Military Truck on DriveThruRPG

Military Truck with 28mm Figure The Military Truck kit is now available on DriveThruRPG.

Military Truck combined with Prospector Rover This kit lets you build a 28mm-32mm scale SciFi Military transport vehicle that comes with several options for the cabin, back tray, and chassis. The tray walls and tail are also hinged so they can be opened.

The Military truck parts also works with all our other released Truck kits.

Mixing and matching the parts in each kit allows you to build even more vehicles. For example, here’s the Military Truck cabin combined with the Prospector Rover parts.

Crooked Dice Producing our Resin Cyberpunk Hover Car

Crooked Dice Design Studio have licensed our latest vehicle release, the Cyberpunk Hover Car. If you’ve reached us via their Colony 87 Kickstarter, the rest of our Sci Fi Vehicle collection is available on DriveThruRPG as well. These are a series of 28mm scale vehicles that are designed for easy printing using home FDM printers for your Sci Fi wargame tabletop.

Review: Titan Terrain Warehouse

I commented at the end of the Vendorum review that Titan Terrain’s Factorum also looked quite tempting. I splurged and bought their larger Warehouse building instead. This building is also part of a good bundle deal Titan Terrain offer.

The above photo shows you my final, assembled Warehouse and it is a commanding piece of terrain which will make a great centrepiece to any industrial Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk 28mm table. It’s around 45cm long and 30cm at the widest point, and from above it’s roughly ‘L’ shaped.

This photo shows the 10 sheets of laser cut MDF and corrugated cardboard that comes in the kit. It’s a fairly hefty package and I think it’s good value for the price of NZ$54.90 (excluding shipping, at time of review).

Instructions are emailed separately as a PDF which shows how it all goes together. This is a reasonably large build and it took me around 4 hours to assemble. That does include giving the glue time to bond the MDF parts together. You’ll need some PVA, a sharp Xacto and a decent file or scrap of sandpaper to clean off the small cut tabs. I also had a bag of long rubber bands handy to hold the large pieces together while the glue cured. Painter’s masking tape also works well to keep things together temporarily.

The build steps are as you expect: there are two basic structures in the ‘L’ shape which you assemble and then join together. Additional pieces add surface detailing, and there’s a sheet of white trim parts including door frames, control panels, and building lights.

One side of the finished building includes a long loading dock with two large roller doors, and a smaller garage door (shown above), and the other side (shown here) features a back door and the building generator. Although it occurs to me you could turn that generator into a sort of back office/staff room if you painted the gridded side with windows. The building has three separate ladders to get to the roof area, so folks with sniper figures will be happy with the commanding view from the top. The corrugated cardboard also helps to hold figures in place on the sloped roofs as well.

Overall I think a very pleasing piece of terrain for a reasonable price, and I’m looking forward to painting it up and gaming over it.

Cyberpunk Hover Car on DriveThruRPG

The Cyberpunk HoverCar kit is available on DriveThruRPG now.

This kit lets you build two mix-and-match Cyberpunk Hover cars for your 28mm sci-fi tabletop. It’s the second kit in a series of street vehicles I’m working on, and the parts also mix with the Cyberpunk Compact Car kit for even more variety.

The next kit I’m working to produce in this series will be either a sci-fi convertable with seating for 28mm or 1/56th figures, or a sci-fi urban taxicab.

Designing a Hover Car

I’ve always been a huge Blade Runner fan, so it was natural to try and take the Compact Car design and turn it into a ‘spinner’ style flying car. Unfortunately it turns out I’m not Syd Mead and after struggling with trying to get a spinner design working that didn’t look odd, or refused to gel properly in Fusion 360 I started working on a more traditional hover car.

Years of watching 80’s sci-fi movies like The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future, and Total Recall must have sunk in because a more traditional flying car just seemed to come together in Fusion 360 without difficulty. It started with a snub-nosed bumper, and a set of front hover pods that replaced the wheels and grew from there into the two vehicles I plan to release this weekend as a new kit.

Designing stuff is interesting. I think if you find yourself having to force a design, or you struggle to make progress it’s often a sign the concept is flawed, or not well thought out to begin with. My Fusion 360 account is littered with half complete or abandoned projects – which I never delete because I tend to raid them for parts and other sub-components – something Fusion 360’s CAD setup supports fairly well.

I’ve been painting test versions of the vehicles this week and just need to get a set of decent photos to show them off on DriveThruRPG.

Review: Kreative Scenery Gothic Office Building

Kim from Kreative Scenery has just released a laser cut 28mm scale Gothic Office Building. He was kind enough to give me a discounted copy to review here.

The kit comes as a series of pre-cut 3mm MDF pieces, and a set of 3D-printed parts for the window and door detailing. This first photo shows my assembled kit and the gray parts were 3D printed. They sit very nicely into the laser cut MDF framing, and Kim sensibly recommends you paint them separately before gluing them into place.

The parts are fully cut, which means the larger pieces are shipped loose in a box, and the smaller pieces included in a set of envelopes. This reduces the shipping weight for international buyers and means you can build straight out of the box using the emailed instructions. You can see the pieces I’ve scattered across my building table in this photo. The parts were assembled with PVA, with any excess being removed with a damp brush. That’s why some of the MDF looks a little pre-stained in these photos.

