Battletech: Gift completed

 A while back, I mentioned that I had descended into madness with regards to Battletech, and had bought a game set for my friend and his son, and then printed off some 3d terrain to give to them.

Well, my kid pointed out that the trees I had painted were insufficient for the basic maps, and so I needed to print more... and paint them.  I threw in a few more buildings and a power generator as an objective. 

Then, I thought, well, who wants to play with carboard standees (as nice as they are) when you can have mechs instead?  So I printed and primed enough mechs to have a both sides equal sort of battle  (which with basic rules would play out pretty strangely).  So, I added two locusts, a griffon and a wolverine to go with the ones in the boxed set, and two thunderbolts which took a ton of time, being larger and more complicated figures.  I also converted a Phoenix hawk from a misprinted Wasp and painted it up in classic Skull Squadron colors from Robotech (painting the tiny skull and crossbones was a challenge for sure!  However my buddy is a Robotech fan so it had to be done (here is a previously published crap picture).

Now, any sensible person would have stopped here, and not you know, printed a ton more stuff for a game they have not really played, and have no regular opponent for.  As you know by now, I am not sensible, and mistakes were made... lots of them.  More to come. 

Starmada - back in action

This past weekend, Stew, of the excellent blog A Terrible Loss of Lead and Wealth, again invited a couple of fellows and myself over for a large game of Starmada- TNG style.  As with the last game, Stew provided the space to play in, a lovely star mat, ship stats. a QRF, lunch, and drinks.  And of course two extremely well painted fleets (seriously, look at those ships!). 

This time we got to pick our fleets by victory points, and I decided to bring out the big guns and selected the Sovereign class Atlantic, backed up with three comparatively obsolete Excelsior class ships.  Stew selected the Galaxy class Freitag (which was portrayed by the Galaxy class Endeavor half way through the game after a magnet failure), as well as a Defiant class, an Akira class, and another Excelsior.  The dastardly Klingons went with a fleet that utilized all the available Vor'Cha models.  In game terms, this meant that the Federation had two big battlewagons, a cruiser,  and what amounted to heavy destroyers, which the Klingons had all cruisers (and a couple of warbirds that barely figured in the game). 

As is typical, I did not take as many pictures as I could have, but here are a few. 

Federation fleet selection

First turn, as the fleets are probing for advantage

The big ships make their appearance

Excelsior classes take a pounding  The flat hex is a cloaked ship

Battlewagons eliminate everything between then (two Klingons cloaked to retreat, er tactically redeploy)

Federation victory, and another great game!

Since Stew indicated that he was running out of ships to paint, and needed another very large project, I printed something to bring along for him...

(In the event that you are not a Trek fan, that is a 1/7000 scale model of DS9 printed in two halves, which I primed before I brought it over.  A bit over 200mm wide)

Marching forward

I have been quite busy lately with dealing with my uncle's estate issues, so I have had little time for painting and other hobby activities.

I did recently receive a very generous gift from Dai, a whole British platoon for Chain of Command, painted and with extras. (such as the MMG teams in the bag on the right).  With just a bit of work on the bases they will match up with my Americans and Germans very nicely, and since I have a pack of Motorized British somewhere, I can add a few more extra items.

So you would think that painting more figures for Chain of Command and its related terrain would be in the forefront of my mind, and indeed it has been largely so.

However, I also recently got this for a hefty discount...

Yet more Eldar (and chaos bound for Ebay)

Been a while

Loads of stuff going on here in the household, very little of it miniature or gaming related.  I was also too busy to read blogs for a while, so apologies for missing all of your great posts.  I am slowly going through all that. 

Some recap:

I printed and painted a face mask for a friend's son's Halloween mask.  since it was so large, I printed it in two sections, pined them together with spare filament, and then painted it with a few layers of PVA glue.  Then spray painted an off-white color, some detail painting, and sponged painted "bone" color. 

I have also been working on printing a lance, a company, a battalion of Battlemechs for Battletech.  Really quite an absurd number of Mechs. All Third Succession War era, mostly TRO 3025 stuff.  Started painting a few of them, little to see there yet.  Bought the maps and introductory rulebook from the starter box, so closer to a game at least. 

Speaking of which, before I got the intro rulebook, the kid and I muddled through a game using the free basic rules, while discussing my Sarna.net derived understanding of the rules not included in the basic ones (which are a lot, but mainly heat, levels, and close combat).

Pretty good initial effort for a 3d printed terrain and figures, and office 11x17 laser printer map

Stinger v. Commando, and of course the kid won.  We had a good time, but have not had the chance to get back to it yet with the more advanced rules (and more figures).  Some noises about playing with the friend and his kid, but then he got Covid, and with holidays and such I do not think it likely for a while. 

Christmas Knotty list

Well, nautical list at least.

