Another Year Older....

...but I'm not sure how much wiser!

Update

I have not done much since the last post. Last week, I had spring break. I spent the early part of the week visiting an old college friend who lives in Atlanta. His wife passed away a few months ago from cancer. It wasn't meant to be a "fun" visit but it turned out well. Basically he talked, I listened. This isn't meant to be a boast, but as another friend said, "truly listening to people is what you do best." 

The remainder of my vacation was taken up with my daughter's tennis tournament. I had planned on finishing the revisions on a paper to be published, but that didn't happen.

Since I've been back, I've been swamped with work, mostly grading and non-scholarly things. Much of the little free time has been spent cleaning the work area. I started to make a few more river hexes even though I didn't plan to make more. One of them is going to have a dock along the river, and maybe a little shack or hut on the bank. The other, I was going to make specifically for a bridge, but that is still up in the air on that. I'd prefer to be able to stick bridges anywhere along my river. I also toyed with the idea of taking the Mediterranean villa I bought from GameCraft Miniatures and set it high up on the side of the river. The hexes are not big enough to accommodate it. I'd have add an extension to the hex, and I think that would look funny. I might still do it, who knows?

I bought some stuff from Shapeways...sorry, no pictures.  I got some more various aircraft, including a 1/300 twin-engine Cessna (not cheap!) and some Pakistani JF-17 Thunder multirole fighters in 1/285. 1/300 and 1/600. The 1/285 looks a little more detailed than the 1/300...no surprise there, but the 1/600 looks awfully small even for that scale. I'll have to compare it to both Oddzial Osmy and Tumbling Dice, but it looks smaller than even Oddzial Osmy's planes. 

 In addition to the airplanes, I bought some 1/96 scale ship-building accessories. This included a 25mm gun and some bridge binoculars. Don't ask me how I got this in my head, but my plan is to build a 1/00 (15mm) small, modern patrol craft. It can be used for AK-47 games. 1/96 is a little big, but don't think it will be too obvious. The plan is to try to sell it. 

Last but not least, more rules! I'm not going into them in detail, but I got Brigade Commander from Five-Core Rules. Another set to be potentially used for modern armor combat. The biggie is that I splurged and got General Quarters III. I can't deny it, I've got naval fever! Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Making Rivers for 6mm, Part 3

I'm SLOWLY getting there on my rivers. Here is a small stretch:

Sorry about the crazy background. I took the picture on a chair because the rest of my work area is a major mess! That is also the reason why they are not fitting together that well. The river itself is done, or at least as good as its going to get. I am now working on the banks. I am not going to go all crazy here on this project. I'm still not sure that I will end up using them, but I've come this far, so I am going to complete them. I keep thinking about just laying down some caulk without any sort of base and be done with it. Currently, I am taking a forced break in order to attempt to clean up the messy workbench.

A few other thoughts as I do some housecleaning:
1. The siren song of naval wargaming once more is calling me. Back in the late 70s and into the 80s, I was a big naval wargamer. My friends and I used various rules, even a homemade one based on Avalon Hill's Midway, but we settled on Fletcher Pratt rules.

Some aspects IMHO were a little clunky, like how torpedoes worked (they almost never hit anything), but they seemed to have what we wanted. Anyway, lately, I've been wanting to go back to naval gaming. There is a naval gaming Facebook group that I joined, and that might be the culprit. I am thinking about pre-dreadnought era, but can't decide. What's holding me back, among many other things, is do I want to build my own or just buy them. One of these days, I will pull out and photograph my scratch-built fleets that I built in the early 80s.

2. Completing my own modern rules. I've been putting together little bits and pieces of it for some time now. It is a mash up of several published rules that I like. I take the best parts and put them together. I'll use them for solo purposes. I've noticed there seems to be a lot of game design posts on various blogs, and a lot of folks are coming up with their own rules. I figure, it they can do it, so can I.

3. Having another epic fantasy battle. Not much to comment on, except I am in the mood for one. It will give me an excuse to paint more of the pile. I still have to finish those rangers, and I have a big pile of Copplestone barbarians that I want to dig into and paint up.

OK, I think that is enough introspective cogitating for one night.

Multihex Complete: the Twilight Zone Post

I thought I had posted the post just before this one. I even made a brief comment on January 23rd concerning it. You probably had no idea what I was referring to. So, I put it up just now, even though it was supposed to be up a month ago. I thought instead of just adding to it, I would make an update. The current polar vortex has reached down to NE TN and SW VA. Schools have been closed for a week including mine. So, I've had some time to work on things.

So, here is the multihex completed:

It is surrounded the smaller forest hexes and each road has a road hex added to its end.

