Graviton's terrain singularity

Happy new year
Having had I feel a well deserved rest from Terrain for a couple of months I had a doubles tournament set for January so I cranked back into action briefly, and am just getting into the swing again for the two more serious events I have coming up in March and June:

New board: Junker station
I Picked up a TT combat white box bundle for their slum stacks, I've been eyeing it up for a while but since I picked up a new Station mat I thought it'd be a good opportunity while i had some inspiration and built it over the christmas break:

Spoiler: WIP PICS

This is I think the final resting place of the spartan scenics gunship, and so far I'm really happy with how the board has played, I even managed to get most of it done and debuted at the doubles event in mid jan, even if in between rounds I nipped out into the back of the FLGS and sprayed all the grey bits yellow.

This is probably the fastest paint job I've pulled on any board using the power of masking take and spray cans (generally all colour forge stuff).

It still needs:

• Lots of the detailing picking out,
• the obligatory oil washes,
• RUST
• a bit more scatter
• probably some graffiti
• Piles of nomad filth.

Refurb board: Martian colony
The mars board is where most of the other boards started off, as terrain sets have sort of budded off and become their own distinct tables it's left the mars board feeling a bit meagre and not just due to it being hammered by years of play.



This is the current iteration and you'll notice the big gunship taking up a fair percentage of the table which is now migrating to the junker station board.

So I've been wracking my brain for a while now trying to work out what to do with it. the theme is a "mountain" terrain set, hills, martian canyons etc. It's been a jungle, a pirate/smuggler base and everything else you can think of.

So in the fluff Mars is majority YJ territory, I've therefore decided to go with a YJ military/terraforming facility, originally this was going to be a moonbase, lots of corridors etc, but I think I already have that covered on my Space set, I then finally decided to pull the trigger on a warmill "Clandestine facility" bundle before promptly discovering they've been amalgamated by TT combat, who knows if it will ever be available again (I even asked them, they said a few months which since the warmill designs are several orders of magnitude more advanced and detailed than TT and have been previously produced without issue, I'm taking that as a polite THESE ARE GONE NOW)

As such I've ordered yet more TT stuff, this time their newer clearly made for starwars stuff, a bunker, a set of raised walls and a landing pad. with the idea of making it look like a majority underground complex so I can keep the board mostly tiberium and canyon, and as a feature downgrade the spartan gunship to my Azure Dragon which is currently just sat in a box being sad. This should all be turning up this coming week.

Refurb board: Arizona
My desert themed board has been earmarked up as an American nanite wasteland for ages and recently I got a mat to better represent it:



the borderlands esq scrap town is somewhat dated but I intend to add some extra pieces, including some largish silos/barracks and some tents to somewhat resemble a temporary UN aid camp which has been taken over by whatever nutters still live in the ground zero for a nanite WMD. I'll also need to knock down the hills a few shades from a golrious buttermilk cream to a more deserty pink. may add in some vegetation as well as the occasional pit of "silver sand" not sure if the veg will be standard fare or something a bit more exotic, like nanite constructed crystals etc.

 

Nanite waste board
Well to strike while the iron is hot I started making some Nissen style prefab huts.

Spoiler: Kornak for scale

The idea with these is that I'll be able to make the drum tops removable for interior playability and then tart them up with some cargo container paneling like the rest of the board, the huts themselves have some small cut outs to facilitate windows and give some nice sniper positions.

I also the other day started making up some 40k containers I'd been gifted a while ago and built a wall out of home made girders.

I'm going to try and add in some tarpaulins over crates etc generally as a look but on the 40k crates to try and hide the more grimdark aspects.

Varuna park & Paradiso lost boards
Also been working on some set ups for these two boards to try and keep them balanced for tournament play, unfortunately this involves sacrificing some of the flavour for more bland utility but I'm pretty happy with the new setups:

Spoiler: board setups

have changed the rules on the elephant grass from just being a -6 zero vis zone to also be into out of but not through and to also grant partial cover to anyone in it. note if you're a big lad you can still shoot over the top of it like a mowang and a kaitok did in one of the games pictured.

