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with any of the dropships currently commercially available in 15mm, to be honest, they all look a bit boxy, retro and outdated.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

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.

Storage and Transport: Playing with Magnets

A little while ago I started looking into storage and transportation solutions for my growing miniature collections. As I get more and more stuff painted up my usual 'shove it in a baggie in a box approach' needs some refinement to stop all that effort going to waste. I've played around with a few ideas and I think I've finally come up with something I'm happy with. 

First attempt was to get some self-adhesive magnetic and iron sheets from TinyTinTroops. These were reasonably priced at around£4 for two larger than A5 sheets (including postage). 

Two sheets does an A4 sized filebox comfortably, with a few leftover strips. The adhesive on these is every strong and you don't have to worry about it coming loose, worry about getting it in the right place first time!

Mark II was a 'tuff box' (whatever that is) from Rymans. The plastic is a bit more sturdy than the filebox card and the clasps more robust than the filebox locking mechanism. As you can see it accommodates all of my currently painted 15s and FOW, although I'm gonna have to get another one soonish. 

The magnetic sheet has a fair amount of pull but nowhere near as much as neodymiums, basically it all boils down to surface area vs weight. For my BSG fighter stands this system works quite well. The bases are large and the figures are very small and light. A inch square of the iron sheet on the bottom of each base seems to do the trick. 

It also works very well for my FOW units which again are relatively light and mounted on very large bases. However, the 15s are a bit mixed, it seems to hold the larger based ones quite well but the smaller based ones I just don't trust. 

As you can see, I can hold the box at the horizontal, and even turn it upside down, without any problems. However, if you start giving it a knock of two the individually bases figures start to slide around and can fall off. I wouldn't want to trust this on the bus or tube. Its great for storage at home, but I need something slightly more robust for travelling. 

To this end I've ordered some 8mm x0.5mm neodymium magnets off ebay (recommended by a friend) to stick on the individual figures, this should get rid of the worries as these little magnets are incredibly powerful for their size.  Originally I couldn't find disc magnets this size (i.e. really thin) but it turns out they exist, so in someways, its back to plan A after a detour through plan B.

My bases order should be arriving soon from warbases and my magnets from ebay soon so I can finally see if my whole sabot bases concept will actually work or fail in the detail.

Review and Modelling Guide: G.O.T Mobile Turret from Antenotici's Workshop

The G.O.T Mobile Turret by Antenotici's workshop was originally meant for their 28mm scale figure line but I saw one at Salute and just couldn't resist such a characterful model. I decided that it would make a good 'superheavy' for my 15mm Autosentia and fitted in with the spidery walker theme started by the GZG drones I had already. Plus its one badass looking motherfucker. Seriously.


Preparation:

The model is resin and generally very well cast. The resin is considerably stronger than less brittle than some kinds I have comes across and I can only hope the rest of AW's resin vehicles are made from this material. I washed the components in hot soapy water a few times to get rid of mould release and grease as per the instructions included in the blister.
The model had a few very small air bubbles and most of these were located in generally unseen areas. The only major holes which required urgent attention were on the top of the main leg pieces. Some filling with green stuff and superglue solved the problem. The model had quite a few mould lines and imperfections on the smooth carapace areas but all these required was a little filing and gentle shaving with a craft knife. Overall, considering the size of the kit, this took about an hour or so.

Customisation:


I added a few bits and pieces such as guitar string aerials, extra sensors, pipes and an optional heavy flamethrower turret on the underside attached with small magnets. You can see these in the pictures later on.

Assembly: 

This is a fairly difficult kit to build and this is worth taking into consideration if you're thinking about buying one. There are very few pictures of the model around and I had to use renders from the AW blog for reference as some of the parts could fit together in a multitude of ways. Some detailed instructions would be a great boon in the blister. I used blue tac to dry assemble the kit and to get an idea of what went where then had at it with the glue. The result wasn't as good as I would have liked, the legs came out quite asymmetrical and needed to be more splayed, but considering the complexity of the multiple joints I think it came out ok.

The legs come in four pieces. I used this bottle top as a rest to make sure the model came out level. Which it did thankfully. 

 The Result:


Here are the fruits of the one and half hours it took to glue together. It ended up looking a little drunk and the legs aren't how I want them but they'll do - all attempts to undo the superglue with various solvents failed.

This weapon looked a little plain so I added a cable. You can see the belly flamer here alo. It was made from an imperial guard heavy flamer, a tau stealthsuit jetpack and some guitar wire. 

Various aerials I added to the strange circular recesses on the top rear which had no discernible purpose. 

I reckon the pilots on the second bottle of scotch. 

The minigun assembly. This was a tricky beast and the ammo feeds line up really poorly. I managed to bend and coax them into shape eventually after much staring at the various renders for direction.  

As you can see, the stance should be wider. D'oh!

Looking at the wrong end of the heavy flamer. This is not a nice place to be... Also,  I added the small sensor lens on the nose. 

Yeah, the pilot is definitely drunk. Oh wait, no, its a 'dynamic' pose. Yeah, thats it. 

Conclusions:


Pros

1. Design - Seriously badass looking kit with great smooth lines and a menacing presence. 
2. Resin - This type is quite strong and not as brittle as some. Still not as good as plastic. Glad its not metal as assembly would be even more of a nightmare, and it'd weigh and cost a ton. 
3. Nice joints - the parts are well crafted and fit together very well for the most part. This could have been much worse. 
4. Customisable - There's some nice scope for adding bits and bobs like aerials and making the kit look just how you want. 
5. Badass - Did I mention this is a huge robotic space spider? Nice to see something which isn't 'modern abrahams or merkava put 100 years into the future'. 
6. Price - A good buy for the £13.50 it cost. 

Cons

1. Cleanup - Small number of air bubbles and mould lines but the size of the kit means this will take some time. 
2. Assembly - The lack of any instruction and limited reference material makes this difficult. The joints fit together extremely well but this is only half the battle of getting the thing in the right pose. 
3. Fragile - This can't be avoided but this thing is going to be a bitch to store and trasport, more than a little pressure will probably see joints snap. Also, the minigun barrel is very fragile. 

Scale Photos:


A few pictures with some 15s I had on the bench to give you an idea of size. I think superheavy just about covers it. Not quite a titan but definitely a worthy adversary.

It'll probably be a while before this guy sees paint as I need it to stop goddamn raining so I can spray it. Paint hates resin without primer. Also I don't want to mess it up so I'll practice the techniques and colours on something else first.

Hope this review was useful and inspires you to pick up this great model from AW.

Adios.