MayDay!

On Saturday, I went to MayDay, the local annual gaming convention organized by some fellow members of the EWG gaming club.  This year had an excellent turn out and was held in a larger venue than last year.  There were many interesting games hosted by volunteers, as well as larger tournaments for Warhammer 40k and DBA.  I hosted a Squadron Strike game, (detailed description to follow in a later post) which went quite well, and also participated in the DBA and Saga tournaments.

 

The initial position of the Squadron Strike game.  This was the first time I hosted a game this complex, but the players did quite well.

A couple of big ships dueling it out in Squadron Strike.

My first game in the DBA tournament, with my Normans versus Aztecs. (quite an ahistorical matchup!)  I managed to win while losing a couple of units.

My second DBA game, with Normans versus Egyptians.  I suffered the dreaded 6 to 1 roll several times, losing two knight units and my general, and lost the game.

You'd think the third game would go better, but this time I played a very experienced opponent (hi Dave!) who used some inspired maneuvering to kill my general.  So I ended up winning one out of three in the tournament.

The Saga tournament later on went better for me, since it was a new game and all of us were more or less newbies.  Things were on more of an even footing.  The first game I played my Anglo-Danes against Will's Vikings, who were a bit more fantastical than historical.  We had a lot of fun though, and the game ended when Will charged his warlord into my warlord.  Unfortunately for him, a warlord alone always gets killed by a warlord surrounded by underlings.

The second Saga game was against Terry and his recently painted Welsh.  He managed to use terrain and his abilities quite well, and did quite some damage to my Huscarls.  However, I managed to charge my warlord and a bunch of underlings into his warlord, killing him and winning the game.  I'm seeing a pattern here...

I also took some pictures of the other games going on at the same time.  Most of the games were quite nice looking indeed.  Here is a game of parking lot Warhammer 40k.

An English Civil War game run by Dave, with historically accurate banners and everything.  Nice stuff!

Here's one of Bob's games, something based on Battlelore or Command and Colours.

Overall, this was a great event, and my only regret was that I couldn't play more of the games.  The whole "can't be in two places at once" thing was my downfall... Well, until next year.

Alien Ships

I've painted a few alien bioships for the planned Mayday game, as opponents for the other spacecraft I've shown here before.  These are kitbashed from Warhammer 40k Tyranid bits.  I originally wanted to play Battlefleet Gothic with them, but since that game died, they were kept around until now.

 

First up are a couple of small ships, the equivalents to the corvettes from before.  These are Warhammer 40k Tyranid weapons converted into ships.

 

This is a cruiser-sized bioship, roughly based on the Battlefleet Gothic Tyranid Razorfiend cruiser, but made from plastic bits.

Here's a size comparison between the cruiser and the Orion frigate from past posts.  The Squadron Strike game will be fairly small, with three ships per side.  The humans will have the Orion and the two corvettes, and the aliens will have the cruiser and the two smaller ships from above.

3D Stands

I'm planning on running a game of Squadron Strike for Mayday this year, so I've made some 3D flight stands for spacecraft.  Squadron Strike is a board game that allows you to play spaceship combat in 3D with ships from pretty much any universe you want.  There's a ship builder system in the game that lets you design ships with various characteristics.  To convert this to 3D, I'm using a hex map from Hotz and some 3D flight stands.

I'm using a cheap telescoping mirror as the bulk of the stand.  When the mirror and the clip are removed, the rod itself is a great telescoping tube with a rotatable, bendable top.

After putting some washers on the bottom and a rare earth magnet on top, the mirror is now a telescoping stand.  I made several of these.

Because of the magnets on top, I can put any spaceship miniatures with matching magnets on the bottom onto these stands.  Here, you can see the Orion frigate I painted a long time ago in various positions - tilted down 30 degrees, completely vertical, and upside down.

I'm also planning on making some smaller stands for missile and fighter markers.  I'll start with these smaller dollar-store magnetic pickup tools.  Coming soon...

Saga Warband!

I recently got into the excellent Dark Ages skirmish game SAGA, which uses individually based 28 mm miniatures.  After playing with a Saxon (well, Anglo-Dane) warband at a game, I decided to make one of my own.  It's been a while since I painted things at this scale, so I had a bit of adjustment to do.

All of the following miniatures are from the Wargames Factory Armoured and Unarmoured Saxons boxes.  These are serviceable miniatures, even though they have a bit of a bad reputation.  The annoying thing is that none of their necks fit properly onto their bodies, and a bit of slicing was needed.  The good thing is that being plastic, they are easily convertible.

I converted this Anglo-Dane figure into a warlord by giving him a cape and changing his pose to hold his shield on the ground.  Hopefully he looks leadery enough.

 

The huscarls and the warlord are the ones with conversions.  I decided to give the huscarls two-handed axes, so I put their shields onto their backs.  This also required putting in shield straps, which the box didn't have, and changing some of their arm poses through cutting and gluing hands.  This way I created the pose where they hold the two-handed axes horizontally in front of their bodies.

