destroyed buildings.
Quick one today: Primordial board: Prototype erruption, So I mentioned having some erruptions on the board for the human edge board which i started a while ago, the first one out of clump foliage was a bit of a non starter but I then attempted another method made from chicken wire and cotton wool: Spoiler: Cloudy blob The initial dome with some electronic Tee lights underneath, you can see the glow under reasonable or worse light Given a dose of fluro orange from a spray can Bit of grey dusting And a bit more heavily with the black before being drowned in car lacquer Still has some of that internal glow Will have to try it in a set up to ascertain it's usefulness and playability, I'm still intending on doing some similar stuff out of stuffing which may yet work better which would be for either this board or the crashed ship. as Mob of Blondes has said above, there will be more cargo scatter for the crashed ship. I also agree it's very flat like it just gave up on life and fell straight down, I imagine I'll get more inventive on it's actual board which will be ice cap / lunar (mat looks suitable for either) also liking the idea of the primed red.
Crashed ship board So the two additional pieces I ordered from blotz came through and I hurriedly slapped them together before games on friday night: Spoiler: The bridge In use with the rest of the board Morat link team just chilling out in the bridge section And I managed to get some paint on it as well. I alsio picked up a variety of control panels and such which I'm thinking I'll use to embbellish the bridge and other areas of the ship. Primordial board Managed to get some time to work on walkways, so now I have the original prototype and two others (now set to hold 40mm bases) which require further embellishment but are functionally playable. Interesting problem I was working outside and left the foamboard while i sorted out some lunch for my son, It was so hot that when I came back the sun had caused the foamboard to curl in on itself via thermal expansion and the paper covering to start coming away, which wasn't a problem I was expecting to have really in the north of England. These walkways will require steps or methods of attachment or termination to the towers or each other, I have a design for it but I think it needs some more work before I've got a working solution. Bagger 288 Had to come home from the FLGS recently as it had received a battering so I cracked out the glue gun and sorted it out, track re-attached, prow plate re-attached and the pulley which has never really worked has been set to a length that gets the bucket wheel to the ground and then glued into a fixed length and pulley position. A picture of it's storage is attached so I can remember how it goes in the box :s Spoiler: Bagger in a box CA base I had some time to do concept work and design on the initial pieces and do a test on some conduit for the colour scheme it's worked out pretty well and I now have a strategy for desiging a board with a lot of hexagonal builds and sloped walls. Hoping to break ground on it in the week but I may be held up by the curly foamboard I have in stock.
80 million pitcures of Jungle: So I had a delivery of new plants to slice up the other day and was thinking I wanted to add some height to my jungle board and a couple of gears of war standard chest high pieces of cover: Spoiler: The high ground I have other high pieces for this set but I wanted something that had some intrinsic cover and that also had a shortcut factor for crossing the table So this is the base with a "staircase" up each side And then with the additional foliage and some TAK for scale: Spoiler: "chest high walls" - jungle version Exactly the same technique but aaround smaller foamboard cores Spoiler: Trees All wound wire armatures painted with watered down filler and sprayed before glue-gunning foliage to the limbs: And finally some game pictures of the jungle board with one of the new pieces (a 3x smaller circle table edge blob) while we were testing one of the scenarios for a narrative event next month. Spoiler: Table New thing! My guilang attempting to run off with the O12 investigation data Friends knights cruising around committing some warcrimes Moderately blurry standoff between a hospitalier HMG in the cave and my Mowang A doomed Zhanshi trying to hide from the military orders mega-link.
Played a game on the jungle board: Testing one of the narrative scenarios for next months event which has been the main driving force behind all this mad assembly but it's let me get all the various bits of jungle (which are currently complete) together the occasional burst of colour really add something. The hills and trees did as expected giving elevated firelanes over the jungle but hampered by the canopy so that they weren't over powering. Spoiler: Welcome to the jungle Just some set up photos Then a selection of photos of Suryats stomping through jungle to engage hassasins Still more to do but I'm now well happy with this set up, just need to do some more jungle I can drape over some buildings in an urban zone for city which has been reclaimed by paradiso.
