Some Barbed Wire

My daughter's project is still occupying my game table, so this weekend, I resigned myself to making some barbed wire sections for 15mm games.  Something I've long been meaning to do.

Pretty generic, but here's a couple of pics for lack of anything better to share:

With old Quality Castings 15mm WWII Soviets.

In all, there is about seven and a half feet of total length.  Not sure if this will be enough, but at least it is a good start.

I was going to weather it a bit, but it occured to me that in the first few games in which I will use it, it will likely be representing wire that was layed only days to hours prior to the battles.  For now, it will reamin pretty shiny.

Some Stone Walls

No game this weekend, as my table was occupied with a non-hobby project.  But, I did confiscate the dining room table to work on a little project that has been on the list for some time.

Every now and then, I come across pictures of fields separated by stone walls consisiting of loose filed stone thrown into a sort of continuous pile.  I've been meaning to make some to give a little contrast in the types of dressing for the table top and finally got around to it.

Method of construction was pretty simple; I started with .06" plastic bases, primed, glued aquarium stone in two applications to build the sort of parmid shaped walls using craft glue, then painted and flocked.

Not a complex process, but a little time consuming given the overall scope of the work.  At least I can check it off the list. Here are a few pics: 

There are 30 pieces, with the long sections being 4" 

in length.

With 15mm Quality Castings WWII Infantry.

A little closer view.

That's all for now.

Finally Completed My Terrain Work

After almost three weeks, I've completed the re-flocking of all of my "green terrain' 1' square foam tiles, an utterly unrewarding project from the motivational side of things.  The process would have moved along a bit faster if weather hadn't kept the humidity up through much of that time, severely slowing the drying process.

Anyway, here's a pic of the the tiles stacked by type on the table:

I happily discovered that I had previously done many of the 2'x2' tiles when I was making the West German terrain,  and do have a small number of 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles to do yet, but will do them over a weekend, when the weather is more agreeable, rather than rather than kill another couple of eeks watching glue dry right now.

Now to get World War III back on the table top.

Doing Some Terrain Work

Last week, in addition to exploring early period Star trek games, I decided to take care of another task in preperation for my Barbarossa campaign later this year.  I still have a bunch (maybe 150 square feet) of moduler terrain that needed to be re-flocked to match all of the newer stuff I made over the last couple of years.

I discussed the color change over the yars in the Woodland Scenics flock sometime back, and figured that now was as good as ever to do the mass re-flocking.

While looking at the foam, I noticed that many of the edges could use some touch up paint, and there were still some bare blue foam edges here and there from my hurry to get terrain on the table in decades past.  It isn't important with respect to usng the terrain, but just looks sloppy, and in some cases makes it hard to see the labeling system that I use on the edges of the foam to assist in finding the right terrain tiles for set up.

The process consisted of patching any missing bits of foam with light weight spackle, painting most of the edges, and then re-applying flock to the terrain tiles.

Here are a couple of pics of the process:

Shortly after starting, the tiles with the white on them have

 lite weight spackle drying, filling finger tip "craters" left 

by a couple of the guys leaning on the terrain back in the 

late 1980s.

A comparison of the WS Green Blend flock 

old and new,  The hill slope tile in front has 

been newly flocked; with older stream tiles 

behind dating to 1990 and 1998.

Not the most fun or interesting thing to do, but necessary, and I can check it off the list if I ever get done.  Thus far, I've re-flocked 54 of the approximately 120 1'x1' terrain tiles.  

We have had several storms in recent days, dropping huge amounts a rainfall.  I don't know the official amount, but we have a little wading pool on the patio for my granddaughter, and it is now filled to the lip with about 10 inches of rain water.  It was empty last Monday.

In any event, this has resulted in a very humid basement, despite the dehumidifier filling up several times, and I started with the most tedious pieces to re-do, the stream and river tiles.  Progress has been slower than hoped, but should get faster as the tiles get easier to finish.

I'm still probably stuck with this ont he table for another ten days or so.  The bigger 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles are going to wait for awhile yet.

