As if any proof was needed of my addiction to this hobby, this must surely be it: I bought my first piece from Forgeworld.

For those who don’t know, Forgeworld are a company somehow affiliated with Games Workshop who make detailed resin cast pieces for Warhammer 40000, aimed at the more advanced modeller. Their kits have two distinctions,

1. They’re awesome
2. They’re stupidly expensive

So they prey on us weak-willed adults who find ourselves justifying the crazy prices to get that much sought after resin. There’s some very nice Chaos stuff which I’d been eyeing up, and seeing as I can’t stand the Games Workshop Chaos Dreadnought I decided to bite the bullet and splash out for a FW one.

So, I spent this evening unbagging and assembling my Emperor’s Children Sonic Dreadnought. The stuff arrives with little ceremony and packaging, in some innocuous little bags with an accompanying A4 assembly sheet:

Here are the pieces all laid out:

As I expected, I found the casts were of excellent quality. No warping, nice clear detail, and they dry fit together very easily. The resin itself is quite similar to plastic and was pretty easy to clean up, mostly with some clippers and a scalpel blade. I decided to magnetise the weapon arms because it means I can switch out loadouts if I ever get any more. The little Neodymium magnets I use for this, as on all my vehicles and walkers, are fantastic. Tiny little things and they are surprisingly strong. Luckily I have yet to glue them in with poles reversed (meaning the weapons would be repelled!)

And here he is in all his insane chaos glory, all assembled and waiting for a spray undercoat, ready to bring death to the puppets of the corpse emperor and glory to Slaanesh!

So this Monday was action packed for me! As Charles tried to figure out the dimensions of his rosette for lone wolf I was taking names all night as I blazed through the initial steppes of volcano.

I showed you guys some of the teaser shots to Volcano earlier so you have an idea of what it will look like. The wood for the back and sides is Padouk and the top is a Sitka bear claw top. The style of this guitar is a little different from Rose Delight (yet to have an official name). As opposed to the dreadnought style body I am making this an OM style. A little smaller with more curve between the upper and lower bouts. Hopefully the nice tone wood being used here really makes this guitar boom. The combination of colours being used for this wood will also make it very eye catching adding accents of Madagascar rosewood for the fingerboard, rosette and possibly the bindings.

So I raced through thickness sanding and cutting out the shapes of the back and top. The bear claw top has some awesome figuring and the back looks just like I was hoping.

Check out the pictures of it here:

Sides to Volcano ready to be sanded to the perfect thickness:

I also worked on my rosewood guitar. We chiseled of the excess wood from the sides which was a rather nerve wracking process considering you are basically gauging chunks of wood out of your guitar and hoping it doesn’t split. After much reassurance that the grain would not split perpendicular because of the direction of the grain I was made to “Step-Up” to the task.

Next after that I performed a technique called “driving the bus” which is the technique used to create the curved contour on the back of the guitar to help drive the sound towards the sound hole. This basically entails taking a bowled out circle of wood the the radius that you want and a giant circle of sandpaper and by pretending to turn a bus steering wheel over and over you gradually sand out the radius of the bowl into the sides.

Here are some pictures of the guitar with the bowl and sandpaper on it:

Look at the angle of the one below! Thats because a dread is 4″ at one end at 5″ at the other.

Here are some other cool pics from the night:

A stack of guitar sides with mine on top!

My dad trying to put in a rosette with Doug:

Thanks for tuning in guys. There will be another update this week as we are going to hit up the shop on Thursday and then run over to Rockie Raccoons and perform Axe to Mouth.

-Adam

H.I.V.E, or the Higher Institute of Villianous Education is not a typical spy-adventure series. Otto, Wing and their friends attend the institute because they have ’special talents’, or because they come from crime dynasties evil enough to make the Corleones nervous. They are taught everything from self-defense to computer hacking and their teachers have high hopes they will be future leaders of the Global League of Villianous Enterprises (a.k.a G.L.O.V.E and H.I.V.E’s grownup counterpart), and indeed the entire crime world.