Final ship boxed up for display

My dad is a huge fan of the Aubrey-Maturin book series, and since it has been a while since I beat my head against a wall, I thought I would try something new and challenging, like building and rigging a 1/700 ship, and then add a time limit to get something done for a Christmas gift.

The primary ship in the book series is the HMS Surprise, which is a real ship, modified for a longer life in the novels than it had in the real world.  The Surprise was a captured French Corvette, which was re-rated by the British Navy as a sort of frigate, although its service life was short, and it was paid out in 1802.  (the ship in the novels gets another 15 years of service)

I bought the files for the hull to 3d print, and while the files were good, the print was not, and I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the various strings and bubbles.  I had printed another ship's hull before as a practice, and that one turned out nicely, so it was probably something to do with our "winter" weather (40 degrees F and wet).  During the cleanup I broke off the catsheads.  I also printed a stack of ships boats that I modified from files found on Thingiverse, and added a lantern that I scratch built from a bit of plastic WHFB lance and some wire. 

3d printed ships can have 3d printed masts and sails, but being an idiot, I decided that I would scratch build my own masts and sails.  The masts were made from paper clips, plastic card, and thread.  At this stage I learned that I was literally incapable of tying the knots, and my wife helped by doing those. At least I got to work on my sailor language.  I also made sails from paper, which I painted, cut out, and then drooped on curved surfaces to approximate the billow of the sail. Spars were thinner paper clips and other assorted wire.

Masts finally finished, spars and sails drying

After getting the masts done, it was time to work on rigging the ship.  

I skipped knots completely, and went right to super glue, so it does not bear close inspection. 

I also made a pair of ratting looms in Tinkercad, which were much harder to use than I anticipated, and I had to press gang my wife again for this job. Getting the lines to have enough tension for glue to take hold was difficult. In the end, the ship only got one pair of rattings, rather than the eight or so that it should have. 

Reference materials

I was heavily inspired by A Miniatures Hobby Room, who happened to post a lovely British Frigate build that I saw in the middle of this process.  After crying in the corner for a while, I copied what I could, but fell woefully short. (and that is a smaller ship too!)

This is the largest picture that I took of the "finished" product

I was working on this down to the wire, with the ship being hot-glued into a baseball collectors box (80cm cube) and the box put into the bag about five minutes before we left for Christmas dinner. 

So what did I learn?  That tiny ships are very hard!  No fleets forthcoming from me. If you are planning to something similar, give yourself another week of time, since I think this could have turned out better with a bit more effort.

In the end, my dad did like the ship though, and put it straight away onto his display shelf, where it displaced a Lego helicopter that a grandson made some time ago.  So all is well that ends well.

I certainly do not need a new project...

 

This weekend we celebrated the birthday of a friend and his son, who happens to be really into tanks lately.  Casting about for a present, I thought about the 3d printer sitting in the garage, and printed out a M1A1 and T-72BM. These had a bit of clean up and sanding before I primed them. 

The duelists

What the newly printed T-72BM looked like

As the title indicated, I certainly do not need a new project, but at least the terrain for 15mm Normandy would be useful for 15mm WWIII... However as these prints took roughly 15 hours each, it might make sense to just buy some of the lovely Battlefront kits instead. (and the Team Yankee starter comes with a bunch of tanks). 

D&D 5th Edition Starter Set Miniatures

For Christmas this year, I somehow convinced my wife that we should give her cousin and his kids the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition starter set... and further that I should buy and paint up a set of miniatures to use with it.

Now, this new D&D set is a "theater of the mind" sort of thing (also known as cheap), so no fold out maps, no tokens or stands.  It barely has dice. So I really wanted to juice it up for them and make it seem more exciting.  Thus the miniatures, and I also made a whole map pack of the Sword Coast for the cousin, who will be the DM of the group. (and that is why I made the Faerûn travel distances matrix).  I went a bit deep with the maps and such, and got about 20 pages of material, including a DM screen that I found somewhere online when looking for travel distances, and I also bought a set of dice for each of the kids.

Anyway, as the kids range from 3 to 8 years old, I knew that I wanted to use Bones miniatures, and began by reading the pre-generated character sheets, which happily are gender neutral. After a few lunch times worth of trawling through the Reaper online catalog, I ordered some miniatures from a seller on Ebay, and set to work.  I made a few conversions, mostly to remove the more egregiously bendy weapons, but also to shift them more in the direction of the starting equipment.

Here is the starting group.

Two humans, elf, dwarf, and halfling

Converted staff

Converted warhammer

Sculpted on detail removed, painted on heraldry

Replaced sword with great axe, removed dragon head, replaced with sculpted tree stump

No changes! 

Replaced bendy sword with plastic

Now, I figured that my own kids might want to play too, and so they needed their own figures (and character sheets, which I wrote up).  So I added a barbarian and a Gnome fighter to the group.

