All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.
Historicals, Painting, Terrain, WW2 Naval

The Workbench This Week, 7 January 2026

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A bit of 1/1200 naval action this week, as well as the usual random stuff lurking around the edges of the bench!

Aziz, Light!

Over the holidays I finally got around to something I’ve been wanting to do for several years, install more lighting over my hobby bench. I’ve got a pair of Ikea task lamps on either front corner of the bench each with a big daylight-balanced (4000K or so) bulb in them, and OK overhead lighting, but middle aged eyes need more light so I finally got around to installing a bunch of daylight LED strip lighting. Four feet of it, cut into a pair of two foot strips. Lee Valley has all the stuff to make this pretty easy, if you’re lucky enough to have an LV nearby. Ikea does too but their stuff is pricier and less flexible. The LED tape light is 120 LEDs per meter (30 per foot, nominally) so they give nice dense even task lighting.

LED tape being set up on my kitchen counter. It’s all 12V after the little transformer box in the foreground, so it’s easy and safe to work on if you have very basic electrical skills! Also, very very bright. Very. Would have made Aziz’s job so much easier…

On the Workbench

The new light strips can actually be seen reflected in the gloss varnish on the two harbour pieces below!

The workbench! Details in text, but yes, that’s a sea serpent in the centre.

On the actual workbench, two harbour pieces and a shore battery for 1/1200 boat games. With three coats of gloss varnish the harbour bits are done, and there’s just a bit of detail and cleanup to do on the shore battery.

On the right on painting sticks is a batch of 1/1200 boats a good friend 3d resin printed for me sometime last year, or possibly late 2024. There’s a pair of big Liberty ship freighters, a pair of little coastal freighters, three Tribal class Royal Navy destroyers, and a batch of eight German Siebel ferries – one gun platform version and seven with various vehicle loadouts on the decks. The two round bases are another coastal freighter that I cut in half to make a pair of wreck markers, one of which is blowing up real good as it sinks.

Yes, that is a sea serpent in the middle, a gloriously goofy sculpt from Footsore’s Harrowhyrst line sculpted by the incredibly talented Trish Carden (follow her on BSky, she’s awesome). I’m not sure it’ll ever appear in a naval game, but I might set the serpent up on the edge of the table just to worry the players…

Also some of the usual random clutter, like a base of 28mm chickens and another of ducks tucked in behind the lineup of vessels…

Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

More Boating About In Mess

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Back on the WW2 fast boat thing for a start to 2026! Sometime in mid-2025 over on Bluesky I ran across Thomas Brandsetter’s early draft Torpedoes & Tides system and he was kind enough to send send us the draft rules privately. We only got one game of the system done in 2025 and didn’t really have any playtest notes to send back to Thomas, but I really like the system he’s written, a very clean adaptation of Ganesha Games’ existing Galleys & Galleons rules.

Dog boats trying to stop an E-boat sortie from Le Havre. Another playtest of what is now officially going to be a standalone Ganesha Games ruleset. This is very exciting for me, as GG is one of my favourite rules publishers. #navalwargaming

— Thomas Brandstetter (@thomasbrandstetter.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T15:38:32.661Z

All this inspired me to dust off some long-neglected things and start a couple of new ones. The last full size 1/1200 coastal module I did, back in December 2023, saw me speculating about “maybe a coastal gun battery” and it’s been back of mind ever since, so I got started on that, a simple clifftop battery somewhere along the coast of Occupied Europe inspired by some of the simpler batteries – just two open gun pits and a small cluster of supporting bunkers.

This shoreline piece isn’t designed to pair up with my existing coastline pieces, it’s a standalone corner bit. The gun pits are built up out of sheet styrene, the various bunker roofs are scrap styrene, the cliff is pink styrofoam insulation, and the whole thing is based on my usual 1mm styrene card. The two back sides of the triangular piece are about 4″ long.