Revisiting My Hobby Plan for Future Gaming (The 10-Plan)

Back in September of last year, I presented a plan to narrow my hobby focus a little, to ten of the thirty-some periods and settings in which I do or would like to game.  The process of executing that plan started on November 4th, and since then, I've done a fairly good job of staying on target.

Over the eight months that have elapsed since the acting on the plan, I have worked in some capacity on eight of the periods, and only blatantly strayed one time.  Additionally, as I recently posted, I've done some research on some Star trek gaming, outside of my original plan, but given that I don't really have any research to do otherwise, the time invested would have simply been down time, so I really don't feel too guilty about that.

Here's where I stand on the "10-Plan"

1/3788 Star Trek/Star Fleet Battles -  The only planned actively has been to acquire three USS Reliant models, which will be used as SFB New Light Cruisers for the Federation.  I've also done a little research regarding miniatures to fill in gaps for the Klingon and Romulan fleets.  I expected to pick up work on this late in the year, so progress is about as expected.

6mm 1950s Cold War - I've completed painting railroad tracks, a bunch of buildings, and a mix of vehicles as needed.  A few aircraft are awaiting decals and will then be complete.  I've also done design or early stages of construction for a few terrain bits still needed.  This project is as close to "done" as anything I've ever worked on and is about where I expected.

6mm WWII East Front Barbarossa - I've acquired all of the miniatures that I need, painted almost all of them, and completed all of the campaign set-up and paper work required to start the campaign.  I need to finish up refreshing a bunch of terrain (in proccess), make some additional buildings, and paint some more aircraft.  This is almost ready to go, and is well ahead of schedule (I don't say that very often).

15mm WWII East Front Barbarossa - I've purchased some of the tanks/vehicles and aircraft, and am in the middle of refreshing some terrain for this. I still need to add more vehicles, paint everything, add some new terrain tiles, and come up with some buildings.  All of the campaign research and paperwork is done.   Progress is probably a little ahead of schedule right now.

15mm France.  I've done some work setting up a "bathtub" campaign, but still need to add some terrain and miniatures. I'mi ahead of plan on campaign set-up and probably a little behind on the miniatures side.  All things considered, I've made about the amount of progress that I should have, by this point.  Note that the progress on my Barbarossa campaign has changed the priority on this a little, as I now plan to start Barbarossa before France 1940.

15mm Cold War 1950s - I've added some vehicles and finished the British infantry.  A couple of planes are awaiting decals.  I have a BTR50 master almost done, and will need to cast up some of those. One thing that I overlooked previously, was the need for buildings, and I've done some research and design work for those, I also will need a make a few city terrain tiles, and cut some blank tiles last week, so this is well on its way.  Given the oversite regarding buildings, this is about where I'd expect.

15mm 1970s Cold War - Other than making a few simple fighting positions, I've done nothing on this, and to be honest, I'm feeling very little mojo for it for much of the year thus far.  I am clearly behind on this project.  I am considering trading the period out for 15mm imagi-Africa, since I have an ongoing campaign there, and now realize that I really need more buildings for it.

15mm Soviet-Afghan War -  I have done research and design work for walls, ruins, gardens, wells, and more buildings, and have a couple more Soviet aircraft models ready to build.  I just finish cutting the foam stock that I will use to build most of this stuff, and as I expected this to be a late year project, am actually ahead of where I expected to be it.

20mm Vietnam - I've completed some work on aircraft, got a new platoon of PAVN infantry to paint, and done more research on building and bunkers.  I still need to decide on a setting for a mini- campaign.  Overall, I am about where I expected to be on this period.

28mm Post Apocalypse - I've made some additional terrain and played a few games recently.  I've got several buildings and new terrain pieces designed, awaiting construction, and have another building complex started.  I'm a little behind on the construction side for post apoc, but have made a conscious choice to hold off on new construction temporarily, as I want to play some games, and post apoc construction is likely to tie up my big table to two months or more.  So I am happy with where this is currently at.

Outside of the "10 Plan" I completed some imagi-Africa campaign buildings to facilitate playing the next battle in the campaign, and in the downtime imposed by the wait for a tool delivery, I've completed a bunch of research for two possible expansion to my Star Fleet Battles gaming.  Not too great a deviation from the plan overall.

