Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Cavern Terrain and Arvus Lighter Build

I haven't been doing a LOT of painting this week - put a few dabs of paint on some Eldar - ostensibly for a Shadow War Kill Team... It may or may not get done in time... I have been working on some Cavern Terrain again and started building the Arvus Lighter.



Over the weekend I did some of the foam carving and gluing of things into place. Monday morning, when the above picture was taken, I cleared off the hobby room table and was sloshing on a layer of "goop" (a mix of filler, carpenters glue and black paint)



This morning I was putting the finishing touches on enough of them that we should be able to put together a 90cmx90cm (~3'x3') table for some small scale subterranean skirmishing!

I've also been gluing up the boards for another 9-10 squares - so we could potentially have TWO 3x3 tables going at the same time. I noticed, building these first nine, that I really needed to make MORE with more than one or two exits!!

Eventually I'd like to make another 15 or so. That way I'd be able to fill TWO 4x4 tables (or a massive 4x8 table!!).

Though it is the Shadow War: Armageddon campaign I'm trying to get these done for - I am hoping they will be usable for MANY different games in many different genres - Generic fantasy dungeon bashing, Pulp era Secret Lairs of malevolent cultists, clearing out more modern cave-systems or insurgent fighters and all sorts of similar actions in the for (or not-so-far) future...

Is there anything else these caverns could be used for? specific scenarios that come to mind? Let me know in the comments below!!



In addition to that I've been plugging away at the Imperial Arvus Lighter I picked up from Forgeworld.



So far I haven't assembled much of anything - but I've started painting a few of the individual parts that will need to be painted BEFORE assembling - like the pilot here.



 Dry-fitting the hull pieces and the canopy I found there was a HUGE gap on one side of the canopy!?  Looking at others on the internet, some some seem to have a gap, others totally do - and the modellers just seem to put them together and ignore it!? I don't know, maybe I'm just a little too AR to let that go...



So I glued in some plastic card hoping it would  fill MOST of the gap...



... and it does... mostly... Hopefully it will look a little less obvious once painted.

The burning question in my mind is... What colour to I paint the private Lighter of a Rogue Trader... I was leaning towards Purple... but them was thinking that was just a bit TOO ostentatious.. Can a Rogue Trader BE too ostentatious...!? Also I was kind of starting to use Purples for my small collection of CHAOS marines and cultists... I have too much red stuff. Grey is boring... Don't really want to do camouflage...


Coming Soon to Tim's Miniature Wargaming Blog:

I really hope this week we'll get to try out a game of Shadow War: Armageddon - in these caverns!!!

13 comments:

  1. What are you using to carve up the insulation? I find a exacto a bit annoying, but the battery powered cutter chews through batteries a wee bit fast.....
    Adventures: Ambull hunts. Clean them out so that the (rare mineral) can flow. The (rare mineral) must flow or the astropath guild will get antsy.

    You should figure out what your rogue traders livery is. I mean, I'm sure they all have some coat of arms or some nonsense like that with colours and flowers and animals and mottos and such. He/She personally might not wear those colours (what a family renegade!) but they would most likely have family traditions (to be ignored or not).

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    1. I just use an exacto blade.

      If only I had Ambul minis! I's sure I could substitute some big nasty - or just a LOT of Orks... These caverns seem like just the sort of environment that Ork spores would flourish in!

      In our game the Rogue Trader himself is relatively new at it - he was a bastard son of an Imperial Commander, but as the Commander's wife was barren (or so they THOUGHT!) he was expected to inherit the office. Then wife-y had an offspring and insisted that bastard son be banished (or worse!), so dear old dad bought him a ship and a Warrant of Trade and off he went on a new adventure... I guess there is his old family livery (which isn't really his family - bastard that he is)... or there is the livery of the old rogue trader dad bought it all from...?

      Thanks for the suggestions!

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    2. Perhaps the crawling insectoid? http://knightmareminiatures.com/category/space-raiders

      That cool backstory suggesting halving (quartering?) the livery. A mix of the old unit colour (planet flag) and the old RT one. Lots of scope for fun!

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    3. Well look at those! They're kind of cool!

      I do have a bunch of old Kryomek aliens - I could use Tyranid stats for...

      I like the idea of blending the two liveries! But now I have to come up with TWO liveries!?

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    4. Hahaha. Sorry =P
      Go steal a simple unit one from an old rogue trader era picture. Make it a solid colour with some notable device in the middle (laurel/aquilla/snarling wolf/whatever). Then choose the other 'rogue trader' colour as a complementary colour (or use a colour wheel to find one of the extra colours that works.....i think there triads and other stuff other than complementary).

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    5. No, no problem - too many good ideas is always better than not enough good ideas!

      I had an idea just now of painting the Arvus in quartered colours - but the older Rogue trader colours would be worn and weathered and chipped and the newly added colours would be crisp and clean. But I'm not sure if I could pull it off. I have a feeling it might just look unfinished - like I forgot to do the weathering on half of it!

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    6. It's so hard to know how these things will turn out....and painting is quite an investment in time =/
      I suppose you could always see how it looks, and if you don't like the effect finish off the weathering?

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  2. Great looking terrain, the lighter looks ok but that's a big gap! Decorators gun mastic, make it go away? Purple does sound chaosy, dark blue with gold trim like british Victorian navy, maybe ?
    Best Iain

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    1. Thanks!

      Yeah I'm really stuck on the colours. I've been wanting to avoid blue as a friend is doing ultramarines and that's just too much blue. I've done too many things in red (though it does make you go faster....), green reminds me of my high school colours, purple seems to chaos-y, white and grey are too boring, black is for the inquisition, yellow and orange are just too hard to paint and make look good (all the oranges and yellows I have are just so THIN!)... Brown or tan seem like camouflage... I don't know... I'm going to have to pick SOMETHING at some point!?

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  3. Ah, color choices! Good luck!

    The cavern pieces look great (and I enjoyed the skirmish report with the Eldar vs Orks). That's a bad gap in that mini! Makes me wonder if a piece was missing or something, but if others have the same gap then maybe there was an error in manufacturing.

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    1. Thanks!

      Yeah, when I was looking at others on the internet - it looked like there were different canopies - perhaps at some point they made new molds, and redesigned the canopy slightly... but forgot to carry the one when calculating how wide it should be...? I don't know. It is odd, that's for sure!

      I think with the little fix it should look okay when it's painted.

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