Early construction. Styrofoam landform shaped with knife and sandpaper, styrene card for the emplacements.
Clifftop level view of the early construction.
Paint and more construction; the bunkers are all just tiny rectangles of styrene.
More paint and flock. Still want to do some more flock up top, guns in the two emplacements, and a bit more paint on the water.

While I was cutting styrene bases I pulled out the Brigade Models Harbour Walls I’ve had in the Pile of Opportunity since sometime in 2020 and set up a pair of simple harbour walls sticking out to sea, as seen many places along the European coasts. Absolutely nothing fancy, just 1mm styrene and the cast metal Brigade walls. Still in progress, the walls need more paint and the sea will get gloss varnish and waves. The smaller piece with the right-angle breakwater is about 6″ x 3″ and the larger multi-angle harbour is about 7″ x 4″.

Smaller harbour piece.
Larger harbour piece.

There’s also various other things going on, including a whole new batch of ships a friend 3d printed in resin for me over a year ago that I’ve finally primed, but more on those when there’s progress to show off!

Misc, WW2 Naval

Still Around!

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Yikes, last post in April! Swear I’m still breathing and gaming, though not as much as some years.

Just had a fun little game of WW2 fast boats using Thomas Brandsetter’s early draft Torpedoes & Tides rules (more here) which are based on/inspired by Ganesha Games Galleys & Galleons rules. T&T is quite a bit faster and lighter than even the TFL-published Coastal Patrol that we’ve been mostly using, but the rules look like they’ll have good flavour between vessel types and they certain capture the chaos and split-second decisions that characterize fast-boat combat.

Screenshot of some in-progress updated naval markers, Dec 2025.

Accordingly, I’ve been updating the various naval marker products I’ve published here over the years and will likely consolidate everything into a single big PDF – blinds, condition and tactical markers, star shell burst markers, etc. It helps that multi-page file handling is now fully mature in Inkscape and incredibly easy to use.

Hope the holiday season is being kind to you and yours, and here’s to a bit more activity around here in 2026!

Galleries, Painting, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Six

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The last of this project’s posts until I can show off the painting work in progress photos and all the extra finished photos I didn’t use for the Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025!

There was a bunch of pre-priming sanding, puttying and fiddling. The side walls of the fuselage pulled slightly skew during construction somehow, so the side rails that hold the roof panel in place had to be custom-fitted on each side.

The shuttle, complete except for landing gear and roof rails, front quarter view.
Rear view of the shuttle, with some final glueup of one of the rear baffle panels in progress.
Top view, showing the engraved panel lines in the wings nicely.
PRIMER! Here’s the underside, complete except for landing gear, all primered.
Primer, top view, with the already finished, painted, and decaled cargo bay masked off.
Proper supervision is essential to all well run projects. Sophie la Floof spent quite a bit of time on the rug under my project bench making sure things went smoothly.

The landing gear only went on after painting, decals, and weathering were all done, so I don’t have any photos of that to show off yet.

By the time this posts audience voting on Build Something Contest 2025 should have started over on Lead Adventure! Go check out all the great entries! BSC rules say no sharing WIP or finished painted pictures until either the contest is over or you’re eliminated from it, so there will be a bit of a pause in shuttle pix here, but I do have a gallery fully of painting photos to show eventually.

Galleries, Painting, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Ancillary Stuff…

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If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do is a saying that floats around. It’s often true that when you’re in a certain creative groove, you can spin off other projects much faster than you might otherwise get to them!

That proved the case while I was deep in building the large and complex shuttle/dropship for my Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025 entry.

I had extra plastic kits parts around from the 1/72 LeClerc MBT kit I bought to pillage for kitbashing parts, I had some rather cool pieces of offcut styrene around, and I wanted a landing pad to stage photos of the shuttle on, so it all came together in a trio of related projects.

The Drone

This started life with the top of the LeClerc turret, the cap off an Angosturna bitters bottle rescued from the recycle bin, some googly eyes and other bits from the dollar store, and various styrene bits.