 

So I took a couple of days off last week and spent a lot of it making terrain:

Nanite board:
So the first thing was to build a more canyon-y hill top:

Spoiler: The Hill has eyes

Step 1 checking what moulded rock faces I still had left in the box. decided to put together these two


Hot glued them into place on some cut polystyrene before chopping the hill down to what I actually wanted with the hot wire cutter.


Bit of contouring


I'd have given the rock faces a week before they fell off so i put the whole arrangement on a cut piece of expanded PVC board (10mm) and beveled the edges, before putting some more cast rocks onto the cliffed off areas of the hill and putting on a couple of chest high outcrops you could hide a noctifer behind.


The finished rock faces before a ver liberal filler pass to conceal the hot glue and cover as much polystyrene as possible


I printed some bizmuth crystals to use as nanite clusters and pushed a few of the smaller ones into the filler in unobtrusive places and covered some of the larger gapes with cork boulders before doing a sprinked sand pass, i then bulked out the sand with some more sprinkles over thin superglue.


Lots of little rocks under the lip around the base.


And the sand basically shows the playable surfaces.


Painting wise I started with the leopard spot method but since I'm doing layered rocks I went across in stripes at the levels I was looking for. I've tried leopard print before and thought it looked a bit lackluster (insert stronger word I went with a mild one) trick is to just power through.


Lots of Ochre washed with browns and reds.


Getting there.


Pretty much spot on.


Then I sprayed it with some MDF sealant as an attempt to press save, it
1: made everything shiny-satin
2: melted the nicely cut cliff face in a couple of places leasgin to some touch ups

Having done my retouch i had another pass with a standard matt car lacquer, it's now far more satin if not still totally matt, i may at some stage risk another pass.


I also went over the nanite growths in some blues and a greenstuff world pinky purple colour shifter which pops against the orangy red.


Pretty much done.

Since this has always been intended as a nanite fallout zone I wanted some silver sand, little pits of dangerous white noise where there are still active nanites eating and repurposing anything that isn't silicate, originally these were to be craters but then i settled on some bismuth crystals to try and make it look like structures for some cover in the zones.

Spoiler: Silver sand

Having popped my crystals on I thought I'd use some supports I'd been saving glued flat to the base board (some 3mm PVC board)to look like reaching fractal like nanotubes growing across the area,


And then started to get a bit more bold with them.


Thought "This crate will look good as something being digested and will give a cool little bridge, so put some more structure to it and covered the joins with superglued sand to make up "active digestion"


Bit of paint, mostly a glowy blue


Then a layer of the pinky blue colourshift as the actual silver sand. the transition on this isn't shown on a photo but it just flips from silver blue to a vivid silver pink when the light angle changes, creepy as.

So as well as the two major bits of work I also popped some spray on the nissen huts and other bits and started repainting the existing hills to make them more natural with the board,

Spoiler: Putting it all together

(my jujaks using the white noise zone as cover from a Karhu who can't stop rolling crits in ARO)

Mars base:
After I'd finished the hill my order from TT arrived, I quickly assembled the landing pad and the bunker,

I changed the landing pad to avoid having in built ramps and instead have placeable ones so it would be more versatile and FIT IN A BOX.

the bunker was not bad to assemble I thought until I got the the roof; oh god the roof. If you make this yourself keep some mdf scraps handy to try and support it as it dried to keep it flat. the doors also had a tab top and bottom (rather than just top as per instructions) so you need to cut one set off and there were a couple of phantom purely decorative components the instructions allude to but which do not exist. TT remain great value but you get what you pay for. and the instructions have veeery small diagrams of quite intricate pieces which are easily confused.

Spoiler: Get Your Ass To Mars

Roof of this, did not enjoy.


No closeup pics yet but I concrete sprayed them and oil washed them and picked out a couple of details to get them table ready. they'll have more work done to them but this is as much as I could do in the time (I had to go to Ikea)

And that was what i did on my day off.

