X-Com and Zombie Terrain

I have been playing UFO: Enemy Unknown again. Not the upcoming one, the original game from the 1990s. I play it every few years. the concept of running an X-Com game kept me going for years but I was never able to get it all together. Now I am older, I have the bits and I currently have the time.

X-Com urban environment warehouse

Made up from Wills plastic sheeting, which actually looks very close to the actual building in the game if possibly a bit smaller. I figured that this would double as some urban terrain for the zombie game. It's a good size being about 12cm square and a little bigger and and a little lower at 25mm tall to allow me to get three strips out of a sheet rather than the usual 30mm tall.

The next building is going to be the ground floor of the barn from X-Com. The top floor is made of wood and I have run out of wooden panelling so need to go out and get some more.

At a pinch it can fit with the post apocalyptic stuff and any SF stuff I have already got.

Continuing the Diversion

As I said the other day I wasn't very happy with how the crew compartment turned out so I have ripped it out and started again. I wanted to be able to get a penny sized base in there as well as be able to get my big fingers in there to move figures around. I also realised that I had made a mistake with the computer room which has been put right. If you enlarge the pictures you will see that I have started adding small details such as pipes, around the ship.

The crew compartment

I wanted the drive room to look busy but still have some  space to move figures around. The bits and pieces were largely stuff I had hanging around, empty pots and some bits from GZGand Ainsty Casting. I haven't fixed most of them in yet as I want to paint the crew compartment grey first.

The drive room

The plan was to paint the hull gold which I have started since I took these pictures. I have some spray paint that has been hanging around for a few years so I might as well use it.

Bits and Pieces

I have had some time to do a few bits and pieces of terrain today. Swimbo has just gone out and she has left me alone for a few hours today.

Big rocks and bigger mecha with a few GZG troopers for scale

 

 This is more of a closeup of the rocks and the marines. The idea is that I am going to cover the base with PVA and sand and then paint it to match the rest of the terrain. If this works then I will do some more. just to give you an idea of the speed I work at, I retrieved the rocks from my parents old, old house before they moved with the idea to do this. They moved out of this house in 1994. I get round to things eventually.

I did a bit of work on the mecha as well today. I put some lines on it and then did a bit of dry brushing. it has brought out the rocket pods quite nicely. In the foreground is some wreckage. It's made from a part of an old 25mm vehicle that got repurposed recently.

I wanted to do some rubble and this was a test bed. It's a 50mm wooden base with some flexible filler and a load of odds and sods from my bits box to make it look interesting.

As always comments are always welcome and if you really want me to have a good day please join the blog.

Mecha With Some Paint

Time has been a scare over the last few days but I have found a bit of time for tinkering. Mostly this has been to do with the GZG mecha.

I was trying to go for the look of a jacket I have used for airsofting which is a Dutch camo. Still need to do a bit more ling and then some highlighting to bring up the surfaces and the edges.

Just Thought I'd Say Hi to Caliban

I found Caliban's blog the other day and quite liked it. Go and have a look at Caliban Somewhen. It's a good blog with some nice pictures on it. As a fan of Mongrels I like his profile pic. Well it made me laugh.

I've Done Some Writing What Do You Think?

The creative juices have been flowing today. I started writing this a while back based on an idea for a game I had. Then the files got corrupted so I decided to start again. Have a read and speak your minds.

Somewhere there is an enemy preparing to strike. That has been a given throughout the centuries and is still as true today. Our nation, our planet, our species. Even when it's no a matter of life and death it's about money, liberty, happiness, territory, technology or something like that. That is what the soldiers on UN mandate are taught when they do their take on training. Most soldiers think that these are fine words. They are here to fight for humanity after all. Most soldiers start the training as believers. After a few years most of the believers are not so sure. Most long service veterans think that these are just words. Like be the best or be all you can be. Words to make the minds of men push themselves a little bit further

Still many hundreds of thousands joined up. There was never any shortage of replacements. Across the globe soldiers joined their national armies or the UN. The young and not so young idealists. All looking to save their country or mankind from forces in the wings waiting to strike. It's what happens to them in the service that makes them an agnostic when it comes to political bullshit.

Most keep doing it though. All leave eventually and mostly by choice. Not because they are believers. True believers are far from common in this line of work. Society tends to call them fanatics or psychopaths and sometime things that are far worse. None of them are born killers. There are screening techniques to weed them out. Most have a sense of duty and like the thrill and ways to find it. The thrill of free fall. The thrill of dropping out of the sky like a meteor. For the soldier there is a certain thrill to be had from combat. At least when you are winning.

As humanity was quietly going about it's business on more than two dozen worlds there was something going on that would make all soldiers and just about everyone else a believer. Beyond the frontier of human territory an alien race humanity had yet to encounter was preparing for an attack. This was not War of the Worlds, not at all. They were out there and they were coming.

There were four human systems that did not know what was about to hit them. Well over ten million people who were living lives that they were about to lose were in blissful ignorance of this particular trauma on their horizons. Most of the inhabitants would be grateful that the suffering would be brief. For most of them they would either be dead or beyond caring about their problems within a couple of days. In many respects it would be those that weren't in the first strike area that would suffer the greatest. It would be the ones who saw what was happening, blow by blow on the Vid for days. Pearl Harbour, 911, Westminster, Ontario and Adelaide magnified a thousandfold.

Working on a Building

Gaming and modelling, as with life, never really finishes. Projects are not completed but are merely left to one side for a while. I had a play about with one of the building I put together a few months ago.

