Star Fleet: The Defeated Fleet

When you get to buying several fleet packs of one faction, you do tend to end up with some surplus ships. Therefore, I decided to hack up a few, and make some objectives for scenarios. The battlecruiser USS Australia appears here in part, specifically her detached saucer. Her engineering hull and nacelles are awaiting some work. There's also the dreadnought Konkordium, which has lost her third nacelle, and a seriously battered Constitution-class, identity unknown, which is barely half there. I painted them much as I usually do, but deliberately made them dirtier, and added some black and brown marks to signify where they were hit by enemy weapons fire. The "smoke" is white cotton wool sprayed with black spray paint. I tore tiny wisps of cotton, then stuck them in a box and hit them a few times with the spray. Since tiny pieces of cotton vanish in breezes, I tore up more than I needed, and was pleasantly surprised not to lose any! I had to reconstruct the Constitution-class's neck with the nacelle support from the Dreadnought, as I had used the original neck and the Dreadnought's nacelle to make the old-style Federation Destroyer. I hope you like the pics, folks. Until next time, happy 'gaming!

Star Fleet: a septet of small ships

Last time we had a battlecruiser and some larger cruisers. Today it is the turn of a pair of light cruisers, USS Bavaria and USS Lorraine, a trio of Burke-class Frigates, Lehman, Beatty and Jellicoe, and a pair of funky, triple-nacelled battle frigates, Red and Blue. In universe, only four of the things were built, but these are my fifth and sixth miniatures. There does seem to be a related fifth ship, an FBV called USS Bryant, and there's a gap in the numbering system which allows for several more ships to be made up and inserted without mucking up the other ships in the fleet list, so I'll probably come up with something eventually! Enjoy the pictures, and happy 'gaming until next time, folks!

Star Fleet: new ships

A quartet of new ships up today. I got a new fleet box for the Federation the other week, and these are the first fruits. You have already seen the heavy cruiser herein depicted, albeit without transfers, alongside the Saladin in my recent conversion tutorial. I am filling in some gaps in my heavy cruiser numbering, so first up are the Constitution-class heavy cruiser NCC-1704 USS Yorktown and a Lexington-class command variant, NCC-1705 USS Excalibur. Next up are my second Strike Cruiser NCC-1637 USS Daedalus and another battlecruiser, NCC-1753 USS New Zealand. There are several more ships to come from this force, so I hope you like these wee chaps! Until next time, happy 'gaming!

Back to the Stone Age!

For once I'm painting a few miniatures of honest-to-goodness humans. Aeons ago I bought some of Copplestone Castings' Stone Age tribesfolk. I have twelve all told, but these are the only four which don't require additional weapons. I do still have the bag of flint axes and spears somewhere, but for the moment it has been a little misplaced. I'm pleased with how these guys have come out. They were painted very simply - just a single colour on each different bit, the predominant flesh tone being the old GW Pallid Flesh, which I have a pot or two of in somewhat gunky condition. Then I washed the whole of the figure with Agrax Earthshade, which tied everything together nicely. I have a couple of ideas for these folk. First, they could be denizens of a Lost World, and be benign or hostile to some Georgian-cum-Edwardian-cum-Victorian explorers. Failing that, they could be our distant ancestors, taking on the odd lion terror bird or, ah, deinonychus. Supporting the latter interpretation is that the ladies all bear classic fur bikinis. Fingers crossed I'm going to be able to get back to regular updates now. Enjoy the pics, folk, and happy 'gaming until next time!

Star Fleet: USS Saladin - simple conversion

This has been a mildly unpleasant period. I still have 40K forces, so I'd like to be able to say the Nurgle has been visiting me, but that really hasn't been true for some time now. I can only claim that his nephew (who is doubtless doing a bit of work experience at the office) has been duffing my lungs up a bit. The first day was a total write-off: I managed that feverish falling into and out of sleep thing that people only do in nineteenth century literature. The second day I just felt awful, and I have been steadily recovering. But I have only been getting better slowly, and one part (er, two, really) of me which has yet to reach perfection is my lungs. I keep coughing - a vexing dry cough which has come upon me again as I type this sentence. So I am far from dead, but a tiny, tiny, yet irritatingly elongated way from well.

