More useful reposts from the old website, this time for Ground Zero Games’ Full Thrust starship game: blank datacards & ship-bits for the regular, Kra’vak & Phalon ships. These are old-school GIF/JPG bitmaps; one of these days (when we wander back into playing FT regularly) I should sit down with Inkscape and bash out some clean new SVG shipbits and datacards to use. Until that day, these’ll do. Continue reading Full Thrust Datasheets & Shipbits
Stargrunt II Blank Datacards
Another repost of useful stuff from the old site; this time it’s two decent quality scans of the Squad/Vehicle/Scenario sheet from the back of the Stargrunt II rulebook.
Sheet One is straight out of the SG2 book: one Scenario Card, one Squad Card, one Vehicle Card. Sheet Two is an edited version that looses the Scenario Card for two more Squad Cards. Click thumbnails below for full-size versions that should print cleanly.
NOTE that these cards are © Ground Zero Games; presented here with permission. Printing/copying for personal use only.
Stargrunt II Scenario, Squad & Vehicle Datacards (blank) 
Stargrunt II Data Cards – Three Squad & One Vehicle Blanks
The Seagull
In 1933, according to Popular Mechanics, there was the Seagull, which “…skims water at seventy miles an hour.”
In 28mm resin, in the present day, we have this:
Painted and lightly modified back in 2009 by myself, produced by the eccentric and excellent Tobsen77 from Germany. The paintjob is inspired equally by classic wood-and-white yachts and the gleaming metal of The Spirit of Saint Louis and other 20s/30s projects.
It still hasn’t appeared in a game, actually. One of these days it will, possibly as the one-man escape craft of a dashing-but-dastardly Leader of the Evil Conspiracy. Can’t you just picture it zooming away from a dock, leaving hapless minions and frustrated pursuers equally behind?
(My take on the Seagull has previously appeared on Lead Adventure and elsewhere, but heck, it deserves another moment to itself.)
Trebuchet!
Apparently not many people have webpages featuring working model trebuchets. Except the old version of this webpage! Transplanted and spruced up; it’s been many years since I’ve built this one (and it’s since been misplaced in a move) but the photos and story are still good, and I’ll try and update the links. Enjoy! — Brian, 12 Jan 2011.
One slow weekend, I built myself a siege engine of the ancient mold and threw rocks at the neighbours…
Actually, it wasn’t as bad as that – the beast is only about 40cm tall to the top of the frame, and the biggest rocks it throws are only maybe 8cm long. The counterweight is 4 pounds of lead fishing weights.
A trebuchet (tree-boo-shay) is a counterweight powered mechanical artillery piece, traditionally used for throwing huge rocks at castle walls or throwing dead horses over the walls. Mine is made entirely of 1×2 lumber, but the design is entirely traditional and historically accurate. The counterweight falls, pulling the far end of the arm up and over, which in turn propels the sling which actually contains the rock. The sling whips up and around, releasing when it comes over the top, sending the rock on its way. The trajectory can be changed by adjusting the sling’s release hook, on the end of the arm. The usual trajectory is fairly high and arcing, but a surprisingly flat, fast trajectory can also be achieved by careful adjustment of the hook.
Accuracy is quite good, providing you are slinging rocks of identical or similar weight. Firing the same rock, I landed 30 shots in the same 1.5m wide circular area. Range could also be quite long – firing a very small rock, one shot went over 25m, with the usual shot being around 10-15m.
The simple plans I used to build my treb used to be available on the Web from A Trebuchet Story (now sadly defunct, and possibly not in The Wayback Machine – Brian, 12 Jan 2011). These seem to be the only trebuchet plans actually available on the Web. There are loads more treb and engine site out there on the WWW – check out some of the following Trebuchet, Catapult, Siege Engine & Mechanical Artillery Links:
- Dan Becker’s Trebuchet Page is a great page with lots of photos and info on building a treb about the same size as mine. He’s also got a Toothpick Trebuchet page. (added 1 Feb 2010)
- Grey Company Trebuchet & Catapult pages: lots of information about cats, trebs, and other mechanical artillery engines, and a great Links section.
- Danish Medieval Centre: a giant trebuchet, great photos and lots of general medieval information as well.
- Hilarious article on the dead-horse & Mini -chucking treb in England: a must read!
- Castle Siegecraft and Defence: siege information, siege engines, photos.