In this latest adventure, the fourth in the series, the Dreadnought, a cutting edge permanently airborne crime HQ (purposely designed for secret keeping and instant world wide access), is overtaken by a rival organisation. Lead by a rogue G.L.O.V.E agent, the enemy threatens to expose both H.I.V.E and G.L.O.V.E to the world, and generally cause a great deal of trouble. Though they are young, Wing and Otto are the best infiltration team H.I.V.E has and it falls on their shoulders to neutralise the threat, free their friends and teachers, and save billions of other lives while risking their own – maybe they are the good guys after all?…

If you loved the Cherub series, it’s time to get your spy-action thrills with H.I.V.E!

Jess

There was 3.5hrs to go until a planned Northern Coalition operation to kill a Pandemic Legion POS and I logged in before dinner just to check my mail and restock ammo etc in preparation. We had reinforced the Pandemic Legion high-end moon mining tower a couple of days ago and it was due to come out. I was expecting a relaxing evening finished off with a bit of a POS bash. This was certainly not the case.

Scramble the fleet!

My Occator deep space transport ship about to fill up a jump bridge

As soon as I logged on, there were fleet invitations being spammed in alliance and in corp, instructions to X up in the Norther Coalition intel channels and orders to bring as many capital ships as possible. Something big was going down.

I jumped in my Onyx, (as usual) hoping that we’d be finally getting a capital ship fight. but as soon as I had, my corp mate yelled that his dread was stuck at a jump bridge with no fuel – so I finnaly had an opportunity to use my brand new Occator. Quickly bought 11 mil worth of Liquid ozone and went and saved the day! who says Industrial ships can’t contribute to the war effort. of course, I can’t kill anything with it so I got back in my ever so trusty gothic robo-chicken.

The FC explained the reason for the rushing… Pandemic Legion had anchored and onlined a Cynosural Jammer on their tower in the system. We had to get as many capitals in before it onlined. In what most of us consider an amazing effort, the NC formed a fleet with the people that were online and had moved over 160 capital ships into the target system OOTY-J along with a fairly good sized support fleet. Mostly Harmless, Morsus Mihi, Wildly Inapropriate and Tau Ceti Federation had all come along to the fight. This was the biggest capital fleet all in one place that I’ve been able to take a screenshot of.

A Northern Coalition Capital Fleet Blob

The capital fleet incapacitated all the modules on the already reinforced Pos and took out the cyno jammer just for something to do. The support fleet mostly stayed on the gates, stopping the occasional PL member trying to get into the system.

NC capital fleets at the hostile POS

After all the modules were destroyed, we settled in to wait the hour remaining until the tower came out of reinforced. We got word that They would be bringing their allies Sons of Tangra and Cry Havoc. We were all anticipating a massive fight.

… but unfortunately, nothing eventuated, we killed the tower and then went and reinforced some more PL towers back in X-7O. Perhaps if we had not been able to rally such a large capital fleet into the target system before the cyno jammer went active we may have had more of a fight.

Come on Pandemic Legion – give us a cap fight!

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Fleet Commanders have a difficult and thankless task. They are often called apon to make decisions in the heat of the moment, with only a small amount of information to go on.

Sometimes these decisions work out, and other times they don’t. Case in point, a recent fight in southern cloud ring.

Taking back O-ZXUV

As part of the recent push by TCF/Defi4nt to take over administration of cloud ring from Mostly Harmless they have been clearing out some systems held by Evoke and Sons of Tangra. Recently Mostly Harmless was called in to help clean out the system of O-ZXUV where there were a number of Pos’s that needed killing.

The mood of late has been (from my perspective in any case) that we’re sick of constant small skirmishes and that we wanted to get this done as fast and as efficiently as possible. So with a combined fleet numbering nearly 200 of Mostly harmless, TCF, Defi4nt and council with a very high proportion of that being capital ships, we went on a rampage around cloud ring, reinforcing 10 POS’s on the friday night and continuing successfully into the weekend.

