Kickstarter: Modular Landing Pads

 The Kickstarter campaign that I have been doing test-prints for launched a few hours ago:

There's a link in the picture above or just click here: linky-link 

Some of you may know Kathy Millatt from her YouTube channel or from her time as a judge on The Great Model Railway Challenge. She's also a SciFi geek and has recently started playing tabletop games (Star Wars Legion).

She's been working on the designs for these modular landing platforms over the past few months and, boy, are there a lot of options in the package.

I've spent the last two weeks (almost) test-printing the SciFi Ring from the Galactic Set:

The ring has two levels which can be used separately (the upper ring needs basing sections for that though), or together for a taller structure. There are 14* different lower sections and 12* different upper pieces. And that's just for one of the four landing pads in the Galactic Set and before any Stretch Goals are added.

In the photos above you can see what I have printed so far - 14 lower sections and 4 upper sections. You need 12 per level to make a basic ring - I'm printing extras to show off all the options, but that means making a sort of figure-of-eight shape.

There are three pledge levels:

Core Modular Set (allowing you to build landing pads in a range of sizes and shapes) - £32

Galactic Set (SciFi Ring, Desert Ring and a Sky City one either full or flat) - £32

All-In (both sets) - £50 (or £45 if you get in early)

Considering how much you get in each set, I'd say that it is incredibly good value. Of course, once you have the files you will need to print them...

* actually slightly more - for the lower ring there are two different tops for the towers and a variant of the buttress piece which requires supports for printing; for the upper ring there are two different tower tops.

Paint Table Saturday 03 September 2022

 As you can see I'm set up ready to start painting some figures. It will be the Waffen SS as I want to get at least the infantry done before the end of this month.

I finished priming the new figures this morning:

Then sorted out the riflemen and extra MG42s to fill out squads and support teams:

Core Platoon plus a few supports

Supports

Looking at what I have, there are a few more figures I need to get - I need a few extra SMG chaps and could use a flamethrower team and an AT gun (and crew). I also need something to make up a third Jump Off Point.

3D Printing

I've printed another Traveller ship but haven't finished assembling it so no photo today. I have however printed another 28mm starfighter:

I'll need to do a bit more clean-up of this one as the humidity has gone up and is causing some issues with the filament (you can see some "zits" on the photo above). I think I'm going to invest in a filament dryer as this isn't the first time I've had problems.

I also printed this last night:

"I AM the Law!

After running all these test prints to work out the best way of printing these:

The customisable file I used isn't the best, but it is the easiest to use that I could find. I do have a Dredd badge ready to print after the next two Traveller ships and eventually a helmet and maybe some other props (no, I don't have any plans for doing cosplay - they'll just be for display!).

Finished: SciFi Terrain

 

And they're finished! I even got the final airbrushing step done yesterday. Luckily, once split down they only take up three A4 boards rather than the three A3 boards they are filling in the photo above.

Walkways

I think I need to get another three packs of these for what I want. My plan is to do one of them like this and to reverse the heights of the small and large platforms for the other two. The small red bits are connectors to join platforms together.

The annoying thing with these is that there aren't quite enough of the railings.

Streetlamps

there was an annoyance with this kit as well. The MDF sprue has enough parts to make up ten lamp posts, but the acrylic sprue only has nine "lamps".  There are two packs shown here. You may have counted sixteen of these with lamps, rather than eighteen. That's because the acrylic sprue that came with one pack appears to have had something wrong with the cutting template leading to two of them being unusable - I'll be emailing TT Combat about that.

I attempted a bit of object source lighting on these. I should perhaps have airbrushed a paler shade of the base colour first on the areas that would be hit by the OSL effect.

Bus Stops

Security Gates

Fast Food Stalls

Fences

There was a further annoyance with these kits (two packs again). There was clearly enough space on the sprues to make up enough connector pieces for each join as I had eight spare uprights - they could have easily replaced two of those with the cap pieces (two would fit in the space of each upright).

All the kits here are from TT Combat. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. 

Finished: SciFi Terrain

 

I finished these yesterday, but didn't get a chance to photograph them until today. I decided against weathering the generators and crates.

Shipping Containers

Yes, another six of these, doubling the size of my container park.

Crates

Small Generators

Large Generators

The small generators are from Blotz, the rest are from TT Combat.

Test Paint - Sci-Fi Building

 

With the Japanese finished and out of the way, I decided to spend some time today doing a test paint on the SciFi building I had primed yesterday. The main colours (walls, doors and roof) were airbrushed, then I did the rest by hand.

This piece is the entrance to a shopping centre, so I opted for bright colours. I quite like how they came out and will carry it through to the other sections. For the pre-fab housing I will probably go for a more neutral scheme with bright accents.