Category: This is Not a Test

Titan Terrain Factorum Painted

I’ve finally finished another Titan Terrain NZ building. This is their excellent free-standing ‘Factorum’ kit.

I haven’t reviewed this particular building, but the kit contents are fairly similar to another Titan Terrain building I built last year.

The building was assembled, and then the MDF was primed with a generic white spray can from a hardware store. It was painted with household acrylics and student’s ‘water-based oils’ from the local stationary warehouse.

It’s guarded by DAK future soldiers because I still haven’t got around to painting the appropriate figures from my Sci Fi collection! Curse my slackness, as I have some lovely metals from Crooked Dice’s Colony 87 set that would work perfectly here too.

Review: Crooked Dice Cyberpunk Hover Car

Crooked Dice were kind enough to send me copies of the resin Hover Car they’re selling based on my design. They’re available on the Crooked Dice site here, and here for 16GBP each. Here’s a quick review of the sample vehicles I received and photographed.

First I have to say these are lovely resin casts. They’re clean, have minimal flashing that’s easy to trim or file away and go together well. The parts are also very crisp, and capture all of the detail from the original 3D designs. Some minor changes have been made to improve the ease of casting – they are very subtle though and I only noticed them because I was comparing them to 3D prints of the original files.

Each car consists of 7 separate parts. Three of them are new ‘jet exhaust’ pieces that Crooked Dice created for the vehicles. They fit into the underbody and the front vents and give the vehicle a solid base as well as a lovely flying look on the table. The remaining parts are the main body, a separate front bumper and the jet nozzles that sit in the front wheel wells. The bumper is separate because that’s the pour point for the resin I believe.

I’m impressed at how successfully Crooked Dice converted a set of 3D .STL files into a physical model, particularly since I was not considering casting when designing the original files. It’s a testament to the skill of their design and casting folks, particularly when you see they managed to capture all the detail, including the (possibly excessive) underbody with no casting issues!

I’m a little biased of course, but I would definitely recommend these resin vehicles if you need some sci-fi vehicles. I also have to say the Crooked Dice folks are a pleasure to deal with generally too, and their customer support is excellent.

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.

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.

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.

Mav3rick 28mm Tank Kickstarter Delivers

I backed the Mav3rick Modular 3D Printable Tank Kit Kickstarter late last year, based on the clever design and short delivery date of Jan 2019. Early last week the creator delivered a large set of files, with some lovely clear instructions! Kickstarter is often a total roll of the dice and like most backers I’ve been burned before, but it’s projects like this that keep me coming back.

The Mav3rick is a fantastic set of cleverly designed parts that build a variety of vehicles based around a common tracked chassis. I’ve already printed a basic APC, with remote gatling for AA defense. That’s shown here next to an ancient 40k Chimera of mine from the 90’s. The kit parts took me about three evenings of parts printing, and only took me about 40 minutes to put together once the pieces were lightly prepped.

I’m currently printing another chassis to built into the self-propelled gun option, but got briefly distracted by printing an AA-SAM system for the APC, which is another of the turret options.

I’m looking forward to painting a few of the Mav3ricks, but there’s already other vehicles in the painting queue I need to finish 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!

Printed Platforms and Ladders

I’m continuing work on my post apocalyptic table for This is Not a Test. I’m trying to improve the vertical possibilities of the table by adding some height and climbing surfaces to game over. TnT’s rules are fairly brutal, requiring a lot of game time to make unaided climbs – so I’m also printing and painting lots of simple ladders to make getting vertical easier.

I’ve created a set of 3D printed platforms, that can be printed with legs or with angle brackets. Both variations are shown in the photos. The platforms with legs are the right height to rest against the large number of shipping containers I’ve already assembled and painted. They’re the diving board looking platforms on the right of the photo. The platforms without legs have 45 degree pieces that help them to rest on free standing terrain, and they’re shown on the left between the tanks.

The platforms work with a clip system that involves a some work with a needle file to get a good fit. I deliberately left them a little tight so there’s a friction fit between the pieces before I glued them. The design was inspired by some similar pieces I found on Thingiverse, that were bit lacking in surface design for my tastes, and somewhat tricky to print on the Anet A8. My designs are simplified for ease of printing, and only require light rafting for the joining pieces. They’re also available on Thingiverse here.

The tanks and some of the other terrain is constructed from very old Urban War ‘Hexagon’ kits. These are still available from a few places online.