Hill about 9 hours of work including blasting with a hair dryer
Nanite zones about 3 between them
TT buildings 3 hours to assemble and another 2 hours to paint maybe along with some bruised thumbs.

Not played on the mars board yet but the America board has been really fun, the silver sand zones force you to make some choices and give good tactical options (like making sure my monk didn't run into it, but using it to keep cover from MSV units in overwatch positions) and the mountain section has been great in both game's I've played on it. generally booby trapped to high heaven, I put long ya on there with mines, my opponent in the second game covered it in koalas and mines and hid a TAG back there.

anyway, thanks for reading.

 

Hello and sorry for the long time absence in posting, on the other hand this post should probably explain why:

Satellite prep: (Steel City Insurrection)


I ran a Satellite and it take a lot of work, specifically I had to do a lot of board prep and run a lot of repairs and upgrades and made another entirely new board.


Varuna mega beast resort:

So following feedback I wanted to put in a couple more pieces of totally LOF blocking terrain and change around some of the terrain rules for things like elephant grass, the last thing would be to naturalise the “abandoned buildings”


So the first thing I decided on was some giant alien trees. I decided to go way more swampy than red wood because they are going to be alien trees and I wanted them to have a bit more of a fungal vibe.

Spoiler: Giant trees construction

So the construction for these was:

• Hardboard base (I had a load of spares from a past abandoned desert board project)
  
  
• Plaster cast rocks,
  
  
• Pringles tube (flavour irrelevant)
  
  
• Flexible conduit pipe
  
  
• Garden wire (thick and thin)
  
  
• Sculptamold
  
  
• Hot glue
  
  
• Greebles I had some 3D prints of one page rules Alien hives scatter terrain
  

So under each tree I put a ring of irregular cast rocks to raise the ground and put a bit of wonky on the trees above. Hot glued the pringles tube on and cut some irregular lengths of conduit and glued those on to to make a buttressed root structure, i cut the ends off conduit to get the angles to meet the ground or trunk and kept the offcuts to fill up spaces around the base. I then put some garden wire roots in and filed up some of the holes in the offcut conduit to make more interesting questing roots.





















With the structural stuff done I put on a printed greeble here and there band covered the tube liberally in sculptamold trying to blend roots together where i could, if some conduit was still visible here or there I was happy to leave it to add the the “alien” vibe. I also sculpted on some features like the stumps of branches, word to the wide these were the thickest areas of sculptamold and therefore took the longest time to dry.











The barricade piece gets covered in the next section

After some sun drying time I painted them with some colour Forge sprays starting with Hyrax brown and then a lighter spray of drakescale green to leave the brown as a recess shadow, I then nuked the site from orbit with car lacquer.






Images from a test setup













The base was done with a miscellaneous green with patches of watered down ahkellion green to make the ground look marshy, I put down some flock and static grass and some of the more alien tufts I had and then drowned the whole piece in scenic cement (water:PVA 5:1) after a little spray of isopropyl alcohol let it soak in and dry then probably hit it again with gloss and then anti gloss lacquer just to be sure.

Spoiler: Scatter pieces

I made some outcrops and other bits with, some are 3D printed 1PR alien hives terrain pieces.






The large one with the fallen tree barricade is a miss print (somebody underestimated how thirsty his print was) which I then doused in hot glue (becoming complacent and burning myself), the fallen log is a piece of drift wood baked in an oven to kill anything on/in it hot glued down and sculptamold-ed on before painting as described for the trees above.

Spoiler: Abandoned facility

Having already built and painted the buildings I found their look way too clean for what I was aiming for and decided to make them look more overgrown so it was back to the 3D printed plants and fungus which i glue gunned in in any available crevice where I thought they wouldn’t receive too much punishment, next was the E N F L O C K E N I N G I wanted a really overgrown look like the red weed from war of the worlds etc so while being mindful of model placement I put down several big gloopy strands of PVA and liberally mashed static grass into it, for girthy tendrils before going over again here and there, focussing on getting continuity between growths outside and inside through windows etc. when I was happy with all that I drowned it in scenic cement. No half measures a good spray of isopanol and then used a pipette or i some cases just a jug to saturate the static grass until it was absolutely turgid. And then put the hair dryer onto it and it still after the headstart head start took another day or so to dry out.

