Continuing on from my earlier post, here’s the latest progress I’ve made on scratch building a 28mm scale tramp steamer for Pulp gaming. I’ve started building up the cabins on top of the flat balsa decking from foam board, 2mm card and balsa wood.
The cabins look rather plain at the moment. I intend to decorate them with a few cast resin pieces if I can get around to mastering them and casting them before the 15th of September deadline for the friendly competition on the Back of Beyond forums. That’s a month away, so I hope at least to create a simple round port-hole and a dogged steel door to fill the empty doorways.
There’s several other forum members working on their ‘tramps’ too, and it’s interesting to see the variety of methods used to scratch them up. Check out this post on the forum for images. I was particularly impressed with Overlord’s hull which is cut from a slab of polystyrene foam using the balsa decking as a template for the hot wire cutting.
If I was starting again I’d use this method myself with the high density Dow Chemicals blue foam I still have in the garage. The advantage of a solid foam hull is I’d have a decent base to pin the 2mm card too. The foam board hull I’ve built up has some annoying voids that means the card hull may be easy to damage in the finished piece.
I’m planning to have simple internal rooms and make the two layers of upper decking removable, just to make the whole ship more interesting in terms of gaming opportunities. For the same reason I intend to keep the deck areas pretty devoid of detail. Probably the most deck detailing I’ll have is the railing made from cut down chicken wire (thanks again Dustan) and some balsa stair ways and ladders.
As the inspiration for this ship is the ‘Sirius’ from Herge’s ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ I also want to add a couple of simple deck cranes. Years ago I bought some model ship making wooden pulleys and brown ‘rope’ that I’ve used for a few Mordheim terrain pieces, hopefully I can find them in the garage because they’d be just right for 28mm scale deck cranes. The trick with the cranes is of course going to be making them look reasonably useful without turning them into deadly eye gougers for anybody gaming over and around the ship!