The angosGMBH Distraction-class Autonomous Sensor Drone is set up for planetary and space surveying and exploration, with various sensor loadouts depending on mission. No crew space is available, although the tiny cargo/sample bay on the port side could accommodate a human-sized sophont in a space suit for a very short, very uncomfortable ride, if it hasn’t been adapted into a drone bay for auxiliary sub-drones. Some Distraction-class are themselves autonomous intelligent citizen-drones, although most have only limited-ML minds, and some platforms are old-fashioned remotely operated vehicles.

The drone went together in a single evening and was primed and painted the next day. I got zero photos of it in raw styrene.

Drone primed, side/top view.
Primed, underside view.
Primed, rear quarter view.
Paint in progress.
Paint in progress.
Paint finished, no decals or weathering yet.
Side profile with paint finished.

The Distraction-class has since been decaled and weathered; I’ll try to remember to get some proper finished photos of it soon and post them.

The Sensor/Comms Tower

This started with the increasing amount of styrene offcuts piling up around the edges of my workbench. Many of them were too large and too interesting in shape to just throw away, so I started fiddling around while waiting for solvent cement to cure on the shuttle and built this little tower in a couple of evenings.

It’s about 5″ tall to the top of the actual tower. The side profile is the offcuts from the nose skin of the shuttle, the various circles and hexagons are from building the docking port in the roof of the shuttle. The rest of the thing are either random offcuts from shuttle building or just stuff from my raw materials stash.

The tower, front view, bare styrene.
The tower, rear view, in bare styrene.

The Landing Pad

This is from the last big piece of 1/8″ foamed PVC in my stash; I’m going to have to go get more from our local signmaking/plastic supply shop because it’s wonderful to work with. Stronger, cleaner, and easier to cut than foamcore, it can be embossed and engraved easily and cleanly, and it’s less murderous on knives too.

The whole thing is 12 inches by 12 inches, assembled from two 12×6 pieces with some connection strips underneath. It got grey primered, then a messy dampbrush/drybrush combo of various tans and greys over that, followed by a few washes in black, grey, and dark blue. There’s expansion cracks engraved right into the PVC, and after the main paint had dried I did a couple of marking lines with tape and a stippling brush in white and bright yellow-green. (Reaper’s Dungeon Slime paint. Highly recommended if you want an obnoxiously bright hazard warning colour!)

I also did a low wall piece with PVC offcuts. It’s 10″ long and about half an inch high. It got the same paint as the pad, with the top third or so painted white when I did the pavement markings on the pad.

Primed and waiting for paint.
Painted and marking lines done. Nice and simple, just a few minutes work over a couple of days. Painted wall piece off to the right.
The mostly-complete shuttle posing on the finished landing pad.

I’ve got a few final complete primered shuttle photos to show off soon, and after the Build Something Contest rules allow, I have a bunch of painting progress photos to post. The shuttle was a big painting project and painting took most of March and the first week of April!

Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Five

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The long-overdue fifth installment of my Build Something Contest blog posts! This one takes us from the end of Part Four, where we had the start of detail panels, no wings yet, and the cargo bay just primed.

Per BSC rules I can’t share WIP or finished painted photos yet, so there’s still going to be gaps in this build log. I have a bunch of WIP paint photos taken and will share them when the contest has begun.

Feb 22 – the underside gets detail panels.
Feb 22 – underside detail panels, looking aft.
22 Feb – the engine pod assembly begins.
22 Feb – layout of the two wings on 1mm styrene sheet.
22 Feb – engine and wing subassembly taped in place on the fuselage.
22 Feb – wings taped to fuselage.
22 Feb – wings temporarily mounted to fuselage, overhead view.
24 Feb – wings and engine pod details.. Front view, showing the intake grilles.
24 Feb – wing and engine subassembly, rear view with jet/rocket nozzles.
24 Feb – another view of the rear of the engine pods.
2 March – putty work on the engines and wings.
3 March – putty and test fit of roof and wings on the fuselage.
3 March – decal sheets assembled. There are almost three dozen decals in the cargo bay and another twenty or so on the outside of the finished shuttle.
9 March – final test fit of the wing/engine subassemblies
9 March – the wings get the vertical stabilizers added.
9 March – rear ramp view with detail panels on the insides of the rear fuselage extensions.
9 March – the wings finally get glued on! Major construction is finished, on to priming and painting!