I am not happy with it. It warped, particularly at the side were you can see the dark line where it connects with one of the road hexes. Also, I am having a hard time seeing figures being able to sit in the forest. There is only supposed to be no more than one figure in a hex at a time, but I am not sure they can accommodate even that.

Here are some close ups:

The small grey structure on the left side of the road is supposed to be a roadside shrine.

The verdict is that I won't be making any more of these multihexes unless I can think of some way of avoiding the warping.

More Light/medium Forest

While waiting for the banks to dry on my river hexes and deciding what to use to paint them, I made some road hexes to go through the forests. They look pretty boring:

So I thought, why not make a large, single multihex and put a road through that? "Multihex," does that make sense? As you are reading this, each time you see the word "multihex," you need to say it out loud the way Leeloo probably would.

What I mean by multihex is, make single larger hex made up of or the same dimensions as a cluster of the smaller hexes. I punched out seven hexes out of the thin styrene plastic signs; one central hex and six to go around it. I glued them together very carefully with modeler's glue:

By carefully, I mean lining up the edges as precisely as I could. The result looked like this when glued together:

You could be saying, "why not print out a paper template and use that to cut out the multihex?" I did consider that, but I figured that if my cutting was the slightest bit off, the result would be a poor alignment with other hexes. I experienced something like that when I used a template to make my own hex mat.  Very slight errors in hex alignment were greatly magnified to the point where I consider the mat unusable.

Once hexes dried, I took this and used it as the template to cut out the second layer of plastic:

I could have punched out more single hexes and glued them on top of my first layer, but I figured that a single sheet would add more stability. As careful as I was, it was still tough lining the two sheets up.

Here is what it looks like with some of the small, 2" hexes around it as well as two road hexes:

And now for a ComicLife test run:

Yeah, its stupid, makes no sense and no Roy Lichtenstein work of art, but I wanted to see how ComicLife works. I installed it a zillion years ago and never got around to using it.  Lesson 1: make sure the scene is properly aligned and characters are more or less in the middle of the box.

New Toys for Conversion Project

There have been a bunch of groups that have been popping up on Facebook in the last few years. They are becoming a popular alternative to Yahoo! Groups. Keith Armstrong of ArmiesArmy showed plans to make a MN-116 Norwegian light tank in 1/100 (15mm). When I first saw the designation MN-116, I thought it was some sort of upgrade of the M113 APC. Nope, its an up-gunned M24 Chaffee light tank. They replaced the old 75mm gun with a French 90 mm low pressure gun, the same gun found on many armored cars. They also replaced the original engine with that of a M113, which might be the reason for the designation. Cool! A tiny tank with a big gun on it...gotta make a 1/285 version! Here is some drawings of it:

Source: http://www.the-blueprints.com

How does it relate to my gaming? In my back history, Southern Chalupastan received a number of surplus WW2 weapons in the late 50s/early 60s . As a result, their armored units were made up of Shermans and Chaffees. These took a beating during the First Chalupastan War, but still were enough of the Chaffees to constitute a battalion. This battalion was relegated to training and to act as an aggressor force for war exercises.  After the war, there was a need to rearm and upgrade their forces. Despite their defeat, the South still viewed Northern Chalupistan as a major treat. What caught my eye and made my decision to include an upgraded Chaffee to my campaign was that Keith stated that it was a relatively cheap upgrade. Presently, the South has some more modern light tanks like the M41 Walker Bulldog  and the Textron Stingray, but these are in small numbers and are relegated to recon companies. 

Many of the TO&Es of my Gambusian armies have weapons only on paper. One of which is this training battalion that I figured would never see combat. Now, if they get upgraded, then they could go to war. I envision brave cadets charging T-55s and T-72s with their pint-sized tanks! 

Today, my order came in from CinC:

Despite the bendy gun barrel, its a very nice model

 I got 20 tanks. 15 will be converted whereas the other five will be left alone to be used for any WW2 games. I will try to finish my river and forest hexes first, before the conversion work on these guys start. Besides, I need to figure out what I am going to use for the conversion.

Making Rivers for 6mm, Part 2.5

Last night, while working a bit on my little forest hexes, I noticed that some of my river hexes seemed to be even more warped then before (Yikes!!).  It was more noticeable with the double-hexes. I wonder if moisture getting into the exposed foam is responsible. The problem with that theory is that its winter and our house is pretty dry, which my sinuses can testify.

I keep bending them the opposite way, which does crack the foam. Fortunately, the cracks are not noticeable.  Now I wonder what the effect of painting them will be. Stay tuned.