After building the first building to use on Infinity tables, which turned out to be a complex shape and two storeys plus roof, I decided the next building needed to be simpler and quicker to build, but still interesting.
Going through my building supplies I found a sheet of corrugated craft paper that became a feature of the new warehouse, both for the two large rolling doors and on part of the roof. The rest of the building is mattboard/picture framing card, which is cheap, easy to work with, and makes good durable buildings.
The whole warehouse is 9″ long, 5″ wide, and about 6″ to the highest point of the “sail” that divides the roof up.
More details on the picture captions below. There’s still some structural work to do on the back wall and on the roof, and a lot of detailing still to do. Paint will happen eventually, as well.
I’ve previously shown my urban scatter terrain for Infinity, and after getting that assembled I decided to tackle something more challenging and larger.
Quite a bit larger, actually. It’s a two-storey building that wound up being about 10″ long, 6″ wide and almost 7″ tall!
The building is entirely made of mat board, usually used as picture framing board. It’s good quality cardboard, easy to work with and it takes paint and glue well. Our local art supply place, Island Blue, sells the offcuts from their framing business off cheap! The roof and second storey come off to allow full access to the entire building during games, and I think I’ve managed to make the building tactically interesting for games of Infinity.
Check out the gallery below; the captions have a lot more detail.
If you’re interested in doing similar buildings for Infinity or any other skirmish game, I really like the ongoing “Cardbuilding” series of articles over on the Infinity news site Data Sphere: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, Part 4. Errhile is much more organized than I am, designing a whole system so that his buildings nest and stack for storage and reconfiguration, and he’s got lots of great techniques and ideas in his lavishly illustrated articles. I might well do some similar modular buildings, but for now it’s fun to just bust out a big, complex building — I haven’t done much terrain building recently!
James Ernest of Cheapass Games has a short video on three ways to make cards. Nothing earthshaking, but a good short video laying out three easy ways to make cards for your games.
Corrugated metal from disposable roasting pans, via Rusty Robot, which has all sorts of fantastic modelling posts. A lot of his stuff is too detailed/too fragile for wargaming, but the roasting pan thing looks like it would survive gamers if given basic respect!
I’ve gotten into Infinity recently, which is a game that uses on-table markers quite a lot. Corvus Belli has PDFs of the markers available to download and print, and the idea of using 1″ clear epoxy stickers (Youtube video link) to make tough and easy-to-handle marker tokens is inspired. (Clear epoxy stickers on EBay.ca. They’re a crafting thing originally, apparently.) I’m actually considering doing some tokens for Chain of Command up as 1″ rounds with epoxy stickers on top now too… might have to fire Inkscape up!
Also from the Infinity side of the gaming world, Toposolitario has a great website with all sorts of paper terrain and some tutorials. Great stuff and all free.
I’m mostly painting up Infinity models these days, getting ready for Trumpeter Salute at the end of March, and considering entering the 9th Lead Painter’s League over on the Lead Adventure Forum – I’ve been in the 3rd, 5th & 7th LPLs, so continuing the “every odd LPL” streak seems like a good idea. Plus it’ll be a kick in the butt to get painting again, I’ve done far too little actual figure painting in the last year or so!
Short links of interest post while I buckle down and get more cavalry painted for our Russian Civil War games — why is it that six damn horses take as much effort as two dozen infantry, anyway?
Burn In Designs do paint racks, buildings and other laser cut stuff. I rather like the vertical paint racks that minimize the footprint they take up.
Mad Mecha Guy do more lasercut stuff, this time 15mm science fiction buildings and bits. The chap behind MMG is also apparently the sculptor of Ground Zero Games’ awesome new engineering mechs.
Terrain For Hippos is an entertaining blog with loads of photo tutorials of short, straightforward terrain projects, all presented by a semi-literate cartoon hippo named “Grot”.
Speaking of painting horses, I just discovered this huge infographic JPG via DeviantArt, which goes into all the many variations of horse colour, including useful information like which colour of mane, tail or hoof is usually seen with which coat colour.
Finally, the interesting folks over at Naval & Military Press have just started their Easter Sale which means 20% off across the board on a huge and fascinating array of specialized military history titles! I’m saving this quarter’s gaming budget for Trumpeter Salute in ten days, but NMP’s booklists are always full of tempting items!
Just updated the Ground Zero Games/Dirtside II/Stargrunt II/Full Thrust Links page, which has, like some of the other resources on this site, needed updating since the early 2000s. I’ve killled off a bunch of dead links, replaced other URLs, left a few favourites with plantive notes for assistance in finding up-to-date URLs, and finally added a note to contact us if you have suggestions for new or replacement links!
Over on the excellent 15mm science-fiction focused Dropship Horizon blog, a rather startling notice that Mark, the blogowner, is planning to “bring the tyres to a halt and turn off the engines for the final time“.