My "10 Plan" status after eight months:

        On target: 7 periods

Ahead of plan: 2 periods

           Behind:  1 period

Overall, I'm fairly happy with how this has worked out.  By year's end, I look to complete two periods, and maybe a third.  If I do the trade out of 15mm 1970s Cold War for 15mm 1980s African imagi-nations, it is possible that I could have four "new projects" on the list next year.

To Go Where No Game Has Gone Before

Well, on my game table, anyway.

As regular readers might know, I am still fan of Star Fleet Battles, a game inspired by the original Star Trek and animated series.  If you look around the internet, you'll most likely find comments relating to the game being complex or having a huge rulebook.

I learned the game over 40 years ago from the 21 page of rules in the original boxed edition of the game, not the 288 pages in the Commanders edition rules or however many hundred pages in the current rulebooks.  And, I really enjoy the game.

The rules are big, but the game isn't really that complex; I can have have you running a starship in 15-20 minutes.  There is just a lot of detail; info about races, ships, and scenarios make up most of it.  More about the current version of the rules can be found here.  The original boxed version is usually available on Ebay.

I've always preferred the idea of gaming in Captain Kirk's universe of the 1960s or even in earlier Trek periods.  Most gamers seem to prefer the time of Next Generation or later, but I find the capital ships too big and overpowering, generally less interesting.

The series, Star Trek Enterprise, had the perfect setting for me; I even preferred the cast and characters to most other Trek series, too bad the writers weren't up to the task.  In any event, the idea of the smaller, technologically unbalanced ships with archaic weapons was just more captivating to me.

Some years back I discovered Prelude to Axanar, and more recently I watched Strange New Worlds (in many ways the Star Trek series that I waited my whole life for).  In the last couple of weeks, I bumped into The Romulan War on Youtube, which sems to have finally pushed me over the edge on this early Star Trek trek.

My hobby options have been somewhat limited over the last week, as I await the arrival of my band saw blade (see last post).  So over the last few days, on a whim, I decided to look into what was available to create a Star Fleet Battles version of the ships for The Romulan War (TRW) and for the Four Years War (FYW) dealing with Axanar and the Klingons.

Given the information that I've found, I will need to overlap both canon and non-canon info and fill in some blanks to create the ship diagrams and weapon tables for a my own version of Star Fleet battles in these earlier periods.

I've been chasing info about ship classes mentioned in material addressing the two conflicts about the ships, propulsion, and weapons (among other things) to produce the ship diagrams, called SSDs in SFB, that allow a player to run ships in the game system.

The Four Years War (FYW) with the Klingons isn't a problem to bring into SFB, the basic game starts just shortly after that period.  The Romulan War is roughly a hundred years earlier, and the ships are a lot more primitive.  I don't know if there is enough granularity to the weapons tables in SFB to accomodate the weapons and defensive systems without re-scaling the game system.

Where I currently stand is that bringing the Federation to life for the FYW isn't much of a problem at all.  The Klingons are a little tougher, finding more ambiguity in ship classes and descriptions, and there is generally less diversity with respect to ship size and class.

With respect to Axanar/FASA, I will have to do some picking and choosing. I quite like the Axanar fan film perspective, and was never a big fan of FASA's ship designs (particularly the Klingons). So I will mostly be going with the Axanar fan film's direction regarding ships, which can be readily adapted to the SFB game system.

With respect to The Romulan War, again the Federations ships seem more easy to produce, though qualifying and quantifying the relative value of armor and polarized plating of the ship hulls instead of the later shields is a bit abstract, and trying to do it, such that there is a direct linear progression from the time of the TRW, through FYW, and the TOS may be tricky.

Aditionally, defining the weapons of that earlier period, spatial and photonic torpedoes, and the various pulse and beam weapons looks to be less than strait forward, and they all look to cause very minimal damage by comparison to even the worst weapons of Captain Kirk's era.

I haven't really gotten into the meat of the Romulan ships yet, having seen what's presented in the fan films, and just scattered bits otherwise.  Leaning on TOS info and my own notions, somewhat derived from SFB, this may prove the toughest part of the adventure.

