Wednesday 23 May 2012

Radio Silence...

I have an exam tomorrow and then I'm going on holiday to Italy for a week, so expect radio silence for a while. However, after the short interruption service should be back as normal!

Also, by way of an irritating discovery I just found my bag from Salute in the bottom of my rucksack, turns out I had a KR multicase golden ticket that would have entitled me to a free backpack! I just didn't know to look. Sigh. My transport problems would have been solved.

In lieu of any hobby content, here'a a funny cow video, enjoy.


Monday 21 May 2012

15mm Dropship Comparison Photos

Due to requests here are some photos of the dropship conversion from yesterday's post with a variety of 15mm figures and vehicles. I don't think its as big as some of your thought it was but its plenty dropship for me.
An idea of how many men might fit inside, use your imagination!
And now with some vehicles from CMG, Old Crow and GZG.
 Looks like it'd fit to me. If not, sling it underneath in a gravity harness or whatnot. Its Sci-fi.
One of the military vehicles/aircraft I like the most is the Chinook, I'm not sure why precisly, I think its just how damn useful it is. Essentially what I'm going for here in feel is an up-gunned sci-fi Chinook, albeit one which can make orbit. The pictures pretty much sum up how I see its role:
Ok, well, maybe not lifting planes, but certainly ground vehicles. 

I reckon the inside would probably look like a higher-tech version of this, probably a bit smaller. As I think you can see from the photos were I stuck guys on top, you could probably fit about 15-20 guys in there in full combat gear once you account for the fact that people sitting down with weapons stowed take up less room. Could probably fit a reasonable number of PA troopers in there as well or a jeep or gun. 

Sunday 20 May 2012

15mm Armoured Dropship Conversion

Here's a modelling guide/conversion guide/'look what I made' article. 

I saw Old Crow's 6mm armoured dropship months ago and thought it would make a good dropship for my 15mm Arbiters force. The model is pretty big (over 13cm long) and looks about the right size to carry light vehicles and at least half a platoon of infantry. Also, at £6, for this much resin, its a bargain. After some fairly extensive work I've come out with two of these badass looking dropships (these are undercoated only atm as I haven't quite worked out what shade of grey I want them to be in the end). 

I wasn't happy with any of the dropships currently commercially available in 15mm, to be honest, they all look a bit boxy, retro and outdated. I wanted something resembling the Pelican from HALO (I LOVE that design) or the huge gunship in Avatar. I couldn't find either of those in the right scale or price range but luckily stumbled across this on Old Crow's 6mm range
All I needed to do was up-gun it to get the heavily armed, 'hot LZ' gunship, I was after. This was achieved by using a few sets of OC's 6mm turrets and some leftover guns on the frame I ordered from Rebel Minis for my Arbiter 'Space Hummers' (up-gunned Goanna Scouts from OC). 

The model wasn't hard to assemble, all I did was cross-hatch the large joins with a knife to create a key and use some potent super glue. However, the 2 models I received from OC did suffer from quite lot of air bubbles in various places, especially the wingtips. I did my best with Green stuff (as you can see below) and it looks ok now its undercoated. 
Some of the small details on the tail had such large air bubbles I ended up replacing one of them with some plasticard.
The models joins in the middle very visibly. I spent a long time trying to fill the various join lines. Its a shame because the model otherwise has such wonderfully smooth surfaces.
My attempts to fill them using super glue, green stuff and filing/sanding went ok but not great. Some of them are still quite visible unfortunately.

After slapping on the green stuff as shown above I waited for it to fully cure and then cut it away to gain a much neater finish. I find this much easier than trying to smooth and sculpt it while wet. 
The missile/rocket pods on the dropships wings required a little bit of dressing up to make them fit in. I added some gubbins with plasticard and guitar wire to the tops as well as a pylon to attach them to the wing with. They turned out to be a little bigger in the flesh than I anticipated, originally I thought I'd just be able to stick them straight to the wings. Nice casts though. 
The heavy turret added to the bottom of the hull was another OC 6mm range turret. I got a pack of 5 so I still have 3 left, I'll probably make them into immobile defence turrets. You can also see the holes I drilled in the wings in order to mount the guns from the Rebel Minis weapon sprue. These sprues are great and you get a nice variety of near future weapons for not a lot of money, not to mention a good gun shield and hatch. I'll probably end up using all these weapons on my other 15mm vehicles.
Although it doesn't seem like much, doing all of this twice over took the best part of a day, including drying times and faffing. Good job I did it a few weeks ago when I didn't have exams pressing! Worth the time for the result though I feel:
As I said earlier I'm not entirely sure what shade of grey I'm going to end up doing these. I'm definitely going to wait until I can use the airbrush at home though before going much further, it can get really nice smooth results. I think I'll also try and give them some decent weathering such as paint chips, dirt, wear, blackening around the engines etc and make the pair a bit of a project. 

The stands you can see in the photos are rubbish, I just knocked them up for painting/taking pictures and I'll take them apart once I receive the omni-stand I've ordered. These models are pretty heavy and really need some decent support. I've heard good things about the omnistand so hopefully they'll do the job and make these things storable and transportable as well. 

Anyhoooo, need to get back to not doing enough exam revision. Procrastination is an art, and I am a Maestro.

EDIT: You can find comparison pics of the dropship with other 15mm figures and vehicles on this post





Saturday 19 May 2012

Modelling Guide: Movement trays/multibases for individually based 15mm miniatures

Due to popular demand on TMP (well confusion anyway...) I've done another post on my 15mm movement trays just to try and clear up any loose ends. I don't have time to do a full step-by-step tutorial but this pretty much covers the important stuff. 

The bases themselves are to FOW dimensions and laser cut in MDF by warbases.co.uk (I highly recommend their service). The fit is nice and tight (I supplied samples of my mini's bases) but the 18mm holes needed a little sand to account for the paint layers on my bases. I used some sandpaper wrapped round a tool hand for ease. 

This is 0.5mm self-adhesive iron paper from TinyTinTroops.co.uk. It doesn't need to be be adhesive, its  just what I had to hand. I simply stuck it on some paper to get rid of its adhesiveness.
Cut out rectangles in the iron paper, these will form the bottom of each movement tray. Don't worry about getting all the edges to line-up, it can be quite rough so long as it covers the holes.
Place some dots of decent superglue on the base and then stick the iron paper rectangle to it, paper side up, like so. Press the iron paper down and make sure it glues nice and flat.
 Rinse and repeat for the batch of bases you're doing.
This is what the bottoms should look like. Note that the iron paper doesn't go right to the edges, the iron paper is so thin you will never notice the difference (unless you have a penchent for eyeballing your 15s from 2cms during a game...)
These are the 8mm x0.5mm neodymium disc magnets that were recommended to me by Phyllion and come in at about 10p each from ebay (Seller: MagnetsMagnetsMagnets).
Stick a blob of paint on one pole and take them from the other side, this should help you to get all the polarities in the same direction. This isn't particularly important but I find it irritating when they stick to each other in transport, plus knowing my luck it'll turn out to be important somehow in the future if I don't do it. 

 Stick a magnet to the bottom of each figure.

Stick some filler on your movement trays to make them match your mini's base heights and then texture, paint and tuft or flock or whatever you like to do. (I haven't had time to do more than one of mine yet).
These trays should work with nearly any period, especially forms of 'modernish' warfare and sci-fi. If you change system, ping an email to warbases.co.uk, get them to cut you some bases out to the right sizes, repeat the process and now you can change between the systems if your get bored etc. You need never rebase again! (probably :P)

Pop your 15s in your movement trays and have fun making up new squads, attachments, heavy weapons teams and combinations.
Adios.
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