Tag Archives: science fiction

Infinity Space Station Hangar Walls

I’ve posted a test print of some printed space station walls previously but after finding a nice batch of Sintra (1/8th foamed PVC plastic board) in the offcuts bin at my useful local plastic supplier I decided to start that project with some larger, more space-consuming pieces and started building a set of six big wall modules.

These are 12″ long, 6″ high, and designed as hangar or cargo bay walls. Six of them plus a couple of pillars will allow me to section off a 2′ by 2′ area of table, run a line of wall clear across the table, or do a number of other interesting arrangements. I’ll also do a few end-cap pillars so we can have stub walls if desired.

The design incorporates an “access tunnel” across the top of each wall that is 30mm wide and 30mm deep; there will be hatchways on each wall module to access it. I wanted to provide alternate ways of getting around the table and give players options for moving through the walls aside from the doors. Similarly, each module except the one with one single huge 6″x4″ door has at least two doors in it. Doors are always going to be chokepoints in scenery like this, there’s no avoiding that, but at least with multiple doors and hatchways per module that effect is somewhat limited.

Basic construction is done on five of the six modules; the sixth is going to be a variant of the very first, with a huge 6″x4″ door in it. All of the large doorways will have built-in sliding doors installed, and I’m planning some freestanding doors on small stands for the human-sized doors. After that it’ll be on to the more human-scaled portions of the space station terrain, but this is a good start!

Review: Impudent Mortal Near Future Elevators

I picked up a pack of Impudent Mortal’s Near Future Elevator Set, as mentioned in a previous post, and thought I’d put a few pictures up and do a bit of a review.

First, I have to say that Walt, the man behind Impudent Mortal, is awesome to deal with. He’s incredibly quick to reply to emails, worked with me to figure out the best way to ship his stuff to Canada (the US Postal Service having recently cranked it’s foreign rates to moderately silly levels) and I look forward to doing more business with him and his company in the future!

So on to the elevators. They’re laser cut from a mix of 3mm MDF and 1/16th cardboard (greyboard), which gives them some nice details and makes them slightly finer-grained than some of the scenery out there that just uses MDF. The base, walls, and door frames are MDF, while the doors are layered cardboard and card is used for details on the interior walls and floor as well as around the door frame.

Each elevator — you get two in the pack — is 3.75″ wide across the doors, 3.5″ long, and 2 1/8″ tall. There’s 11 pieces of MDF total and about 28 total pieces of greyboard, that count being inflated by the fact that the grilles that detail the floor are all separate pieces, 16 of them.

There are also eight small control panels of laser cut acrylic, which go in the openings on either side of the doors. They’re not visible in any of my photos because I haven’t installed them yet; they’ll go in dead last after I’m finished all painting and weathering.

Everything fits together with the ease we’ve come to expect from laser cut scenery, and while most pieces are pretty obvious in their placement and function, dry-fitting and testing as you go (before applying glue!) is always advised.

The doors slide in and out of the door frames vertically and fit very well, loose enough to actually move but snug enough not to fall out while transporting or handling the piece. Each door is three pieces of cardboard, so it has details on both the inside and outside and they’re reversible, which is nice.

One thing I couldn’t initially find on the IM site is the actual instructions for these elevators; turns out they’re tucked into the ITS and Paradiso Scatter Terrain Instructions PDF as that was the set they were originally part of.

I’ll post more pictures on a future post once I’ve gotten some paint on my elevators. Two is probably enough for any single tabletop so I’m not sure I’ll order more, but I’m very pleased with them; they’re unique cover items for an Infinity table and provide more options and opportunity than the classic packing crate or cargo container. They’ll look great as scatter on the space station terrain I’ve been working on!

If IM ever decide to do more of this style of terrain, the sort of thing you might find in a space station or cargo facility, I’d be very interested.

The Dropship Drops Out?

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!

(I guess this means I should update, refurbish and republish my mothballed list of 15mm SF miniatures companies, just in case Dropship does go entirely offline!)

15mm Science Fiction Sources

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!