Caverns and HOF Playtesting

Well, the first game with the caverns was a success. It showed up a few oddities in my rules which I shall be tweaking, but it has also interested someone else at the Games Club in getting some 15mm stuff, which is good!

I have also signed up to start playtesting the new HOF Fireteam rules. I've played one game already, so I must log onto their yahoo group to put my comments on there.

Photographs to follow!

GZG Colonists

Painted the first couple of colonists I have - these are from SG15-V1 - Civilians/colonists pack A. I have to say, the male colonist looks very grumpy and miserable.

Why? Either he's fed up being stuck on some grotty colony world at the back end of the universe, or he knows that he's about to become monster food - after all, he is wearing a red shirt!

GZG Light Vacc-Suits

When I saw these light vacc-suits from GZG (SG15-V15 Armed crew figures in light duty vacc-suits and SG15-V10 Spacesuited crew in light-duty vacc-suits) , I instantly thought of my old "Action Force" Space Patrol / Security Trooper figures. It was the helmet in particular. I could already picture them in my mind's eye painted with orange environment suits, grey helmets and black visors.
As my AF figures are still in Mum & Dad's loft several hundred miles away, it was time to take a look at "Blood for the Baron", a fantastic archive of everything Action-Force related! I found the figure I was after - the Space Security Trooper.

On closer inspection, I decided to leave out some features of the original figures - bright blue gloves, boots and weapons don't seem out of place when you're 10, but just didn't give the right gritty sci-fi feel to tie them in with my other 15mm figures. I'll go for grey gloves and black boots. The old AF figures had a one-piece armoured torso and helmet, but the GZG figures have an unarmoured torso. Rather than indulge in fiddly conversion work, I just went with the figures as they are.

Undercoat - Humbrol matt 33 black enamel
Base coat - Heavy drybrush of Humbrol 100 german army red-brown enamel
Mid coat- Lighter drybrush of Humbrol 70 matt brick red enamel
Top coat - light drybrush of Humbrol matt 82 orange lining enamel
Helmet/gloves - Humbrol 33 black with a drybrush of matt 32 dark grey acrylic

Colonial Security

These Colonial Security officers from GZG (SG15-V6 Colonial Security (Cops) pack 2) will be out policing the city soon.

After the standard Humbrol enamel matt 33 black undercoat, the faces and hands were painted with my own flesh mix (old GW bronzed flesh, Humbrol acrylic flesh, a dash of GW bestial brown), followed by a GW flesh wash and highlighting with the flesh mix. Jackets were painted Humbrol matt 104 oxford blue acrylic. When I find my large pot of Humbrol 25 blue acrylic, they'll receive a light drybrush of that. Trousers are also Humbrol acrylics, base coat of 32 matt dark grey followed by a drybrush of matt 64 light grey. Waistband and cuffs on the jackets were re-painted in black. Pistols are black, and the shotgun will possibly be given a brown stock and barrel grip. Bases have received a coat of PVA & sand, which was then painted with brown/grey/green finish.

Mobile Missile System

"We've all been there. You need mobile close air defence, but there's no room in the DropShip for a light tank based launcher unit, and the groundmount system is unmanoeuverable and just too tactically limited. Until now, you've just had to hunker down and hope the enemy fighters don't make an attack run until your backup arrives..."

"Introducing the new mobile missile system for all your medium surface-to-surface and surface-to-air combat needs! The marriage of a tried and tested 4-round medium missile battery with the drive unit from a Mobile Autonomous Weapons System give you the flexibility that you need on the modern battlefield. The tracked chassis gives a stable fire platform for the launcher system coupled with good mobility over rough terrain."

Following a conversation with Jon at GZG, this little project came about, and Jon kindly let me add a MAWP to my order, which already included some missile launchers. The inspiration came from the old Action Force "Z-Force Dart" mobile missile system, and uses parts from V15-25D Medium Missile Battery on groundmount and V15-22B MAWP(T) with Plasma Gun.

The missile launcher section has been assembled in the normal fashion, as has the base unit for the MAWP. As Jon uses the same diameter rod for all the small turret mountings, so all I needed to do was drill the mounting hole on the MAWP slightly deeper and the conversion was done - nice and easy! Now to see how the Plasma Gun from the MAWP looks on a groundmount...

Caverns nearing completion...

Well, the caverns are coming along nicely. Here is a view of the whole lot cut out, stuck down and with the tunnels all widened to the required width. You can see a selection of extra polystyrene bits which can be used to add interest to the tunnels, eg. rockfalls to block tunnels, extra tunnel walls to break up large caves if desired etc.