On Saturday, however, one fight stood out in my mind as being something interesting to write about.

Sometimes Mistakes are made.

Our capital fleet had been going for 4 hours after down time and had moved on to the final POS prior to handing over to the US time zone. A cynosural beacon was opened in O-ZXUV and local filled up with 180+ friendly ships. As the system had 5 exits, there was no way we could effectively lock it down with our relatively small battleship/support fleet (everyone who could fly one was in a capital ship) and so the FC was concerned that we were going to be hot-dropped while our dreadnoughts were in seige mode. (A dread in seige cannot manoeuver or be remotely repaired, but outputs many times the normal amount of damage).

our capital fleet aligning to the hostile POS

The POS came out of reinforced and our capital fleet warped into range and went into seige almost immediately, with about 10 dreads selected to remain out of seige mode as an anti-hot-drop fleet if required. It turned out that this was a good decision as when we were half way through the seige cycle (10 minutes I believe) a hostile cynosural field opened right on top of the capital fleet and local spiked to over 250 as Sons of Tangra jumped a battleship fleet in.

Now, over the next 2 minutes, our FC remained calm and called targets at an ever increasing rate. it turned out that SoT had brought 9 guardian logistics ships and about 30 battleships. but they were very quickly wiped out with the combined firepower of our dreadnoughts and the support fleet that came in.

Bubbling the cap fleet for the greater good

Again, I was in my trusty Hictor and had the enjoyable task of locking them all down. I committed a near-mortal sin in doing so however, the hostile fleet were all short range and had jumped in on top of our capital fleet so all our bubbles went on our cap fleet. Most of the dreads were in seige at the time so they couldn’t have warped out, but still I felt bad about it.

Towards the end of the fight, the FC gave up calling targets entirely and just told us to order our overviews alphabetically and kill everything. At this point targets were dying faster than I could lock them. The hostile fleet was melting under the withering fire of the sieged dreads… it was a turkey shoot.

Some of the battleships must have tried to warp out towards the end because I got on killmails for ships that I didn’t target, who must have gotten stuck in my bubble. This is always satisfying for a HIC pilot.

Here are the battle statistics at the end:

As you can see, they were slaughtered and we lost two interceptors. we were in shock at the end of it. It is fights like these that do NOT leave you cheering for victory, but rather makes you feel numb and pensive. There was hardly any chatter on teamspeak and hardly any smack talk in local. The FC had nothing but pity in his voice. There must have been a mistake, either with the person lighting the cyno beacon or with the intel that the SoT FC had been given, or perhaps we destroyed the cyno ship before the entire fleet could bridge in…. whatever happened, something went wrong and they paid for it with an entire fleet destroyed. only a couple got out including 2 logistics ships.

The one dreadnought of ours that their fleet primaried was in my corporation and he posted a screenshot of where he was at the end.

It was a close call, that’s for sure, but overall a miserable failure.

…and so let us end this blog with a moment’s silence in remembrance of all the Mistakes that FC’s have made, and the death and destruction that these cause. Let us remember that it could have been us making those mistakes, and remember to always respect a valiant enemy before we put the “surprise butt secs” ascii-art in local.

Bristol, the birthplace of country music, is home to great architecture, neon, and at least two giant guitars.

The Grand Guitar, an enormous Martin

The fret markers are windows, as is the sound hole. It looks like it could stand to be re-strung.

And in town, is another large guitar, set in the ground, as a chamber of commerce / welcome sign.

Yes indeed. I decided to have a go at hosting a forum, for all you gamers and hobbyists out there to come together and talk about anything hobby related. The page is only a couple of days old, and is still being moved and tweaked here and there, but please stop by, register (it only takes a minute) and join in!

