Chopping up wood

Of course, the airlock isn't really an airlock. It's really just the room that leads to the airlock. Tonight I've been chopping up some of the pieces of a corridor section and a single wide door section to make the airlock itself. I think this one is going to need a lot of plasticard, not to mention some green stuff..

Airlock progress

So it turns out that it's actually five times the charm. With four sheets consigned to the bin, the fifth one finally turned out okay well enough to do 90% of the airlock. I will be adding a space behind the four smaller doors to store some EVA suits  (most likely the Ainsty ones) but right now the only other detailing step are the four walls leading into / out of the airlock. I was originally going to leave them blank but now I think I might put some detail on the lower part of those walls.

Dead Ends

Some of the dead ends I have customised and primed. I used some regular card for the one on the left to create a section of raised wall but I don't like how it turned out as it's obviously card. I will probably stick to layers of plasticard in the future.

Exits are: North, South, East and West

Have now assembled enough parts to do all four walls. One strip seems higher on the wall than the rest and my superglue seems to be turning into a gel when it dries which is another thing I have to clean up when it's done.

But.. we're getting there.

No really, actual progress!

3 layers of .25mm (10 thou) plasticard per doorway detailing. Ouch! Luckily I can still do the floors in the thicker .38mm with 'etchings' and there are only 8 or so rooms to do. Er, plus about 20 freestanding door sections. Gulp!

Progress

So, some progress with the plasticard. The new blade still wouldn't cut through the .38mm / 15 thou material but at least it cuts the .25mm / 10 thou card without crumpling it. Of course for every step forwards there are two steps back - even with the sheet taped to the mat, the fact that I have to run it through the Portrait twice means that a lot of the horizontal cuts are lifting off the mat and catching, causing all kinds of mayhem. I've salvaged a few pieces from tonight's test but now that I need two pieces so they can be sandwiched together (a single piece of .25mm just isn't thick enough for detailing) I still don't have enough pieces to build anything. Bah.

Tomorrow, maybe..

It begins with the end..

So after months and months of watching my sci-fi corridor mdf kits pile up, I decided I should finally make a start on building it now that my AvP pledge has (mostly) arrived.

I have started with the simplest components in the set - the dead ends - both to test how easy it is to customise the pieces and to get a feeling for practical its going to be to paint the parts individually before gluing them together. The primer is drying on those pieces right now but I'm already running into some problems with the detailing. It turns out my Silhouette Portrait just doesn't have the chops to cut through the 0.3mm plasticard I am using, even at the highest settings. This isn't a problem when it comes to separating large pieces from the sheet as I can bend the material and pop those pieces off.. but the small details have to be removed with a knife and the results aren't good enough.

Damn.

UK Games Expo 2015

So the UK Games Expo happened this weekend, my first time at the show, and what little I saw of it was great. Really, really great. I'm convinced now that a convention hasn't really hit the big time until they start screening cult films. Watching Flash Gordon in a room where just about everyone can sing along to the theme tune and quote the best bits in unison was very.. comforting. It felt like home.

Of course, I wasn't just there for Flash Gordon - I was primarily there to participate in the Warzone Resurrection International which ran through Saturday and Sunday. My Bauhaus were soundly defeated in three out of my five games, with another loss that might have been turned around into a last minute win if we hadn't ran out of time. I enjoyed it never the less and it was really interesting to see how the meta differs from how I thought the game would be played. For example, out of the five people I played, only two really used any cards; Everyone else used their resources to add additional action points or increase a weapon's rate of fire. Rapid Deployment - although nerfed in the week leading up to the event - was still pretty devastating, especially the Capitol Air Cav with their fragmentation ammo. High RoF weapons and high Invulnerable Armour saves were the order of the day; My Bauhaus list had neither and combined with my terribad dice rolling, my army was not exactly competitive. Hopefully when the Bauhaus Dragoons and Blitzers make it into the game, I will have more options for a competitive list isn't filled with Etoiles and Fisty Vulcans :D

I also failed to secure a copy of AvP (boo!) as the copies allocated to KS backers went like hotcakes on the Friday - no surprise there - but at least I got to have a look at the game components and of course the painted models, some of which are in the pictures below. Hopefully my copy will be here in 4 - 6 weeks and I'm expecting some MDF sci-fi terrain corridors in the same delivery window (hopefully) so that I can make a game board for AvP!

Also, I really want one of these:

 

 

 

So, all in all, how was the UK Games Expo, Andy?

I agree.