Infinity scale Sci Fi Cars - scenery/terrain project

 

I'd been wanting to get my hands on a few cars to compliment my new Infinity terrain I've been working on, and was scratching my head for some time. The best option for a while looked to be trying to get hold of some diecast models. There are a few proper options out there, or resin 3d prints maybe, but it was looking a bit expensive. I don't like putting too much money into terrain pieces. While pondering this, I had a flash of inspiration- what about that box of run down old Scalextric cars that had been in a drawer for 20-30 years?

So I pulled them out and hey - the scale wasn't bad. Maybe a little on  the big side, but who knows how big cars will be in the future right? - I'm not a perfectionist for these things. The other advantage was that they were really really dirty... no wait that wasn't the advantage, the advantage was that as they were race cars of a few types they already looked sort of non-mundane and a bit futuristic. Also according to Downfall (an Infinity book/novel - which has been really good) there are still cars that don't fly and even sports cars. It was all coming together. 

With nothing to stop me, I set about the task of cleaning the dust off of them. I decided to keep the clear windows as were, so I put masking tape on those, and then undercoated them with a bit of black spray. 

Some airbrushing later, a few very hasty panel highlights and a freehand go-faster-stripe and here we have the finished result - apparently ready to deploy my Yadu multi-rifle and tacbot into the fray!

It's always nice to repurpose something from the junk heap of life. These cars almost went in the bin about a year or so ago during a house move, so it's a cool thing both to have for the field and to rescue from oblivion. 

Original photo below of the condition  of the cars when they were found. You could almost just clean them up and pit them on the table if you don't mind the cheap plastic look and are in a hurry, but I wanted then to match the aesthetic of the game. I pulled 3 cars for the initial batch. So far I've only finished one, but it's a start. 

Well, that's about it for today - I posted this really in the hope that one day someone else could do the same.  We'll see if the idea catches on.

Gathering of Might - Massive oldhammer undead vs Empire and Dwarf Battle

 

The game was about 5000 points per side. In the red corner weighing in at several pounds of chunky painted lead was old 90s Nagash who was being backed up by a number of mighty Sylvanian Vampires. Across the table was the allied forces of Dwarf and Empire being led into battle by the Elector Count Marius Leitdorf of Averland together with his illegitimate son Ned Neederlander who was bearing the army battle standard. The Dwarf force as ever was led by the largely undefeated Drong the Hard. Many cannons were also in attendance.

Every single model was fully painte which was over 400 models!. The Vampire Counts and Averland Empire are my armies. My brother Ed (BerserkerBlade Blog) was fielding the Dwarf and Tomb King sides.

In fact, it was so many models, I had to reduce the scenery significantly to make space for the number of units compared to what I would normally use!

Now, there's no way I could battle report on this whole thing. In fact it took about 7 hours just to play it to a reasonable conclusion - and that was moving pretty quickly, but I wanted to record the event. I rarely do a battle this big, and a lot of the fun is the spectacle!

Marius is shown above in a rather costly unit of knights. I was just able to finish the Imperial battle Standard in time for the game - I have named him Ned Neederlander and have a bit of a back story going on where he is the illegitimate son of Marius Leitdorf- or possible his nephew. Nobody knows whether Marius or his brother Wilhelm  Leitdorf (my other general) sired the child one drunken night in a tavern. The one thing we do know is that he's embarrassing for the family and they've been trying to kill him off ever since by giving him a big flag and a horn and sending him off down the front!

The first shot of the game from the flame cannon roasted about a dozen skeletons! Ed holds the template in place over Nagash's unit as the war begins!

Of course, the undead weren't defenceless. Vampire Bats saw off some of the artillery and return fire from a trio of Screaming Skull Catapults put a dent in a few too!

The Steam Tank ran rampant - running over skeletons while fighting with its own malfunctioning boiler! At T10, it proved very hardy until a Vampire Lord with a double handed weapon started putting dents in it!

A near miss for the undead - Nagash faced Marius in the middle of the field. NAGASH IS A juggernaut of power, but Marius charged with a full 7 frenzied attacks. Needing 4+ to hit and then 6s to wound it didn't look good, bit the Runefang was with him and he scored 2 wounds which doubled into 4 wounds on the Lord of the Undead! Unfortunately, on Nagash's turn he healed the 4 wounds back, but for a moment he was almost toppled by the Elector Count! 

In the end, Nagash proved pretty unstoppable. The Slayers held up one end of the field well, but the undead tool the victory and pushed harder towards Averheim.

Let's hope Marius and Drong escaped somehow to fight another day!

Warhammer 40k Armoured Train Build

This is a project that I've had at the back of my mind for a long time. Actually, the seeds were sown years ago when my brother attended a gaming event where our local game store Marquee Models in Harlow (UK) had a land train game set up with ork vehicles that were jumping onto the train to attack it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I got the idea of a warhammer train and it stuck - bubbling away back there for decades.