Soo just painted my first dreadnought for my new space marine army. Ursäkta, skall ju skriva på svenska och grejjer! Har iaf målat den första och kommer från startpaketet. Men är ändå helt nöjd, dock hade jag inte så bra ljuskällor för att få till en ordentlig bild men det får duga.

/Alex

Worked on my Rat Ogre/Heavy Loader today. First port of call was gluing the feet to the legs, a fairly straight forward procedure. I then drilled out the contact area where the legs will meet the body section so I could pin the pieces together. I also drilled a hole into the front section of the body so I could put some plasticard rod through there, which would then be attached to the loader mechanism.

After pinning the legs to the body I glued in the Skaven operator. His torso and head are from the Clanrat sprue. His arms are Clanrat arms, but I sliced the hands off and replaced them with the hands holding the two-handed flail on the Flagellant sprue. I kept some of the shaft of the weapon under each hand, to act as the controls of the loader. After this, I glued on a front panel, made from some piece I dug out of my bits box. I also used strips of plasticard to cover up the area between the front section and the driver.

Once all this had dried I started working on the mechanism. I cut two I beam pieces of plasticard to same lengths. To these I attached two smaller pieces of plasticard rod to the back, and a larger one on top of them. This larger one could slot over the rod running through the body of the loader. I then joined the two at the bottom with another length of I beam plasticard, and constructed prongs from bits of plastic sprue.

Here we have a close up of the rods securing the mechanism to the body.

I’m happy with how the body turned out. If I get to build some more based on the Space Crusade Dreadnought, I will probably construct the whole body separately before I glue the legs to it. I also think the cockpit area could do with a bit more work, but I do still have to add the small details to this model. So it might yet be okay.

This version is based on a forklift, though I am not 100% happy with it. The body is fine, but I think the mechanism is a bit clumsy in execution. Perhaps some kind of claw that comes out the bottom is a better idea? I am open to suggestions.

Each Loader will have a different mechanism, so there aren’t going to be a half dozen ‘forklift’ Loaders. Just the one. But it is a fairly conspicuous model, so abnormalities in it’s design are going to be more apparent than, say, a Mechanic, who can just be hidden in amongst the other Mechanics.

So that is the Rat Ogre test model mostly done. Overall I’m happy with it, it’s certainly for filling the vision I had of it in my mind. Obviously the mechanism might need some work, but I’ll add the details onto the model first and see how it looks. I’m not to sure what troops will next get treatment, though I have a fairly good idea how to pull off the Jezzails. Most likely I’ll do a Jezzail next, as I can think about what I can to for the other troops while I put one of these together.

Today I decided to start working on my first Rat Ogre. At this point, I think I might put together one test model of each troop type to see how they all look together. This will also let me plan out what parts and materials I will need, hopefully cutting down on buying unnecessary stuff.

Because it is a themed army, I plan to make the Rat Ogres ‘Heavy Loading Machines’. Basically, the equivalent of Skaven forklifts and other warehouse type devices. The base for my test model is a Dreadnought from the old Space Crusade board game. The carapace section is a little to high-tech for my needs, but the feet, legs and torso will do perfectly.

The first part that needed attention was the feet. As with most Citadel designed miniatures in Milton Bradley board games, the feet of the Dreadnought are moulded to the base. And of course, the base is larger than a standard sized monster base. So cutting the feet away from the moulded base was called for.

I basically used a Dremel cutting tool to slice away the bulk of the plastic from the feet. While a handy tool, the Dremel isn’t really designed to cutting right up to details, so I had to do the rest by hand. It took me about an hour to cut the remaining pieces away from the feet and clean up all the edges.

Tomorrow I plan on starting work on the legs and torso sections.

I was held on retainer for a POS takedown today, so I finally got around to fitting up that Naglfar that’s been gathering dust for months.

I was expecting to not be needed, so it didn’t really surprise me or leave me disappointed. I’d quite like to see what it can do one day though…

I don’t think I need to say much more about Seyllin. Everyone else in the world has already said so much, and most of it ends up being pretentiously obvious stuff anyway.

