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Being pretty much done with my 28mm urban board project (or rather, as done as I am going to be for the foreseeable future), I’ve decided to move on to an entirely different project:
A 15mm urban board project!
Well, it actually is quite different. For a start I am not building everything from scratch, being 15mm has allowed me to afford a good selection of buildings from Mad Mecha Guy as the basis for the board. Buying the size and amount I built by hand in 28mm would have not been pleasant on the wallet, even if I could have found the design style I wanted.
Other than the scale change, it’s going to be a near future (2027+) based sci-fi project. The aim is to be pretty generic, not having to use every asset of the board at once like I do with my 28mm one, and not building a base board or mat for it either so I can save on carrying stuff. one thing I am going to try is using self-adhesive vinyl floor tiles as the base areas for buildings, not much added to them but some surface detailing. I’ve done this before for 6mm terrain so I think it’ll work, but I’ve seen said tiles crack and fragment from getting bent before so that I shall have to be careful with storage. A layer of felt will be stuck to the sticky side, since that pretty much always helps. Should save a lot of weight over conventional hardboard bases too, which when you’re hauling a table’s worth of stuff to a club every time you play it really adds up!
Making this kind of building with all the windows and detailing and ability to come apart would be a right royal pain in the fundamental orifice for me, had enough trouble doing it with nice big 28mm stuff where there’s room for plenty of mistakes.
I’m almost certainly going to mix in some old shanty town stuff I built when getting into Force on Force years ago, which when combined with such elements as solar power grids, large battery and water facilities with overt connections to the shanty stuff should give a sort of refugee camp that became a lot more permanent than intended look.
The very modern buildings I’m putting together now will contrast in a big way, with the technical infrastructure well hidden (imaginary underground pipes rather than temporary above-ground construction) could be seen as the shanties being upgraded to a decent standard of living with lots of pre-fab buildings but throw down a big dividing wall and checkpoints on the roads and instead the terrain is implying a distinctly contrasting social situation. I’m hoping to convey a sort of stressed society during upheaval effect through the whole. Though that won’t be the focus of the games I am hoping to play on the board, it’ll be part of the backdrop. I’ll have to dig those out of storage for photos, might be some on my oldest blog entries. Or actually, the background photo. Anyway, they’ll need sorting for maintenance and upgrades.
My shanty town stuff does at least have removable roofs but it’s pretty much all single-story. Come to think of it, I should add some shipping-crate buildings to the ensemble, I would have when I originally built them but I just didn’t know such things existed back then. Maybe a mix of specifically constructed medical and other facilities that were ported in as well as locally converted from regular crates to mix it up?
Not petrol, but wireless power transfer station (and hydrogen fuel cell replenishing). Neat kit, needed to make a tweak though by cutting two of the supports so that I can remove the whole roof or just the roof of the store.
A two-layer car park for something different. And some helicopters for cargo moving/looking cool. There’s also a ducted fan and boxy jets versions on the same hull that have been quite tempting, though normally I like to keep such craft away from a fight… I’d better stick to expanding the terrain-front for now.
I might also go with a load of water-based terrain features, streams, swamps, ponds and the like. Mostly because I’ve never built any before, and the contrast to all the artificial elements would be good.
The Mad Mecha Guy kits are really nice, are the choppers his as well?
Yeah, the helicopters/other VTOLs on the same hull are apparently a recent thing. Some are also available in 28mm I think from his posts elsewhere.
Not shown: they came with either a shipping crate or a passenger box. There’s holes for magnetising stuff if you want to swap out the loads or drop off stuff.
Couple more buildings to add to the pile:
Got two of these warehouses, gives somewhere for crates to naturally collect around.
Got this larger shop as well, should go nicely at the end or center of a row.
I’ve also remembered that I have some of the Antenocitis Workshop totally-not-from-aliens-guv’ colony pods to build. They might be quite good if stacked up, used maybe to add to either industrial stuff (site offices?) or or the shanty bits (facilities for processing, medical and the like) rather than be houses though. Their origins don’t really fit the theme all too well but since I have them I should try and make use of them I guess. Maybe rigging some tents off the side would help disguise that? Or quickly built low-tech looking extensions, contrasting the sci-fi bit and the improvised, somewhat stressed nature of things rather than just trying to ape what’s already there.
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