 Close-up of a huscarl with a horn.

  

These are built straight out of the box, with no conversions.  They are supposed to be wealthy, well-equipped warriors, either lower-ranking thanes or wealthier ceorls.

 

These unarmoured warriors are also built with no conversions.  They are the grunts of the Saxon/Anglo-Dane army.  

As you can see from the close-up, overall these miniatures aren't bad and have enough detail to serve as good wargame pieces.

Considering how much I've been veering away from 1/72s, I probably should change the name of this blog to something more general...

Shapeways Models!

After some failures and fixups, I finally received the 3D prints of my models from Shapeways.

First up are the simple missiles.  There wasn't much detail on these, but the nozzles on the back turned out to be acceptable.  In any case, they're for making markers, and now I've got 40 of the suckers.

I used the "white detail" material for the two 1/1000 scale VentureStar shuttles, and they turned out okay, with around the same amount of "grain" as the transparent detail material from the previous Shapeways posts.  The wings and tail-fins are bent a bit though, but I can probably use the hot/cold water method to straighten them.

The backs of the VentureStar models turned out okay, and the linear aerospike engines have the right shape.  The detail on the engines (separate segments of curved outer shells) are rather shallow though.  Maybe I should remember to make detail more exaggerated so they show up better in miniature.

For one of the shuttles, I put a hole on the bottom to accept the 1/8 inch rare earth magnets I use to fix models to stands.  The hole also offered an opportunity to hollow out the model to save money on materials.  This one turned out to be around 20% cheaper than the solid model.

These two are around 39 mm long, which is surprisingly large if you are used to "fleet scale" ship miniatures like me.  The real VentureStar was supposed to have been around 38.6 m long.

I also printed some 1/3000 scale VentureStars.  These guys are tiny, at around 13 mm long.  To make sure they printed well, I ordered them using the "frosted ultra detail" material, which cost more but allowed thinner detail to be rendered.  Here you can see the size comparison between them and their bigger cousins.

The FUD material actually does seem to offer a higher resolution.  As you can see in the picture above, the grains are much shallower, even though these models are tiny.

Overall, these are nice looking models, and a good first try for me.  The VentureStars don't have a lot of detail, so they were a good fit for my early modeling attempts.

The only real problem here is that Shapeways recently raised their prices, and their use of UPS as the only shipping option exposes me to the "Brokerage Fees of Democles" penalty.  I'm debating whether to keep on using them, but they are the only game in town, at least so far.  No other 3D printing service caters to small miniature makers like they do, and the ones that do print miniatures tend to be for prototyping.

Parthians!

Getting ready for another DBA campaign with the local group, I managed to finish my long-planned Parthian DBA army last week.  All of the miniatures are from HaT.  They are decent enough, but not as detailed and crisp as Caesar or Zvezda.

I didn't make all of the possible troop type combinations for this list, but there's enough to get several good combinations.

These are the main striking power of this army, the cataphracts.  The DBA 2.2 list actually allows five stands total, but I only painted four here, including the general.

 A close up of the general stand, with a standard bearer and drummer.

The horse archers, the backbone of this army.  The list actually allows 10 stands of them, but I only have 8 here.  In DBA, light horse are very hard to handle, and it really doesn't pay to have too many of them.

A close up of a horse archer stand.

Another horse archer stand showing the famous "Parthian shot", where the horsemen shoot their bows behind them.

The DBA list allows foot troops too, with a total of two psiloi and one auxilia.  However, I only have one of each.  The other psiloi cuts into a cataphract stand, and I don't want too many horse archers.

Here's the entire army.  I've been lucky playing with it so far, but an army with this many light horse has serious control issues.  Oh well, it'll be a challenge in the campaign.

3D Models

Inspired by the Shapeways miniatures I bought, I got into 3D computer modelling in order to make some of my own miniatures using Shapeways.

I started out doing something simple, a missile miniature design that I intend to use as counters in space games.

Basically, I envision several of these small models on a base, representing a swarm of missiles in games that allow them.

Then I moved onto something a bit more complex. I've always been interested in real-world spacecraft designs, so I chose the next subject from that area. The Lockheed Martin VentureStar was an ill-fated 1990s design that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. However, various problems with the project caused its cancellation by NASA. I've recreated that model using various online sources, mostly artistic pictures of the small-scale test prototype, the X-33. Some of the details concerning the VentureStar were vague, so I tried filling things in using the X-33's design. The good thing too, is that this miniature can also be used as a sci-fi space shuttle. I'm making two different sizes of the VentureStar miniature for now, one 1/1000 scale, and one 1/3000 scale. These will be good sizes to use in games. If the first prints are successful, I'll make a bigger and more detailed model, maybe 1/500, that can be used for display purposes.


I've actually uploaded my finished files to Shapeways and ordered miniatures. I'm just waiting now for them to produce and mail the miniatures to me.