Thankfully no changes

And I also painted up a henchman/torch bearer and a donkey, because every D&D group needs someone to do the dangerous work for them, and I hope that having miniatures for them will help the group to remember this important fact.

I had a pretty good time painting these, although as always it was a bit of a rush at the end to get them done in time.  The wilderness type bases were a lot of fun to do, and if you look closely, you can see there is quite a bit going on there.

Anyway, so there is most of my hobby work for the month.  What about you, did you make any miniatures to gift?

Rey of Sunshine

It has been rather hot here (40°+ every day), so not much hobby has been accomplished.

However, it was my beloved wife's birthday, and I did manage to convert and paint a Star Wars Rey figure for her.  I used a Hasslefree miniature as the base, which with the correct head selection and some work to the staff and robes makes for a passable Rey figure.

Pose is a bit hard to photograph

I nearly had a heart attack when my daughter started shaking the wrapped box to try and figure out what was inside. 

Bit of a hasty superglue frosting on the base here

Now contained in a golf ball box

Unfortunately I ran out of matte spray after completing the figure, so I did not get the Inquisitional team finished, but they are nearly there.

 I did also help to "run" a murder mystery dinner party for her birthday, and wrote an additional character for it, so I guess that counts for hobby as well, but there really is not anything to show for that.

2016 Gifts

As I mentioned before, I painted and finished a few figures before Christmas for my sister and her sons. The spray finish was difficult to achieve given the weather (a high temp of just below 10 Celsius, and rainy), but a portable electric space heater got the job done at last.

First are the two Bloodbowl Orcs I painted for my American Football mad nephews.

The figure I painted for my sister is one I previewed in December, namely the Copplestone Casting Henry VIII figure. I bought this figure to paint for her about 10 years ago, but never managed to finish it due to some issues with replicating the classic Hans Holbien the Younger painting it is based on.

All three figures were given magnetic bases, and placed into golf ball boxes.  Why one would want to collect golf balls in tiny plastic boxes, I will never know, but they work great for single figures!

'Twas the night before Christmas...

...And Santa was busy using a portable heater to dry out the finish on some miniatures.

Hope you and yours are having a wonderful holiday!

WIP - Christmas Gift

No prize for guessing what this figure for my sister is.

Custom Dice

As a last minute Christmas craft gift for some of the people we exchange presents with, my wife came up with the idea of "Foodie Dice", or rather came up with the idea of copying the Foodie Dice.  For those unfamiliar, this is a way to deal with First World excess by reducing the choice of what and how to cook to the roll of dice.  Emergent cooking if you will.

The details of replication were left to me, and I found a set of 1" wooden cubes on amazon, and read a few tutorials about making stickers using our Silhouette Cameo, and away I went.  I produced four sets of six dice, and banged them out rather quickly thanks to using the Cameo's print and cut feature, which allows you to design both the print and cut portions of a project at once. I was able to make 144 identical squares, and as they were on sticker paper, applying them to the cubes was easy.

I think that it would be extremely easy to produce a custom dice this way, and could even use symbols in place of the squares provided they were not too complex in shape.  Think X-wing dice, or weather dice, body locations, and the like.  Unfortunately I was not able to find wooden blanks for other common dice shapes, although I suppose you could use this to place stickers on regular dice.  For actual game use, I suspect that a couple of coats of spray sealer would be useful for longevity, and a stain for the wooden blocks might add some interest as well.

You might also see in the foreground a partial imperial eagle... I was after all sitting there with the design software, and it seemed rude not to produce something for my hobby while I was there... this test did not come out quite right (the blade hung up on cutting the beak of one of the heads, and the stickers were just a bit small to handle without tools), but now it will be a simple matter to make an imperial eagle stencil.

Captain Richard "Dick" Winters

My brother-in-law is a huge fan of the Band of Brothers.  He has read the books, watched the show innumerable times, visited Normandy and Belgium a few times (although you might call it more of a pilgrimage)... he is a huge fan.  I had been trying to think of a way to paint up something for him for a while.  Something related to Easy Company, like a squad or something; but no ideas ever seemed quite right.  So when I saw that the Historicon miniature was going to be a Richard "Dick" Winters figure, and further that you could buy it from Warlords without going to the Con... well, I had to act.

$20 later the figure was on its way to me, and I had to figure out what to do to get it painted before my Brother-in-law's birthday.  I had thought that it might be nice to have a larger base surrounding the figure base, and dispatched my wife to look for some sort of display box at a craft store.  She came up trumps with an over sized mirrored baseball display box which was approximately a four inch cube (do cricket balls get collected in the same manner as baseballs?).

I painted the figure and the display over a week, spending around eight hours altogether, which was slightly rushed. Concurrently I was also reading the book (very good!) and reading about Airborne uniforms for painting purposes.

Here then is the result, shot outside on an unusually cloudy summer day, just before being packed up for gifting.