"What's round this corner - do I hear something breathing heavily...?"

A test for my idea of marking movement spaces onto the tiles. Tunnels will mainly be 1 space wide, but with larger caverns and some wide tunnel sections.

Xenomorph and NAC marine test the tile out...

The tiles after painting the base coat. Although I'll want to work on some shading at a later stage, the tiles look pretty good as they are - the dark matt paint brings out the texture very well.

I have a few loose sections of cavern wall that can be used to divide up larger caverns if desired, so I have a choice of more tunnels, or just a large chamber (a Xenomorph egg chamber perhaps...)

A test piece for painting the movement spaces. This has come out much darker than I intended, so more experimentation is required before I achieve the desired result.

A cavern pool. This was made with paper stuck underneath a hole torn through the cork base sheet. A couple of the cork fragments make stepping stones across the pool. The paper cockled slightly when painted, but this actually adds to the effect, creating an interesting rippled texture. I think a slightly lighter purple may be better. I probably won't create water areas in any of the other tiles I've made so far. I shall leave that for a future project, creating a small set of water caverns to add to this basic set.

I may leave the caverns at this stage for now, concentrating on preparing the figures & rules I need for the Old Buckenham Bone Crushers meeting nect weekend.

TTFN

Paul

Cavern Scenery Stages 3.5 & 4

Cavern Scenery



Stage 3.5 – Tidying the tiles
After gluing all the tiles down, I decided that a little tidying was in order. Some needed a slight trim on the edges where the polystyrene was slightly mis-aligned, and I wanted make all the openings on the edges of the tiles line up a little more closely. Some of the tunnels are too narrow. They will need to be wide enough that it is easy to reach in and move the figures without knocking the whole cave system out of kilter.
The edges of the tiles were just trimmed with the Stanley knife, the new blade fully extended to give a good, clean cut in a single pass.
I used my soldering iron polystyrene cutter for the tunnel-widening and cave entrance aligning. The cutting wire was bent into a “U” shape of the desired width, and this was dragged through most of the tunnels to ensure a uniform minimum width. The slight curve on the corners of the “U” helps blend the base of the polystyrene tunnel wall into the cork floor.




Some of you might be wondering why I didn’t just stick the whole sheet of polystyrene directly onto the tiles and carve the tunnels in from scratch; well, I did consider this, but rejected it for 2 reasons…
1) PVA might not have stuck as well with large sheets of something non-porous like polystyrene – it would take a very long time to dry in the middle of a 30cm square! I thought about using double-sided tape, but that would have involved quite a lot of hassle, and I wasn’t sure how it would react with the hot wire of the polystyrene cutter.
2) More importantly, I didn’t have enough expanded polystyrene! I only had a couple of oddly-shaped sheets, and closer inspection revealed that both had ripples which would have made it difficult to stick a large section in place. By cutting out and sticking smaller sections, I was able to discard the rippled areas. The cutting took a while (3 one hour sessions - out in a cold garage to avoid molten polystyrene fumes making the house stink!), as I tried to cut in the most economical way, matching up the shapes for the minimum amount of wastage. In the end, I had just enough left over to add a couple of extra 10x10cm cave tiles, using up a cork off-cut at the same time.



Stage 4 – Painting

A little hunting in the garage finally located the pot of "cochineal red" matt emulsion that I was after. I used a 10x10cm cave tile as a test piece, and once dry I was very pleased with the result. The paint dries to a brick-red colour, and really helps to bring together the cork and polystyrene. The polystyrene in particular looks much better when painted, as the darker red shows shadows more and brings out the texture created by the polystyrene cutter. This had been much more difficult to see when the polystyrene was in its reflective and slightly translucent natural state.

I’ve been thinking about how the caverns will be used, and have decided to try and mark some sort of measurements onto the cavern floor to help resolve movement and weapons fire. It will be impossible to get a tape measure into the tunnels, and I have some ideas brewing for an action point based game along similar lines to Space Hulk. The caverns will be shaded or highlighted as appropriate by mixing a few drops of black or white poster paint with the cochineal red. I can also use these colours to paint in the individual movement spaces along the corridors and caverns. I’m thinking dark corridor edges with approx 5mm thin dark divisions every 10mm or so, followed by a lighter highlight in the middle of the space. The spaces will be slightly splodgy circles, and a quick test using the CD marker to draw circles on one of the as-yet unpainted corridor sections has convinced me that this should work OK. Once the basic red coat has been applied to all the tiles, I will try the marking method on a 10x10cm cave tile as a test piece to see how long it takes, and whether it gives the desired effect.

On with the painting!


TTFN
Paul