Recently, I've been working on my Steel Legion and the train idea resurfaced. A quick Google search revealed that some people had been able to make one successfully. A while back, I'd looked at actual scale train kits, but they were prohibitively expensive. I was basically looking for something to be used in scenarios - budget was definitely limited for this project!

A bit of Internet searching revealed this thread: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/769594.page?userfilterid=122875 - which featured a great train built from something called a "Caterpillar Construction Set"... I looked it up on eBay and got a used one a few days later for a grand total of £10 plus postage. If you look at the thread on Dakka Dakka, it was a really involved build. I wanted to do something more simple with a focus on look and playable area. The running boards for the train were a brilliant idea  so I took that idea and sort of ran with it to increase the playable area. The train itself is perfectly in scale, but as a dodgy plastic toy, I had a lot to do. The first things to work o  was the windows at the front as the front is always the place people look first!

I also bought a bunch of plasticard bits to make railings and details with. The photo above shows how the basic shape for the running boards was constructed. I decided to make a freight type looking train and not to add guns so that it wouldn't be so much a fighting piece as a transport. I also looted my bits box for parts. I really didn't want to add hundreds of rivets to the thing, but handily, I had a bunch of flat plastic Warlord Games bases that already had a gripping side that looked like rivets, so I used those with some plasticard used to cover where it said Warlord Games in the middle of each one! 

For the 3 carriages, I have one small (in this photo red) tank which was actually an ore cart looking thing I flipped over and built a gantry on. The passenger car is next which has large playing areas added. Of all the carriages, it was the most unstable, so low armour skirting was added which is also some sort of anti roll device to stop it tipping too far on the table. After that in the distance is a mostly flat tank carrying platform which should hold 2 Chimera size tanks, although I haven't tried to size it since adding the hand rail section to the rear. There is a bunch of cheap ass looking plastic track sections too I am going to paint as well. They would actually look really good if based up, but as I don't have room to literally build a permanent train board, the flexibility of being able to lay them as is has to be king. 

All in all, I spent about a week building the Steel Legion train. I guess I need to name it now - and paint the thing. I finished 3 carriages in total plus the train, and there was a one more carriage in the set I can do at a later date along with a bunch of track.

It took quite a lot of spray to get down a decent coat of white to start working over the top of. It was fun to roughly array it once it was looking like more of a united colour. For me, the balance came out just about right- a lot of the otig9nal kit is visible still, but up-detailed and the running boards are a very usable size. 

The photo above shows the passenger carriage from the rear. I added a raised gantry with control panel to the back - the ladder on this one was already part of the kit, so that helped and saved me a bit of time. Work on  the whole train was slow in the beginning, but once I got going and had basic shapes in place it came together pretty quickly.

Pictured above is the big transport carriage which I did test later on after writing some of the text earlier and found that it will still hold 2 chimera hull tanks or similar size. Actually this was one of the more difficult carriages as it had a number of lumpy plastic details that I had to remove which was one of those jobs that could only be done with clippers and a lot of time. I did most of it while watching TV in the end.

Now that it's undercoated, it looks almost ready to cross the Ash wastes! Story wise I envisage it crossing the big stretches of Armageddon between Armageddon Prime and Secondus or the hives themselves. Hopefully, I will have time to update once I have had the chance to pit some paint on it. 

My first Diorama - GK Competition 2020 Entry

It's been quiet here … too quiet. There's a good reason for it though; as at least for some of the time I was hard at work on a top secret entry for this year's GK Competition (run by E2046).

The competition entries are up, but voting won't start for another week or so. After that there's an official judging period, so results won't come out till September. Anyway, my entry this year was a bit spontaneous in the end. I bought a couple of 54mm miniatures from RN Estudio with the thought that maybe I'd make a tiny diorama - like both on something not much bigger than a small base. It just so happened that at the time, I started playing a little Valkyria Chronicles and it kind of inspired the colour scheme which went on to influence the rest of the piece and in the end I kept adding more bits influenced by the game - like the recruitment posters.

The other main parts of the kit are the building and bike. The bike is a plastic model Harley kit made by Italeri which came in a lot of parts for something so small. The building is a kit by MiniArt. It was like nothing on earth to build though - the building was vacuum formed and came in big sheets that you had to cut the walls out of. I'm really happy with it now that it's done, but it took a lot of work to get it looking good. The scale would probably be good for Inquisitor though if anyone was interested. 

Painting wise, I used my usual mix of airbrush and brush. I intentionally chose to try more non-metallic techniques as a way to match the sort of animation style that I was looking to create.

You can check out all the entries here (there are figure and robot categories too accessible at the top) 

For just my gallery with more photos: Click Here