However, these worm holes opening up everywhere really have grabbed my interest. I already spent quite a bit of time flying around in my Buzzard and probing out sites of various sorts, so when I got the word, I took off into space. Took me a bit, but Metropolis space evidently has a fairly high density of them, for whatever reason.

Some of them took me to places like Sota and Pakhshi from deep in Metropolis high-sec, but I did find several that led to this other new place (cluster? galaxy?) that has everyone up in arms. As I really just wanted to explore, I didn’t take along any sort of combat ship or armaments, so I did manage to bring back some imagery from the other side. (That sounds spookier than I intended. No, I lie, I did intend that.)

Wormhole Entrance

Sleeper Facility

Emergent Defender

Awakened Defender

However, that doesn’t pay the bills. I’ve heard a lot of stories about those drone-like Sleeper ships putting up quite a fight, more than I could handle. I fully intend on going back and gathering more data for later analysis, though.

So instead, I’ve tooled around looking for rogue drones to observe and abandoned (or not) data centers. Evidently those rogue drones defended the Minmatars from a Revelation construction site. Though I put a stop to that; scientific inquiry doesn’t mean I want to see drones flying a dreadnought near my home. And a few of the drones there identified themselves as “sentient”, though I didn’t see any behavior that matched that label. Maybe next time.

Drone Revelation site

Koronakesh and I discussed the relative merits of trying to decode the rogue drone transmissions. Personally, I think we should try to understand them a little more before just destroying them. This shouldn’t downplay the importance of self-defense or even saving other human life, but if we could maybe figure out what makes them tick or how to communicate reliably with them, who knows what we might learn? Or at least stop the attacks.

During my patrol tonight, I ran across a habitation under rogue drone attack, and I got the following transmission:

01001010010100100010010100100011100100100100101001001000100111010101001

That appears to translate to something like

JR%#’JH�)

which of course doesn’t mean much. Yesterday, my research team achieved some breakthroughs on our codebreaker modules, so we’re soldering some quantum microprocessors and other bits onto them for a much improved version. I’ll run this and my other scan data through them when the manufacturing facility finishes its work.

I tracked down a radar site, and Aura told me something interesting about it:

Half-broken remnants of technology drift aimlessly throughout the vacuum; the end result of infighting, CONCORD raids or one of a thousand other common fates suffered by pirate outfits across the cluster. A codebreaker module will be invaluable in uncovering the secrets that are likely hidden here, locked away inside data vaults and semi-functional computerized networks.

Well, that sounds familiar! Looked like an old Angel Cartel mainframe to me, and I know my way around them pretty well. They had some sort of operation handbook and a skill book on Minmatar encryption methods. Not much but not bad.

Angel Mainframe

Skall dock inte göras denna månaden då jag måste spara till resan och så vidare. Resan frågar ni, och ja, kanske skriver om det snart. I vilket fall som helst! Eftersom jag skall ha lite roliga extra saker till min Black Templar arme har jag börjat kolla runt på Forge World efter lite delar och sådant man kan använda.

Självklart även, Black Templars helt egna dreadnought!!!

Är den inte sexig? Hmm, eller ja fel ord kanske. Men jag gillar den som tusan! Här är även samma figur målad:

Det är iaf 1 av de “enheter” som jag skall ha min arme. 2 Dreadnought skall finnas eftersom… jag diggar dom som tusan! Eftersom min arme i sig är ganska mobil så tror jag inte att den kommer förlora på dessa långsamma elit val.

Sen vidare i shoppingen, två av mina enheter kommer vara Terminators, en av dessa en Command Squad, eftersom dom skall vara lite specielle så följer här lite av deras extra saker:

Sen så vill jag även ha lite extra saker att sätta på fordon och liknande i framtiden, så tänker även köpa: Purity Seals.

