Golum

The Golum were a range that never quite made it out in time before FASA and the Vor The Maelstrom game ceased to be. Luckily I was able to get a few of these Golum prototype models, a few of which have been painted up for use in various sci-fi games.

In my latest Rogue Stars crew, I decided to do a non-human line up so I could try out various skills and abilities. This Golum was basically a heavily armoured trooper with some built in weapons.

Aeroneff Landing Station

With the recent reasonably nice weather, the mass undercoating of models is well underway of all those models put together over the winter. This has allowed me to finish some of the larger projects which have been taking up a lot of room. One of the biggest is the Aeroneff Landing Station for the flying machine I built a few years ago.

So now, even if I don’t get to use the Aeroneff in a game as a flying fighting machine, I can still use it as terrain.

Most of it has just been painted with good old Halfords primer, red, grey and black. Then just picking out some detail and a bit of drybrushing.

The walkways, raised base and lamp posts are all from TT Combat.

The plan is for this to form a part of a large port complex with several warehouses and a large crane (also recently undercoated). Courtesy of Mr Steinberg, I also have some railway tracks which will be incorporated into the layout.

Top Gun Maverick

Maverick “Top Gun” Vinales wins the Losail MotoGP after a great battle with Andrea Dovizioso. Rossi somehow dug a third place from a weekend where he struggled.

It will be a good year for the racing.

MotoGP Is Back!

MotoGP returns this weekend, can’t wait for the first race on Sunday evening from Losail. It has been a long winter with no racing to watch, drives me nuts!

New kid to watch this year is Maverick Vinales on the M1 Yamaha, he has just moved to the works Yamaha team and has been fasted in just about every test session over the last few months.

Championship contender? We will see after a few more races, but I reckon so.

On The Seven Seas

So, we tried out On The Seven Seas last night for the first time.

It was disappointing. It is a game that I do not think we will be returning to. The basic concept of Greed versus Fear sounded quite good, the side with the higher Greed value goes first and if a crews Fear gets too high then they lose.

However, the model and weapon profiles meant that combat was not a very satisfying experience.

It is recommended that a 6′ by 4′ table is used. Models on foot move at 4″ per turn. Basic muskets have a range of 8″. Pistols have a range of a mere 2″. So the first who-knows-how-many turns are just movement. Zzzzzz.

When you do get in range to shoot at an opponent, you need a D10 roll of 10 to hit. A roll or 8 or 9 causes a Fall Back, which just means moving back by 1″.

Close combat is a bit better but not by much. Each player rolls a dice, if a player beats the other by 4 or more, he wins and the opponent is removed as a casualty.

The models don’t really have a profile to speak of. There is no damage roll but some models apparently get a saving throw, but we could not find what the roll was or who gets it.

Anyway, this book is going on the shelf. Cutlass is a much better game.

In two weeks we will give Legends Of The High Seas a go. After that, I need to get Mr Steinberg to have a go with my No Quarter Naval Battles rules.

Aberrant Hammerer

A good friend at Aberrant Games very nicely let me have a few Rezolution CSO robot models for my Steam Wars Mechanica force.

These are CSO Hammerer MIU (Mechanized Infantry Units) models which I will be using as medium support of the Mechanica infantry. I did a bit of trimming of one arm and attached the cannon at the elbow.

Cutlass Games

Finally got to have a couple of pirate games, the first of which was with the Cutlass rules.

My first outing was with a Royal Navy crew, mostly armed with muskets and bayonets, but the second game was with a motley crew of swashbuckling rum swilling pirates.

A Royal Navy crew is all well and good, but all of the soldiers are armed the same, not a lot of room for variety. A pirate crew is much more fun as they can all be individually equipped with what ever they are modeled with.

The leader of my merry pirate crew is a great Ron And Bones model, Hank Blackheart, complete with an odd looking critter on his hat.

As you can see from the pictures, we use white counters to record a fired weapon, a puff of smoke to signify that the model needs to use an action to reload a weapon.

Cutlass does have an odd activation system, too complicated to go into here without writing several paragraphs. Suffice to say it is easily possible for models in base to base combat that should be fighting can actually stand around doing nothing whilst other models move and shoot. I think it is just different to what I am used to, an ever decreasing number of activations makes for some interesting choices as the game progresses.

We have a few more rules to have a go with, the next being Osprey’s On The Seven Seas which I have barely even read yet.

Clockwork Dragon Wings

A few weeks ago, I started to put together my Reaper Bones Clockwork Dragon. I had to do some boiling water reshaping of the legs to get them all level, but I am getting quite good at that with plastic models.

I was not happy with the position of the wings as they stuck straight up. I wanted them spread out a bit more.

It was actually easier than I thought it was going to be, the wing tabs just needed a small bit of trimming to get them to the required angle. I also drilled and used a small pin to add a bit of strength.
Where the wings join the body still needs some work, a bit of plastic to cover the tab and a cog or two to hide the join.

I Got Lucky

The weather on Saturday was fine undercoating weather. I also had to chop down some trees and get rid of the waste, but in between hacking sessions, I was able to apply spray paint to plenty of robot infantry and get started on the mdf Aeroneff landing platform. I now need some more paint.

If I’m Lucky…

The weather seems to have picked up and I may just get a chance to undercoat models this weekend. Today my car was telling me it was 16 degrees Celsius. Considering how cold it has been recently, that is positively tropical.

I have been busy making sure everything is ready for an undercoating marathon, figures, vehicles and buildings.