Another avenue that I've gone down over these last few days, is availability of models for these two conflicts in or close to the 1/3788 scale of the old Gamescience and SFB game miniatures.  

A lot of the Federation ships are available for FYW, as are some Klingon, though at the moment, scale may be an issue for some of the Klingon ships.  For the earlier period of the Romulan War, I have a lot less to work with thus far, and suspect that I might have to start scratch-building and casting fleets for those.  Though there are quite a number of model ships available in the Romulan Warbird configuration that might work as proxies.

I could play both periods with counters, but would really prefer and better enjoy the games if they included miniatures.  Ultimately, I don't really know if this will go anywhere, and beyond the research stage, it may just sit on a shelf for quite some time before manifesting on the table top.   Last year, I shared a plan to focus on 10 gaming periods, and was doing pretty well with this since November.  Star fleet Battles - The Early Years wasn't on that list.

Anyway, this is the more interesting part of what I've been doing while waiting for my band saw blade to arive for my foam cutting project.  I'll plan to continue to research the ships and build a timeline of events for the two conflicts, and make up at least a few SSDs for some of the ships to get a feel for what they look like in the game.  Hopefully I'll have something to share in a future post from all of this.

That's all I have for now, be safe out there.

Ever Notice How Things Never Seem to Go As Planned?

My next game is going to be a WWIII-1958 battle, but I need to make a single terrain tile for a small town with the right road layout to connect to the rest of my modular terrain, a fairly simple little project.

By chance, I am out of 12" square foam tiles, so need to cut one.  No problem, I have enough foam on hand to cut 6-7 tiles, so figured I just do that, and reduce the amount of space taken up by the foam a little.  

And then, it occurred to me that I have notable footprint of uncut 1 inch foam slabs sitting on shelves that have been taking up space since early 2019.  It hasn't been used, as it was for a terrain project, but the green 1 inch foam from Lowes was manufactured poorly, such that the thickness varied between .81 and 1.06 inches, making it really hard to use with 1" thick modular terrain.  So, I figured that I'd eventually cut it up into slabs of varying thickness for making buildings and whatnot.

This process involved cutting the foam into 1"x 7"x24" pieces, cutting off the glazed face, and then splitting them vertically into "slabs" having thickness ranging from .75" down to .06" for making walls and whatnot.  A lot simpler than it sounds, but very messy.  The process would take maybe 4 hours, and generate 45-60 gallons of foam waste and an equivalent amount of newly freed space in the basement.  Plus, there was enough foam that I may never have to do this messy job again.

A box of half inch to 3/4 inch slabs.  When 

finished I'll have two more boxes of thinner slabs.

So I grab all of the foam, sort it out, and start cutting it down on the band saw.  Going good, filled the first box and then some with slabs of stock.  Then "floink".  The blade breaks; the cutting stops.  Not a big surprise really, the blade has probably been on there for 15 years.  

An inconvenience, but not a big deal.  Got to go get cleaned up, get all of the green (and a little pink and blue dust off of me and go to the store.  Get a new blade, maybe $12-15.

Now even 7-8 years ago, there were three stores within four miles of my house, that carried as many as eight different blades for my saw, having different combinations of blade thickness and teeth per inch.  

Now, there were none.  There used to be easily, a dozen places located between my house and place of work that carried the blades.  Guess what?  Now, there are none.  

Two days and 7 hours of searching later, I found one place that will custom make the blades for $69.00.  And, I fond one store that offers one size/type of blade that will fit, but they don't carry it in stock.  The saw is a Craftsman, and that name, after bankruptcy and resurrection by a new owner, no longer offers any parts for any of my home or work floor or benchtop power tools.

So I ordered a couple of blades, which should outlast me, and they will be here in a week.  So my four hour project to save space has my whole gaming and work area filled with stacks of foam and dust for a week, Seven, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, it would have been a 25 minute inconvenience.  Progress confuses me.

So much for my brilliant plan.  First contact with the enemy, I mean saw, and it all goes to poo.

Sorry, I just had to whine a bit.