More Sci-Fi Tertrain Photos

Here are a few more photos of the 1/600 scale science fiction city, now completely finished, together with a few long-range shots of the jungle.

As you can see, the "towers emerging from the hatches" pieces became something else entirely. In thinking that they are city-sized shield projectors or point-defence systems. Or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. My old plastic and wood block-based buildings form a suburb to the left.

3mm Sci-fi Jungle

Mechas and infantry carefully pick their way through a tubetree jungle.

I wanted a suitable alien-looking jungle on the cheap. Inspired by adolescent memories of GDW's classic wargame Bloodtree Rebellion, I decided that I would do giant tubercular trees which catch water in their middles. Following C.J. Cherryh's sparse descriptions of "woolwood" in her Cyteen series, I decided I wanted the trunks to be a mass of tangled blue-grey branches.

So I bought a medium-sized loofa sponge for a dollar down at the SAARA and cut it up into chunks. I hot-glued the chunks to some old Mechwarrior cards I had lying about, then painted them black, using a fairly heavy black wash and squishing it into the sponge structure with my hands. When that dried, I dry-brushed the sponges with blue-grey. The result was the following:

I then painted the base terracota and did a tan drybrush over that.

When everything had dried, I glooped up the top upper 2/3rds of the sponge with white glue and dipped it in Woodland Scenics generic green flock. I then glooped more glue on the base and put down a layer of fine yellow flock, followed by more green flock. When that dried, I glued clumps of coarse dark green flock around the base and a layer of coarse light green flock along the top of the sponge. Finally, I laid a bead of white glue over the light green flock and dipped the top of the sponge in a tin of Gailforce 9's green summer static grass.

To finish it off, I painted the bottom of the hole in the center of the sponge blue, as if water was reflecting the sky.

Here's the result:

I made two smaller clumps like this and one big jungle piece, complete with path through the middle. Here's a top shot:

Total time taken for the project, maybe 2 hours all told, outside of drying time. Total cost, maybe 5 USD.

Big Red and Thor

Here are a couple of pictures of the House Möder-Fokker titans, Big Red and Thor.

These are Dream Pod 9 Earth Force Frames, done up as 60-foot-tall mega-walkers for my 1/600 sci-fi Furture War Commander project.

Building a 3mm Science Fiction City

Last Tuesday, I took a stroll down through the SAARA to my favorite bead and bangles shop, where I bought 20 dollars worth of wooden and plastic beads and shapes with which to build some sci-fi urban terrain for my burgeoning 3mm mecha armies.

My goal was to make suitably phallic-looking towers a la Dream Pod 9's rendition of the city of Peace River. (I was also inspired by the One More Gaming Project blog's recent Martian city.) I didn't want the buildings to be TOO detailed, as that would distract attention from the minis, but I wanted the to be more than simply painted shapes.

Anyhow, here are the results so far...

And here's a few action shows with the painted main citadel and a few city blocks. Note also the presence of Big Red, the House Möder-Fokker Titan....