Just a short one, been a busy week. Primordial board I've done a bit more on the walkways (no pictures I'm afraid) but the last couple of days Ive also been working on some smaler pieces of scatterish terrain, rocky outcrops: Spoiler: Rocky outcrops So these are the offcuts of the main hills backed onto foamboard to try and maintain the theme After some filler and sand and a couple of heavy spray coats we've got to this: Painting to follow Also I've had a quantity of expanded PVC board turn up for making the CA base table, the stuff is a marked improvement on foamboard (it's the same stuff plasticraft use for their buildings), I'm now mostly waiting for my flash of inspiration as to what to do with it as I've not been happy with my designs so far.
Oh yeah, foamed pvc board is a marked improvement on foamcore. Just about as hard on blade edges as foamcore (have a supply of fresh blades on hand), but you can superglue it or rattlecan spray it with non danger of it going all "melty" on you. Just be warned, superglue tends to grab pretty much immediately. You do NOT have time to reposition it once you touch those glue points together.
Use an approach more like soldering: place the parts as you want them (sticky tape, clamps, etc), then apply the glue to the joint. Best with liquid or very thin superglue, so it flows into the joints easily.
I tend to tack one contact point then dot several other places along the line (there's enough flex in it to allow for this, even with 3mm). I'll be grabbing a sheet of 2mm in the next couple of weeks for my own needs (2mm is easier to put a curve into for a roof).
CA Base/ship So after spending a long period of time staring at the expanded PVC board (which is amazing stuff btw) I finally started cutting, also big thangs to @chromedog and the superglue tip, that instant set reaction is potentially problematic but makes the assembly so much faster than PVA. Currently about half way through my stock of sheets and I think I've got about half a table: Spoiler: lots of pictures The first forray was this building (which even now has no roof as I'm not happy with the way to finish it) and the slopped walls, i decided the bulkhead walls will be the main features of this set and that draft angle reccurs through most of the architecture. The start of the Pyramid reactor and one of the gate walls, the pyramid was designed to nest inside itself creating a lip about half way up but by coincidence it just happens to have exaclty the same size base for the top half as the throat of the base and they line up perfectly. It doesn't look as visually good but it does make storage a lot easier and perhaps leaves me with a roof I can remove on a building the size of an objective room with a possible door in each wall... One of the many many ladders I'll be making for the walls to aid elevation and to break up LOF down the sides of walls. Also I managed to find a car spray whe same colour as my CA colour scheme and this is supposed to be their "home table" So this is the generator pyramid finished with the plasma conduits in the top and the transparent acrylic as a topper, I was quite pleased at this stage so I did a scale check with some models I had lying around. The wall gates are designed as S7. I'm also using a lot of conduit to add additional cover and a bright colour to the board, (the orange in the background is actually for the human edge lava board) a highlight of neon orage over the neon pink gives a great glow effect So yeah about half a table so far, I'm really pleased with it, used it in a demo on sunday afternoon, definately needs more low level scatter added to the set but I'm on that, sometimes a test game just helps determine what else you need. Cardboard stuff shown will be swapped out for more PVC work, the hungries nest will eventually be part of an enclosure potentially adding some jungle to the mix. I've passsed the transparent acrylic to a friend with a sonic cutter who's sorting me out some doors. There's some MDF to be added here as well, this is the forerunner beacon from TT combat, there are also some of the scifi shipping containers to add.
CA Base/ship Managed to get a little more done last night: mostly on the beacon: Spoiler: the beacon found this kit nice and easy to put together, the painting is the same as the other pvc buildings thus far: grey primer > metallic purple, The glowing areas are a white spray > Neon pink > neon Orange or just white spray > neon blue, unfortunately the neon doesn't convey as well over photos. I also dusted the metallic purple with the neon pink which adds a highlight I'm quite fond of which I'll probably do on the other buildings I also commited knife to board on the roof of the first building I made: Spoiler: Roof Dozer for scale I'm not going to lie here, this is a bit of a ball ache, the roof is double thickness to give it a lip and a plug to remain located and the octagonal butresses around the outside require each piece to be measured cut and fettled and when they're all on I'll have to style them. I'm planing on doing a couple more buildings but I think this will be the only one of its style.