Along the way while finishing the shuttle, I built a 12″x12″ landing pad as a photo prop and gaming scenery, a small ‘drone’ using some of the LeClerc MBT parts that hadn’t be used in the shuttle build, and a 6″ tall sensor tower that used up a bunch of the offcut styrene from the shuttle that was too interesting to just throw away. I’ll share photos of them in another post.

Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Four

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Another photo dump of the last ten days or so progress on my Build Something Contest 2025 entry. My LAF project thread is getting much more regular updates (new photos every other day or so at this point) if you want to follow along!

As of the last blog post the nose had been skinned but not much else. Since then I’ve tried several designs for the wings, disliked every single one of them, built and detailed the removable roof for the cargo bay, and started doing detail panels on the nose.

Check the captions of the photos below for more details.

Engine/wing mockup in cardstock. This is the second, smaller, angular wing.
Second wing in place, with the first bigger slab-like wing on the cutting mat. Still not happy with either design, so I left the wings alone to do other stuff for a bit!
One of the wing mockups taped in place alongside the open cargo bay.
The underside, showing the three landing gear bays and the un-skinned belly.
Primer! I’m going to be painting the cargo bay before gluing the rear bulkhead & ramp in place, so it got primed.
Rear ramp deployed, couple of 28mm figures hanging out for scale.
Wider view of the rear bulkhead & ramp with the whole shuttle propped up to about the height it’ll sit on it’s landing gear.
The ceiling of the cargo bay all detailed.
Roof! The start of the removable roof of the cargo bay.
The top of the roof, with the docking port/escape hatch detailed. It’s recessed into the roof.
The roof in place, looking foward toward the nose of the shuttle.
Detail panels in 0.5mm styrene being installed. When installing across a bend like this, much easier to glue one side down, let the solvent glue cure, then do the other side across the bend!
Second detail panel installation, side view.

The belly skin will be installed today, and then I’ll be able to carry the detail panels aft from the nose, down the belly, and around the landing gear bays.

I’ve also (finally) started building the actual landing gear, because I need to set the height of that before I can make some detailing decisions for the underside of the beast.

Then it’ll be back to the engine & wing subassemblies, where I have a third wing planoform I want to try out that I think will work better than attempts 1 and 2!

Galleries, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Three

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Decided to go with the nose next instead of the wings and engines, and as predicted in my last post, it required a lot of mockup work, in two stages.

First, I did an internal frame to establish the basic proportions of the nose and give me a nice solid frame to hang the skin from.

I redid parts of the skin mockup three times, including scrapping round three for part of the sides and going back to round two’s ideas. The advantage of all of the fiddling with cardstock and masking tape, of course, is that I knew what I was doing (mostly) when I switched to 1mm sheet styrene and started the real thing.

I also cut back the outer (top/bottom) corners of the sides where they extended forward, and that was the right call, it made integrating the nose and sides easier.

The hammerhead nose was a spur of the moment idea while planning the first mockup piece and I really like how it’s come together; the hammerhead let me play with the angles and bulk of the nose area more than a more straightforward taper would have.

Mockup for the nose frame.
Nose frame finished in 1mm styrene. I wound up cutting most of the long thin brace on the outer side off, but all the internal bracing gave me a nice solid, trouble-free start to doing the skin.
Finished nose frame. The whole beast is just under 11 inches long, nose to back end, which is perfect.
Closeup of the top left with skin mockups in progress.
Nose skin mockup in progress, figuring out what to do between the hammerheads and the start of the body/sides.
The underside of the nose, mockups in progress.
Finally cutting styrene! The big panel behind the hammerheads has a twist to it, so it got anchored down with elastic bands and left for the plastic cement to cure for a bit.
Styrene skin in place, sanding and puttying cleanup started. There is going to be a LOT of sanding.
Current state of the nose, with putty smeared around a lot of the seams and sanding in progress.