The pace of posting had slowed slightly over on Dropship recently, but with interesting developments still going on in 15mm SF, it’s unfortunate to see Dropship Horizon shutting down so abruptly.
Hopefully Mark leaves Dropship up and running even if he isn’t actively posting, as his links and articles are an invaluable resource for 15mm SF gamers. Having done basically nothing with this website for quite a number of years before reviving it late in 2010, I certainly understand that people’s gaming interests wax and wane and sometimes it’s time to move on, but even a somewhat dusty resource is better than nothing — Dropship’s collected information can still help 15mm SF gamers for years, as this site was doing even during the years I was neglecting it.
Best of luck to Mark in his other gaming interests, and here’s hoping that some day in the future he relights Dropship’s engines, brings up her running lights and starts posting cool 15mm SF things again!
Another revival from the old Brian’s Wargame Pages version of the site, and one that I should have brought forward ages ago! You can see the Esquimalt Drydock on Google Maps for a sense of scale that wasn’t available ten years ago when I first posted the photos. — Brian, 22 Feb 2011
In the summer of 2001 I was roommates with a guy who worked in the drydock here in town. He turned into a real asshole after being laid off, but while he was still working he gave me a tour of the yard. I brought my camera, and these pics should inspire people looking for new industrial modern or SF scenery projects!
One thing that would be very difficult to reproduce on the gaming table, except maybe in 6mm, would be the sheer scale of the place. I didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I didn’t even try for some real area photos. The drydock itself is 1100 feet long; the two big cranes pictured below are several hundred feet tall. There were two fair-sized ships in the drydock when I was there, and they could have accomodated a third with no difficulty. And this isn’t even that big a drydock, by maritime engineering standards. The ones that can accomodate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are even bigger…
Wargamers interested in industrial scenery or future-tech industrial landscapes (Necromunda style) should find plenty of inspiration here! Even if you can’t reproduce the scale, the clutter, details and fixtures should provide some ideas.
Click any image below for a (slightly) larger view. Keep in mind these are refugees from the Old Web, when 600px wide was a Big Image.
The blue-and-yellow tower in the centre is one of the two massive cranes; this photo is also impressive for the amount of clutter visible!
One of the massive cranes alongside the drydock; the two big cranes are similar, but the details differ.
Workshops, office cubicles, supplies and random equipment and parts compete for space alongside the drydock. Great, colourful clutter for scenery ideas – lots of cover for skirmishers.
When they need to section off the drydock, the big cranes lift these huge steel bulkheads into the dock. For scale, those yellow railings along the top of the photo are about waist-high on a person.
Ships are big too – this guy is spray-painting the primer along the hull of that Russian deep-sea fishing boat. The travelling lifting-basket truck he’s working in actually looks pretty cool too.
The pale blue crane is the second very large one at the yard; the ship at centre is a Russian deep-sea fishing boat in for overhaul. Again, lots of clutter and stuff filling the place up…
The two big cranes ran on these massive railroad-style track assemblies. To give you an idea of the scale here, each of those big blue cylinders (brake machinery) are about five feet tall. (1.5m or so) These are seriously large machines….
The other crane. Made by Krupp of Germany, at least in part.
Note: These signs are Brian’s work from the old Warbard. One day they may be recreated in Inkscape and SVG — Corey
This zip file contains two very detailed, 1200dpi images in Adobe Photoshop PSD format, with lots of varied industrial & safety signs to decorate your industrial scenery and buildings.
Each image is roughly 3×3 inches. Print onto standard paper – or the lightest paper your printer can handle – and cut out and glue onto your scenery. A few of these on a nice piece of industrial machinery or factory wall really make a piece ‘pop’ – after all, real industrial sites tend to be plastered with signs, notices and warnings. (The actual images are MUCH more detailed than the little sample image here!)
As usual, these are free to download, print or modify for personal use.
Update, 8 Aug 2020: I’ve just confirmed that these old (from sometime in 2001!) PSD files can be opened just fine in the current version of GIMP. Not bad for files nearly twenty years old!
15mm science fiction (Stargrunt II, specifically) was one of my starting places in miniature wargaming; I don’t do much these days but I still have all my figures and I still keep an eye on the field. These are great days for 15mm SF gaming, with a bunch of new companies involved with rapidly expanding ranges, as well as new stuff from established companies like Ground Zero Games.
I used to maintain a long page of companies involved in 15mm SF – many people still link to it, so you might have followed a link expecting to find it, but I’m no longer as heavily involved in that scale & genre as I once was, so I’m going to refer you to Dropship Horizon instead. Dropship is an excellent blog devoted almost exclusively to 15mm science fiction gaming, and even better, on one of their right-hand sidebars they have a long list of 15mm Sci Fi Manufacturers!
Dropship also has news and reviews of the latest and shiniest stuff from those manufacturers, some neat projects of his own, and a good group of commentators to boot. Go check it out!
