Avast Behind! or The Saucy Sue Sets Sail

Dave Graffam produces a nice range of card buildings for printing out and building. They use layers in the pdf so you can customise them and produce quite a variety of models from just the one download. At no more than $5 per pdf that makes them very good value, although you do need to factor in ink and card costs.

Anyway, I was browsing his stuff at Wargame Vault last night looking for some cheap retail therapy when I spotted his Patrol Boat model, which looked interesting. Then I spotted his Abandoned Wagon model. Well, that was it. Three quid for two models with many uses. I was sold.

Better yet, I could combine the two models. Steve has been talking about playing a Lacepunk game set on a lost continent in the mid-eighteenth century for some time now. I admit that I too have talked this one up. It sounds like fun to me. One of the ideas with this world is that it has a vast flat plain at its centre and the denizens thereof use landships to get around. Naturally, my group in the game will need their own wheels, so here is the Saucy Sue. She is a small cutter-like vessel, being swift and manoeuvrable but with not much room for crew. The next question that we need to answer is whether to raise the jolly roger or not.

The Church What I Built

Those of you that read my other blog, Talomir Tales, will already have seen my newest completed terrain. This post is for the rest of you. I have spent rather longer than I ought on building a set for the latest Warrior Heroes: Armies and Adventures game that we played, but I reckon it was worth it. The game consisted of Steve's character, Brother Cedric, getting into the church and then into the crypts followed by the undercrypt and then finally the denouement in the chambers under the undercrypt. You can read the battle report over on Talomir Tales, so here is just some of the eye candy. More pictures can be found in my Photobucket album. The whole lot is built using Worldworks Games card terrain. Click the pics for larger images.

The Church of St Lindorf


Some of the expensive stained glass windows


The upper level of the church



Ground floor of the church


Beneath the church lies the crypt


Beneath the crypt lies the undercrypt



Beneath the undercrypt lies under the undercrypt


"At last we meet, Brother Cedric. I have been expecting you."

Shrike and Shuttle Models

I've not done any painting in a couple of weeks now. Life seems to be driving me in other directions. However, I have also not bought anything, so I guess that means I have broken even overall. However, I did print out a couple of card models that I bought some time back as pdfs from Ebbles Miniatures, and I have now built them. Ebbles Miniatures sells a variety of downloadable pdf buildings, terrain items and vehicles and I have bought a few in the past. The prices suit me nicely and give me the chance to print out as much as I need for my games. The first model I built was this TA160 Shrike Transatmospheric Fighter (click the pictures for larger versions):


I now see from the picture that I forget to edge part of the base so there is an ugly white line showing. This is not actually as visible in real life as it is in the photo. The pdf is scaled to 15mm, but a 28mm version is also available. What you get when you buy the download is a zip file with instructions for building the kit, a pdf for the display stand and eight colour variants of the Shrike. This means that you could have eight different versions of the model without doing any editing for yourself. Woohoo! Of course, you could always drop the file into Photoshop and add your own touches if you are that way inclined.

The model itself consists of three pieces: upper body, lower body and wing structure. The wing is very easy to put together, while the upper and lower body are not difficult but do require a little care to get them to the right shape. Overall I am pleased with this model and I shall produce a couple more to provide air support for my 15mm Bwendi army.

The second model was a 28mm Utility Shuttle (apologies for the poor lighting on this one):


The utility shuttle is a neat little piece that measures approximately 4.5" long by 4" wide (110mm by 100mm). It has more parts to it than the Shrike but is not really any more difficult to build. The parts are: nose cone, central fuselage, rear fuselage, two engine pods, two skids and two landing skid supports. All of these are simple to fold together but I found that the fuselage sections did not want to sit exactly flush with each other. You can see the joins where I have edged them in black. As with the white line on the Shrike, these are not as obviously visible in real life.

The zip file for the shuttle contains three named shuttles and eight coloured shuttles, as well as a landing pad tile and the instructions. In the photo above, I have glued the landing pad tile to a WorldWorksGames concrete tile from their Urban Mayhem sets so that the landing pad will fit my other card terrain sets. I think it needs blast walls on three sides and a few more shuttles so that I can make a small spaceport set for our games.

Although the shuttle is designed for 28mm, it has no features on it that fix it to that scale. For this reason, although I do plan to use the shuttle for our 28mm games, it may well feature in our 15mm games as a dropship. It certainly looks about the right size to deliver an APC and its troops into the battle, so the Bwendi army now has near earth orbit delivery capability. If I wanted a 15mm version of it, it would be simple enough to print it at 60% size and my 15mm troops could have their own utility shuttles. There are no complex folds in the set that would make producing it at 60% scale difficult or impossible.

Overall I am very happy with both of these models, which I built while sitting watching TV with my wife and drinking wine. Admittedly the wine may have resulted in some less than careful building, but the finished products do not look much the worse for that and the brownie points scored for not hiding in my man-cave are worth it.