I really like how the whole thing is shaping up, it has a good bulky angular look to it. There’s going to be a round of detail panels over this initial skin, after the endless sanding and puttying is done – some of the seams didn’t come out quite as well fitted as I’d like, so there’s going to be some remediation before detailing can start!

Still to do, in rough order of size/complexity of the subassembly: the engine pods and wings; the roof for the cargo bay; landing gear and landing gear bay doors; skin on the belly.

I’m away this coming long weekend and have some things to get organized before we go away for the long weekend, and as mentioned, the next while is likely to be mostly sanding, so it might be ten days or so before there’s another blog-worthy update to this project!

My Build Something Contest 2025 thread on LAF is here; the rest of the contest has some very cool entries – there’s another couple of shuttles or dropships, some neat magical walking constructs, and a bunch of other cool concepts among the other contestants! Entries just closed on February 8th so everyone who’s in for this year is in!

Science Fiction, Terrain, Tutorials

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle Part 2

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Progress on my Build Something Contest 2025 entry, the small shuttle.

Some of these photos have shown up on my Lead Adventure Forum BSC thread but others are original here. Captions have more details.

Mocking up the sides with light card. I didn’t get a photo but there’s three pieces under each of the big side panels to give strength.
Mockup stage showing the in-progress underside of the shuttle.
Local supervisor hard at work.
Styrene sides cut and installed, with the angular extensions at the back.
Designing the initial panel of the rear bulkhead.
Never enough clamps. Or clothes pins in this case. Adding bulk to the underside of the extension on top of the rear bulkhead.
Rear bulkhead and ramp complete and detailed, outside view.
Rear bulkhead and ramp, inside view.
Rear bulkhead and ramp dry fitted to the body. I won’t be gluing the subassembly in until quite late to make painting the interior easier.
Rear subassembly dry fitted, outside view. There will be small panels in each lower corner to cover the groove the ramp hinge pin rides in, and detail panels on the insides of the fuselage extensions.

Very pleased with progress so far. Up next will be either the engine/wing subassemblies on either side, or the nose, depending on my mood. Both are going to require more cardstock mockups, especially figuring out how the nose is going to join up to the front of the current body assembly…

Science Fiction

Build Something Contest 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle Begins

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As mentioned last post, I’m in the Lead Adventure Forum’s Build Something Contest 2025. I’ve entered a few over the decades, finished my entries in even fewer, and ever gotten out of the first round of voting, so we shall see, but it’s always a great contest to watch even if you aren’t participating.

My BSC2025 thread is here; the entire BSC sub-forum with every other entry is here. It’s day one, there’s not a lot there yet, but some very talented people have been making some very cool plans!

Photos to date below – today (Sat 1 Feb) I got the floor and three main walls of the cargo bay built and assembled. Engines and landing gear next, then figuring out how the actual skin of the shuttle is going to cover all this stuff!

One of the classic sources of kitbashing/scratchbuilding detail parts – a 1/72 MBT, in this case a Tamiya LeClerc. Also at the top of the photo, half-round pearls from the dollar store, because you can never have enough dome shapes for sci-fi building!
Also from the dollar store, an entire baggie of googly eyes. Some of these might well wind up as actual eyes in silly places, but a bunch of them are just going to be interesting shapes for kitbashing.
Cargo bay floor. LeClerc track pieces for detail.
The assembled cargo bay. The side walls need at least one more round of detailing!
Cargo bay, showing the other side wall.
Wider workbench shot.

The main thing now is going to be maintaining momentum and not getting bogged down in overthinking this damn thing. Onward!