- Codesmith’s Siege Engines Page: a group of nice diagrams & photos of a smallish trebuchet in action.
- Trebuchet.com ‘For people who like to HURL!’ Good links & information, and the Siege Engine webring.
Igor Award Recipient: Goes to my brother Corey, who acted as mad scientist’s assistant during most of the firing of this beast. (then bugged me about giving him credit until I invented the Igor Award!)
And finally, the photos – click for complete views, although not that much larger, I’m afraid.
The New Re-Launched “The Warbard”
This website is devoted to wargaming, mostly in pulp adventure, hard science fiction or fantasy settings. The rules we play include Rattrap’s .45 Adventure, Dirtside II (Ground Zero Games), Stargrunt II (GZG), Full Thrust (GZG) and Fantasy Rules! (Chipco). We’ve got house rules, Galleries of my own and other people’s pictures of miniatures & games, reviews, how-to articles, and even some free stuff you can download.
This is the slightly-belated twelfth (!) anniversary edition of my wargaming website, with new shiny WordPress-based backend that we’re slowly converting all the old content over to. (the original site was founded in November 1998 as “Brian’s Wargame Pages”… I’ve gamed with players younger than my website…) The still-relevant parts of the old website are almost all converted now; with possibly another short flurry of postings of half-forgotten things still to come.
I’ve invited my brother Corey, who I do a lot of wargaming with, to join the site and add his own material. That’s the other part of the reason for the name change – “Brian’s Wargaming Pages” just wasn’t right for a multi-person site, so we’ve gone back to the site’s domain name for a name – welcome to “The Warbard”!
We each publish our own stuff here, and if we work on a post together we’ll publish it as “The Editors” instead of under our individual names. We’ve also been known to add interjections to each other’s posts, when we want to add something.
— Brian Burger
Last updated 11 April 2011; first published 11 Jan 2011.
Gradient Backgrounds for Photography
I’ve created a number of simple colour gradient backgrounds that I’ve printed out for use in miniature photography, and recently decided to bundle the most useful of them up in a PDF and make it available.
Eight smooth gradient backgrounds included; on North American 8.5×11 paper by default, but they’re all vector-based so they should scale to whatever size paper you can print them on.
The list:
- Pale Grey
- Grey
- Dark Grey
- Black (shades to grey)
- Blue
- Sea Blue
- Blue Grey
- Tan
These backdrops MAY be used for commercial uses (photographs for a webstore or similar) but the file & printed backdrops MAY NOT be sold on any medium.
Enjoy – let me know how you’re using these, and if you have any suggestions for more colours or other expansions on this idea.
Links: General & Personal Wargaming
General & Personal Games Sites:
Update, 22 May 2011: Work has started on weeding this list. Don’t expect fast progress, but at least it’s something. This time, I went through and tagged all the Geocities URLs as Dead Links. Actual link fixing will be happening as and when I get to it – feel free to contact us if you have suggested links or want to report a new URL for a site!
Because this section has gotten so large, I’m working on some ways of reorganizing it. I don’t want to go to an alphabetical listing, and many of these sites cover a lot of different areas of the wargaming hobby, so I’m going to start organizing by “Mostly…” categories, using the (in my opinion) most prominent, interesting or best area of a site to figure out where it goes. Eg “Mostly Painting”, “Mostly Galleries”, etc etc. I’m still going to wind up with a large list of unclassified sites, but at least a rough subject sort will be possible… I’m always looking for feedback.
So far, I’ve got The Essential Wargaming Sites, General Wargaming Sites, Mostly Painting, Mostly Paper Models, Mostly Scenery & Terrain and Mostly Links.
Links: Commercial Miniatures & Terrain
INDEX: Miniatures & Rules Companies. Scenery & Misc. Companies.
Miniatures & Rules Companies:
(in alphabetical order)
Continue reading Links: Commercial Miniatures & Terrain
Links: Pulp Wargaming
Some links of interest to pulp wargamers. An ongoing project; I’ll bump it back to the top of the posts when it gets updated and expanded!
Continue reading Links: Pulp Wargaming
Terrain: 15mm Cardboard Fantasy Buildings
I put the first of these buildings – the Short Tower – up on the site sometime around 2000, and for ten years they’ve been consistently popular. I think I’ve gotten more feedback on these (and some of the other cardboard/paper stuff I have available) than on anything the website’s ever hosted.
Continue reading Terrain: 15mm Cardboard Fantasy Buildings