"He's dead, Jim, but not as we know it!" Not quite, but let's use that to segue into the main topic, that of starships and whatnot. As I have mentioned ere now, I am quite keen on this Mongoose game: A Call To Arms: Star Fleet, derived from Amarillo Design Bureau's Star Fleet Universe games, which are themselves (stop me if you're getting bored or if I've erred, which I may well have by now) derived from the Star Fleet Technical Manual of the 1970s. Said manual included a few ships: the original Enterprise and her sisters, a three-nacelled dreadnought, a tug variant (the same size as Enterprise, give or take, and a destroyer and scout variant with the same saucer. Technically speaking, none of these are yet available from Mongoose, though I am quite happy to use their Constitution-class heavy cruiser as the original Enterprise, and their dreadnought as the old dreadnought.

So my lust for the past has driven me to think on creating the Scout/destroyer and the tug. I recently acquired another fleet box from Mongoose, and the raw materials for my design manifested themselves (courtesy of my kindly postman) one morning recently. Stricken with illness as I have been, carving up bits of metal with a knife have been the furthest I have been prepared to drive myself, and so I did. Brave fellow, eh? So let's get down to my latest endeavour. I looked into Memory Beta's entry on the Saladin-class Destroyer (which is very close in appearance to the Hermes-class Scout. I grabbed a few bits and bobs from Mongoose kits.

1) In picture A you can see the saucer and secondary hull from a Mongoose Constitution-class heavy cruiser, and the upper warp nacelle from a Federation-class dreadnought.

2) I carefully cut the neck of the cruiser's secondary hull from the hull itself. See picture B.

3) Then I glued it in its usual place. See picture C.

4) In pictures D & E I realised I needed a sensor/deflector dish, so nabbed one from a Mongoose FFB. I also drilled a hole in the warp nacelle so I would be able to mount the starship on one of the plastic bases.

5) In pictures F & G you can see the Saladin/Hermes sat next to a Constitution-class cruiser. Opinion is strongly divided on these ships (the single-nacelled Saladin/Hermes. Some think they are excellent, and others feel they look awful. My own opinion is that they are decidedly adorable!

6) Pictures H, I, J, K & L show the destroyer/scout together with the larger cruiser.


A final note here is that the destroyer/scout should really have a nacelle with smooth sides, and with some detail on the lower side. The main reason I didn't make such a model was lack of preparation and research. So next time look forward to some excruciatingly painful research! Next time probably will not be until October unless I win the Lottery, folks. I have a strong feeling that the next few months are going to be strongly based in recycling old bits and bobs of this and that - or in painting models I haven't seen in years - or in begging at GW for free paint! Anyway, until next time, folks, happy 'gaming!

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

Late on Monday I began to feel a bit ill. Don't worry, this isn't another appendicitis story! But nausea, headache, &c manifested. On waking on Tuesday morning I was totally laid low. It took a great deal of effort to drag myself out of bed. I felt so bad I believe I couldn't have driven safely. Heck, I couldn't even walk quickly! I usually volunteer at a charity shop, but not yesterday, and not today, either. Today things are better than they were, but I still don't feel well. I'm going to keep stuffing myself with vitamin C, hoping it's a cold rather than flu. Needless to say, I haven't managed anything  on the tower. I hope none of you has this! Fingers crossed I'll have something for you next time.

April Fool!

Ooh, it's one of those days! I was awakened at twenty-five past three this morning by the sound of something falling over. I stumbled to the window to see the bird-table lying on its side, and a sheepish badger partly-creeping and partly-limping back toward it to get the birdseed he'd managed to dislodge. This rather disrupted my sleep, and so when I got up to go to volunteer at the charity shop I've been working in for the last few weeks, I ended up about five minutes late. Luckily, it was closed. I had checked on Friday that it would be open today. More fool me! :D

In truth, on Friday we almost ran out of change in the till, and the manageress couldn't get any more because the banks were shut. She did manage to get some more money, but I imagine it was expended over the weekend, with the result that there was no point in opening today, as the banks are still shut, it being a Bank Holiday. Note to self: remember next time to give her my number so she can let me know. The Tower is coming along nicely. I have three of the four quadrants done, and am hopeful of getting most of the last done today. There's a slight lack of foamcard, but I doubt I'll be able to get any since everywhere's closed because it's a a Bank Holiday. The rest of today will probably be consumed by reading and watching old episodes of HIGNFY. I trust you're all having a less exhausting Bank Holiday today than I!