Yu jing Martian Colony

This is still the first board I ever made for anything, having played a couple more games on it since the refurbishment It needed some more Large LOF blockers as is the board was set up in too much of a valley it could be a deathtap to TAGs and as somebody who spammed TAGs before it was cool I can’t be having that.


So this board got some more “Base” terrain a Hydroponics pod and some rock pillars, there’s not much to say on the base stuff that hasn’t been covered before so I’ll gloss straight past it.

Spoiler: Hydropontics pod

The hydroponics pod is made from

• a cheap plastic container
  
  
• a TT combat fan from their infinity range
  
  
• A resin cast keypad from TT combat (not pictured)
  
  
• Plastic plants
  
  
• Expanded PCV board
  

So this was an easy build, I resprayed the foliage with a variety of colour forge sprays just like the jungle board etc, these are mostly leftovers from the elephant grass.


The pvc board was cut to size to match the tub, foliage and fan were hot glued to the board, then with extreme care the tub was lowered on and I put glue on the board where the tub would make contact.


Last but not least I stuck the control pad on the front.

Spoiler: Rock Pillars

So these use my more recent techniques for rocks like as used for the Large hill on the Nanite waste board


First step is a polystyrene core on a pvc card base, just hot glued on.

Next were rock castings snapped up and glued to the core/base before filling the gaps with scultpamold.


Paint brown (this was cheap craft Acrylic) then overbrushing them with a brown/red mix before doing the majority of higher layers with some texture martian earth paint (think it’s Green stuff world) going through three different highlights, then nuked with scenic cement.










And then all together as a table shot

Neo Springfield board:

So Art of war put their AVASARA terrain on last orders and I had to pick up a bundle.


Great stuff to work with I at this stage was in a rush to get it sorted so I painted pre assembly having decided that it was going to be external only terrain again i just used some colour forge sprays and possibly a can of rustoleum for texture beneath.

Spoiler: M O N O R A I L ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Having had some regulars play a test game on the starting setup a comment that came in was that if you were stood on the second story the board was basically through and through lof as everything was at very regular heights not really helped by the street layout.


So how to combat this? Put in a monorail!

https://media.giphy.com/media/xT5LMFZDpDZPA0O8jm/giphy.gif


So I picked up a TT combat monorail set and a maglev train. I based the monorail pillars on some thick PVC board and on the train i built a rail attachment out of come 3mm pvc board:








This is all removable so the train comes off the rail but fits nicely


This worked pretty well especially as the monorail passed across the 2nd story

Anyway, I still wanted more so I also ordered some of the ELMOR roads formerly from Warmill but now made by TT allowing me to put a highway across the board to block off that high Lof and also make a nice skirmishing line.

Spoiler: ELMOR highway

I was also kinda sick of my school buses i’d started about 8 years ago now so I redid them filling the screw holes better and and putting on a catchy slogan!




Anyway with all this it’s much more interesting in terms of LoF the 2nd floor is still powerful but the 1st actually has much better LoF options if you want to shoot past the elevated obstacles.

Other bits and bobs:


I’ve also been helping Guerillajam with his Brutal cities board, finding him a more suitable mat to put under it and i also found this:




It’s a toothbrush pot...


But






Putting it upside down under the Luxumbra tiger soldier it makes a phenominal brutalist marble plinth.


Other upgrades, I finally gave up and glue gunned the CA unidron crates together on the CA carrier board into a variety of piles which stack together quite nicely making interesting firing platforms of LoF blockers and barricades





There’s plenty more, including the day itself, But that’s probably enough for one dump of WIP information for one day!

 

Thanks :)

They're actually Q drone emplacements. Back in N3 obviously you couldn't prone an S3 bot so it's an emplacement where an S3 can see over the top but can if it wants to fail courage to drop back from the firing step into full cover. I should probably upload the STL