The build instructions are easy to follow, the pieces go together well and the resulting building is strong and light. It’s built in three sections: a ground floor, a lift-off middle floor, and roof. Each section is also built in two stages, the basic structure and then a layer of exterior detailing. This photo shows the basic structure prior to adding the roof and external detailing. There’s plenty of space inside too which means you could go to town with interior detailing if you’re playing skirmish games using the building.

Overall the finished building looks good. It definitely has the High Gothic Warhammer 40k feel but at the same time is restrained enough to fit onto pretty much any sci-fi table as an Administrative, Office or Apartment building. I could also see it sneaking onto a modern or WWII table with a few additional period buildings around it. The combination of the basic MDF structure, the external MDF detailing and the finer 3D printed window frames combine very nicely in the finished builing.

The front and back of the building are detailed differently as well which is a nice touch. It gives you two options to use depending on how you position the building on your table and also means you can place two of the same building next to each other with different facades. The front shown above has a nicely recessed doorway, with a set of smaller overhead windows, while the rear has a more industrial feel with a roller door and smaller side window.

Overall a very nice kit, that builds into a strong building that will look great on your table once painted.

Cyberpunk Compact Car on DriveThruRPG

The Cyberpunk Compact Car kit is available on DriveThruRPG now.

This kit lets you build two mix-and-match Cyberpunk Compact cars for your 28mm sci-fi tabletop. It’s also the first kit in a new series of street vehicles I’m working on. The street vehicles kits will work together with each other in the same way my earlier truck kits do, giving you more vehicle options with each kit purchased.

The next kit I’m working to produce in this series will be a flying / hover style sci-fi car that will include a stand. I’m also planning a police style cruiser and urban taxicab in the series.

Review: Titan Terrain Vendorum

Titan Terrain are a New Zealand company producing a range of reasonably priced laser cut 3mm MDF terrain sets. This review covers the ‘Vendorum’ building kit from their Sci-Fi Slum range.

This kit comes as the five shrink wrapped MDF sheets you see above. PDF build instructions are emailed to you when the order ships. The instructions are reasonably easy to follow, but they’re not keyed and the major parts are spread of over the four sheets so there’s a little bit of figuring out to do while you build.

It is a fast build though. I put my Vendorum together on a Saturday, and the majority of that time was waiting for the PVA wood glue to dry enough to move to the next step. You’ll need a sharp Xacto to cut out the pieces from the frames, and a file or scrap of sandpaper to tidy up the edges. I also had a bag of large rubber bands handy which made gluing easier.

The parts are well cut and go together easily, exactly and the joints are sturdy. The design is clever too and many parts hide the ‘tabbed’ edges within the finished building itself which is certainly a detail I appreciated. A good example of this is the added air-conditioning units that go together from a handful of parts but still manage to hide all the edges you’ve cut within the finished unit.

The overall building is very nice once it’s complete, with the white trim details adding a final touch that brings it all together. The windows, doors and ladders are well scaled for 28-32mm sci-fi figures. As a gaming piece, the building is great too, with a number of playable surfaces: the roof-tops, the store awning, and if your rule system has climbing rules I can see figures scaling the AC units as well. The variable height of the roof-top parapets also adds visual interest, and possibly amusing arguments about cover modifiers when figures are placed against them.

A highly recommended kit. I’m now considering expanding my collection further with a few more purchases from Titan Terrain. The Factorum looks quite tempting. However as usual I should probably paint what I’ve already built first!

Nuka Cola Chemical Factory

I’ve finally got this Chemical Plant off my paint station and into my terrain collection for This is Not a Test. The paint job isn’t quite a good as I’d like, but I’m honestly just happy it’s finished.

It is a reasonably large terrain piece and covers a good amount of the table, as well as giving snipers and other heavily armed figures something to fight over. It hasn’t been deployed at TCOW yet because I’ve been too distracted by Gaslands to organise a game of TnT there yet.

It was primed with Army Painter ‘Dragon Red’ – like most of the terrain for my TnT table, and then over painted and dry-brushed with cheap student acrylic paints before getting sealed with pre-stained polyurethane floor varnish.

I also acquired another copy of the same kit that I’ve assembled in a mirrored version of this plant, but I haven’t managed to base it yet due to my band-saw being out of operation. I also suspect it might take me a while to get around to painting this second copy as well!

Publishing Thingiverse Models

Now that I’ve designed a few bits and pieces in Fusion 360, I’ve decided to publish them all under my Thingiverse account. I’ve benefited hugely from the free war game terrain folks have published on Thingiverse, so felt like I should try and give something back to the community there.

Under that account you’ll find my original designs for:

28mm Arcade Cabinets for scatter terrain.
28mm Kitset Shipping Containers.
28mm Industrial Walkways and Ramps.
– A collection of generic War Game tokens I’ve made to use in a bunch of games like Gaslands, This is Not a Test and Rogue Stars.

Several of these projects are still ongoing and may have additional content added to them occasionally. Additionally any new designs I create for 28mm war gaming are likely to end up here too. Hopefully somebody finds them useful! Comment with a link if you do, because I’d love to see the designs in use.