I have added a few touches and glued a few bits here and there. The bits are fom critical Mass Games, Scotia Grendel and random bits of flock.The bits from Critical MAss I got at a show and haven't seen them for sale on the web yet.

15mm building for modern post-apocalypse and sci-fi

There is still more work to do on it but maybe I will leave it for a while and work on some of the other buildings or maybe something else entirely.

And the rear of the above

The poster on the rear is a print out of an RDA poster from Avatar I think just to give the games a little bit of flavour.

I Have Found the Rebel Bass(se)

Just saw this and it put a smille on my face. I am not trying to catch up because it has been a slow posting months :-)

Star Wars fans don'y get old. Well actually they do. Jar Jar Binks aged me five years in two hours of sitting in a cinema.

Sorry lost track there for a minute.

More Work on the Scoutship. The Diversion Continues

So I have a day to myself. Swimbo is over at her mothers. I have done the housework and there is nothing to distract me.

So I have had a go at doing some more work on the Traveller Scoutship. The first thing I noticed was that I had actually missed out a bulkhead so I put that in.

Traveller Type S Scoutship

I wanted to cover up the void areas where the machinery and fuel tanks would be so I used some card to do this. If I have learnt one thing from this process it is work from the top down. I would make more sense to cut the covering card out first and used that as a template. I am also thinking that the central corridor is too narrow and the staterooms are too big. It seems like a lot of effort to put this right but I doubt I will be making one of these again (unless I management to sell it, all reasonable offers considered) so I think I will go back and do something about it. 

I was originally going to go with 15mm squares rather than 20mm. It's a coin toss really. 20mm squares make it easier to move figures around but then throw the scale out a bit. On balance I think I would go back to 15mm squares and drop the wall height a bit.

I have had a bit of a play about doing a 20ton launch as well. This was originally going to be the test bed model but I got carried away.

Blogger - Working differently? 100th Post, 5000 Visitors and Some Stuff for eBay

This is more about blogger than anything else. This is also my 100th post and I have made it to over 5000 visitors. So all in all not too bad

Strange this are happening to blogger in recent days.

I noticed the odd change on blogger the other day when I was checking my stats. Now I am seeing that things like followers on people's pages.

Where are mine? Dammit. I want more followers.

Followers has never worked whilst I have been blogging so I never really thought about it. Now I have serious "Followers" envy.

On a slightly more practical note, I have had a chance to find some some stuff to put on eBay.
 
This is some Citadel stuff from a long time ago. I am told the genestealer patriarch is worth a fair bit of money I thought and the space marine (epic) Warhound Titan.

The gem is Don Uggie and the Ape gang which I am told is pretty rare. I really liked the figures when I got them. They just never really fitted in with any game I ever ran. SO I thought I'd sell them and get them out of the way.

Napoleonic cavalry

This is what I have been working on over the last week or so. I said I would get round to posting some pictures. Four bases of Napoleonic heavy cavalry. The first three are curiassiers and the last one dragoons.

 Lots of colours means lots of time and I have had a lot less time than I expected recently. I was expecting that I could paint about two bases per day but it seems like I was a bit optimistic.

There is also a fair bit of time spent on research to get the uniforms right. I wouldn't want any wargamers with OCD telling me I had missed something or painted the cuffs the wrong shade of pink. The figures are from Baccus who do easy to paint minis.

Back Online but not much to post

Life changes everything.

We have decided to start fostering. As we are out of work and the world seems to be to be decidedly slack and it's something that had been thinking about for several years.

So I have lost my room and my work table. I have spent the last few days boxing up my prized possessions and sticking them away in the garage and the attic. My shelves. Then man cave has gone. It is no more. I knew him Horatio. Sniff.

Sniff. I now have a temporary table in what was the dining room which now seems to be a transit camp for boxes. But this is what I have now.

The plan is that I am getting a shed. I can get a proper built in workspace. A proper man cave somewhere I can go to get away from it all.

Now I need to finish moving stuff around so I can get some painting done.

Bloody Sky

For those of you who have yet to have the pleasure of dealing with any of Robert Murdock's companies, can I auggest that it is a pleasure best postponed. Say hello to Virgin Media. A better service and less hassle.

I am back online though but without much to say. I have done very little painting in the last few days. Real life and Skyrim (sadly too much reall life) have got in the way. I have had a little bit of time in the evenings and I have been thinking about stuff to do with Napoleonics and even thought about some stuff for an oriental RPG campaign which has been at the back of my mind for a few years. I was thinking about doing some terrain for it.

I am not having a good time with life at the moment and it is starting to stress me out more than a little bit. I can see good things around the corner but that corner seems a long way off at the moment.

On the plus side I have had a couple of followers sign up and show that some people like what I am doing.

Happy Fourth of July

To all my American readers. Have fun.

I'm off to play Skyrim.

GZG vac suits

I dragged these out on a whim yesterday. I painted these a while back and was going to paint up the new figures I got at Triples the other month.

I put them back because I want to order some more. I figured that these would do for bad guys and that if I get another couple of packs and some heavy suits I could paint them in a range of colours, so I put the new figures back in storage.
 
These are fairly high tech suits compared to the ones I have from RAFM. I would guess that the are about traveller TL12 or TL13. I originally painted them up as two teams.

I plan to get some more of these and paint them up a bit more randomly for civilians. I will also get a couple of packs of the Survey Team in vac suits to pad out the figures I have already painted and give the additional figures a bit more variety. I may even get some of the heavier vac suits that might work as hostile environment suits if I ever run a Traveller campaign again.