Tror min arme kommer bli riktigt nice tillslut. ^^ Beror på hur mycket tid jag lägger ner på målandet sen då såklart.
Kommer även lägga upp en bild på min Tau arme senare när jag.. ja orkar.

/Alex

By the Emperors Y-Fronts I thought this thing would never get finished! I estimate 10-15 man hours spent on this, from sprue to the finished item. It totally made me sure that I would NEVER want to paint another AoBR dread, EVER!

So, here it is! C=C welcome!

This post will differ completely from the normal topic of my blog. This post is about game/sci-fi/fantasy archetypes. Now I’m not a hardcore gamer, nor do I play World of Warcraft, or Dungeons and Dragons, so forgive me if I over simplify your favorite race/whatever.

It seems to me that there are usually in fantasy three main classes, with lots of differentiations flowing from those classes. I’m talking about elves, wizards/mages, and fighters. Elves usually are all about stealth, speed, agility, and ranged attack. Wizards/mages usually just have ridiculous colorful spells that defy the laws of nature (it is magic after all), and fighters usually beat the shit out of things. Here are some typical representations:

You see variations of these three archetypes everywhere. I personally LOVE the third. I love a fighter, covered head to toe in armor, charging into the center of the fight causing as much damage as possible, and just soaking up the damage in return. It’s manly and a force to be reckoned with.

Elves and mages piss me off, and so do their variants. To me they’re just a bunch of wimps.  I’m not a real man so I’m going to dance around over here with my tights and my bow, hiding in the bushes shooting arrows at you! Or the mage who is the over educated nerd that can’t build muscle to save his life. All he has is a cloak and if you hit him with a stick you’d probably break his arm. Instead he just waves his staff and does something messed up with pretty, colorful magic. He has to rely on that to fight his battles for him.

Two games that have sort of these dynamics are Starcraft and Warhammer 40k. (regular Warhammer would fit better, but I haven’t played those yet)

As for Starcraft, we have Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. Protoss are basically advanced space elves. Along with the Eldar in Warhammer 40k:

The Zerg bring up another archetype that I hate, the gooey, spikey, organ like thing. It’s just a disgusting bug covered in spikes.

Yes, it might be a bad ass bug, but it doesn’t fit my personal tastes. Along the same vain (pun intended) as the spike theme are things like Chaos from Warhammer 40k:

These guys bug me too. I’m just not into the whole dirty, demonic, spikey horde thing. This includes Orks! The idiots in haphazard armor with shit that’s practically duct-taped together. Sorry. It’s just barbaric spikes, blood, and more spikes. Yet luckily for me, in both games there are human like bad asses covered in armor.

These guys are well armored, carry a shitload of firepower, and are clean. (well, clean in the sense that they don’t have spikes and shit) I just love the imperial/knight aspect to them.

I guess this bias towards this type of archetype is the combination of me growing up doing 100 years war living history, where I was building a suit of plate armor, and watching Gundam Wing Zero as a kid. I just love Gundam. The mech suits just seemed to exemplify the archetype that I love.

The Armored Core serries is also kick ass for this reason.

It’s just something about the raw power behind these things. It’s extremely hard to explain. If you ever get to wear a full suit of plate armor, and I’m talking real armor, not wussy plastic, leather, or rubber, you just get this feeling that you can take on anything. You’re a juggernaut. I guess that’s the word I’ve been looking for, juggernaut.

There are a few things in real life that I think this archetype draws its inspiration from:

I have started working on my Black Templars Dreadnought. I had already painted the one arm, but was not happy with the highlighting, so I went over it all again last night. I only painted a small part to get a feel  for the black highlighting process. Now that I have a formula I am happy with, I will continue with the rest of it. In the meantime, here is what I have done:

I’m pleased with how he’s looking so far. However, that being said, I don’t think i’ll ever want to paint another AoBR dready, as there is something about it that makes it feel like a toy more than a model. The plastic its made from seems harder and more unforgiving than the regular boxed sets. More to come!

Paul