Drop Ship XVIII

So today I finished the mounts for each of the turrets and weapon systems. I'm using Old Crow 15mm and 6mm turrets for this, and I brought all of the elements of the Drop ship together for a couple of pictures.

I only have engines and mounts and tail fin for one side of the ship (as I have yet to cast the others), hence the slightly artistic angles to try and get a representation of what this will be like when finished.


On top of the ship you can see a rear missile turret for air to air defence during the descent. On the froward port mount is a radar array.


Here you can see the under mounted forward turret - a 6mm Old Crow Turret - used for anti personnel defence duties while the ship is grounded. Also visible is the forward port 'tube' in which i was originally going to mount forward pointing machine guns for ground clearance - I think now these will house forward firing Air to Ground Missiles instead.


Finally a close up of the forward and aft undermounted turrets. You can also see the rectangular areas that need to house the undercarriage/struts which I have still to complete, and at the moment are giving me a headache as I can't get a design that i both like, and i can cast to recreate...


The big thing I've noticed now that I have all this assembled is the very large windscreen. It's in keeping with the windshield on the old crow gecko and goanna vehicles which was its inspiration, but now I look at it and can't help but thinking "That's one hell of a lot of glass!" Especially given that this craft needs to dive through the atmosphere. Its also a large expanse without any detailing on it and I'm not sure it fits with the rest of the vehicle...

Ho Hum... wonder what I can do about that then?

As always, comments and criticism are welcomed

Drop Ship XVII

I thought it was about time I resurrected my Grymn Dropship project. I ran out of steam on it last year and I've been meaning to get back to it. But then if I actually finished a project I'd have to change this Blog's tag line.

I left this project having built three different versions of the engines and decided that the most popular one was good but too long. Well, today i roughed out what I hope is the the final engine.



There's still a fair amount of cleaning up and light sanding to do to get everything smooth enough to cast, and I may add a few more detailing elements. The blue end is the front.


The gear which allows the engine to be posed on the final model is shown assembled to the engine.


As this comparison shows, the construction is the same as the previous engine design but around 12mm shorter which makes it match the squat nature of the drop ship body better. I may cast both so there is a choice to assemble the drop ship with either engine type or a mix of the two.

New/Old Sci-fi vehicles.

I just saw that Mirliton are re-releasing some 28mm sized (28mm is a size not a scale) resin sci-fi vehicles. I've not seen these before, but apparently they are old Grenadier resin models. I assume that these came from Grenadier US as I never saw them in the UK back in the day.

The three better ones I think are these.




As some of you will know, I have a pathological hatred of walkers and giant Robots (I'm an engineer and a phycisist so i can't suspend my disbelief enough to make them viable or efficient) so I haven't included that one here, but i know some of you will love this...


I'm thinking that the second and third models might make reasonable partners to :

Do you think he'll notice? - II

This is a better picture of my Diorama of Doom IV entry with my digital camera rather than my phone. I'm also playing around with different composition and layout on the base. As the title suggests its important that something is out of sight of one of the miniatures!


A couple of people asked me how the lift fans were made.

I was going to make them by cutting the centres out of two 30mm lipped bases and glueing them back to back, then adding overlapping triangles of thin plasticard in the centre. I mentioned this on the Forum of Doom a while ago, and my mate Inso pointed me at these Evil Mushroom Games products. It looks like Evil Mushroom games had exactly the same idea as me and are casting and selling them, so I bought 4 from them.

Having got them though I'm a bit disappointed. There are plenty of surface defects and bubbles in them - you'll see I had to fill the surface with squadron green putty and sand it back - twice. I hope to disguise any other defects with the paint. Fingers crossed!

I may have been better making my own lift fans after-all.

ABC Warriors

I was in conversation with a few fellow 2000AD ABC Warriors fans a few months ago. The discussion revolved around the ABC warriors already created by Wargames Foundry.

I have all the Foundry figures thanks to a half price sale last year, but haven't got round to painting them yet (surprisingly!). Two of the major hurdles were that Foundry Never produced figures for Happy Shrapnel or Mongrol.

I was just browsing TableTop Gaming News and saw an article for Rattrap Productions who are now making this:


If that's not Happy Sharpnel then its his identical twin brother! [ok, so we may need to add some putty to make the robot beard!)

I lost the emails for the people I was discussing this with, so I'm putting it up here in case they missed it!

The best options for a Mongrol figure I think remains something like this for the body and limbs (A rackham At-43 figure)


With the hands and head from this Alpha Forge Wardroid figure.


You'd have to model the lower jaw from scratch though i think.