Reverse Engineered Alien Arc Reactor

I'm about to go off and get my summer convention season started, which pretty much means little fiddly stuff is going on the back burner. Fortunately, I managed to get a few projects wrapped up before the shift. As a for instance, there was this little project I was working on, something with paratroopers, and its finally done, wrap, fine, completed. Even took pics of them all, I just haven't had time to clean them up. Hopefully that won't fall too far onto the back burner, but between the Steampunk World's Fair and ImagiCon, its probably gonna end up collecting dust for a while.

This, on the other hand, I'm just going to sort of toss out there.



Its a 15mm scale model of an alien arc reactor, recovered by... someone... in the 1940s, reverse engineered, and pressed back into service to power some infernal war machine. Its also close enough to the size of a Flames of War objective market for



It was a very fast, simple build that started out as a small plasma sphere I got from Edmond Scientific. Its battery or AC powered, and works a lot better if you hook it up to an AC adapter rated just a few amps higher than the device is speced for. I wouldn't leave it on all day like that, but its cool.



I took the plasma globe and covered the base in whatever junk looked right from the bits box, plus most of a 1/72 scale Vietnam war era jet support crew accessory kit I picked up some place. I have some figures to go with it -- three techs and a German officer on site for inspection -- but they aren't painted yet. I even made the floor of the elevator (where one tech and the officer will stand) removable so that I could make another later, or have FoW sized skirmish bases fit on there.

I'm so BORED with olive drab!

I'm so frackin' bored with painting olive drab! Actually, I'm kinda bored with painting miniatures in general. And pretty damned burned out on WWII as a whole, at least the version of the war fought without benefit of daemons and jet packs.

So, its time for something different.

Actually, there's a lot swirling around on this one, and the timing is all sort of coming together for me. I've been getting a bit worn out on painting various shades of brownish green and greenish gray for a while now, but I've been plugging ahead, partly just to have something to do. Idle hands, and all that. I made it a personal goal to FINISH THE FUCKING PARATROOPERS before starting anything else. That just made things worse. I mean, they are so damn close! All I've got left is to finish a scout platoon, paint the objectives, paint the command and hero elements, do up a few markers, and that's it. Well, then I'd have to go back and retail all the previously finished stuff to bring it up to the same standard as the later finished stuff, and add flock and other foliage, and fake snow. But man, they are close! I really don't want them to join the ranks of half-finished armies filling my shelves.

On the other hand, I was thrown out of the main BattleFront forums a while back. I'm not going to rehash the entire sordid affair now, but basically I was getting very critical of BF's newer products, and the guy who is behind the stuff I was being most critical of runs the forum. I made a comment that gave someone grounds for complaint, and I was shown the door, along with CrazyIvan, another infamous loud-mouth. This started an exodus of other loud-mouths to STCC, our local gaming forum -- you should drop by, you'll like it. Much talk was made of our banning being the beginning of the end for BF as they slid inexorably into GW land. Their most recent army book bears this out, with all manner of stupid shit.

Then today they announced the rules and location of the 2009 National Tournament. Hum, how to put this..... fuck 'em. I wasn't that big on it anyway, but they've done a few things that just pissed off pretty well everyone. Its in the middle of no where, so there shall be no extra-curricular fun. No popping out to Historicon between rounds this year. It's in a rented athletic center, so we'd probably have to put up with jocks in the lobby. But the real shark-jumping deal killer are some of the rules in the painting competition. From their announcement:

1. All entries must contain nothing but Battlefront Miniatures.
7. National Tournament participants may not enter categories with components of their army considering those components will be unavailable during the day.

Most of the other rules suck, but those two pissed off pretty much everyone on both sides of the fence. The power gamers basically have to bring two armies, one to fight and one to show off. And anyone who, like me, mixes brands has just been auto-disqualified. My masterpiece is no longer a tournament-legal force. In a historical game. Without copyright restrictions.

And I was struggling to get that shit painted?

So, OK, BF is doing its level best to blow the Flames of War community to shreds. That's fine, I was getting bored, anyway. I need something new, and I need something wierd, damn it! I need gyrocopters and genetic super soldiers! I need airships, with pirates, and maybe aliens. Or deamons, those would work, too. I need to MAKE some shit, and get some real creativity flowing. I need wild parties with fancy people who don't take anything seriously, except for cool things that shouldn't be taken that way at all. I need some new music, too.

I need SteamPunk.

I've been resisting the siren call of hammered brass for a few years now. The whole SteamPunk thing just pulls in the best parts of damn near everything I've ever liked, and wraps it up in DIY coating of live action not role playing party time costume fun with live bands and Tesla coils. But I knew once I jumped I'd be in it up to my eyeballs. Well, the hell with it, I jumped. The basement is now full of brass and cogs and telescopes and toy guns and freaky monsters and all the horror, fantasy, leather, cyber, archaic mixed up nonsense that Mrs. Utini and I have been collecting for years. The whole thing fits like a well-worn glove, probably because we've had our fingers in all the holes all along. We're finally just giving in, and putting all the pieces together. I mean, what umbrella but SteamPunk could cover Lovecraft, Pirates, and WWII all at the same time? (No, at least at this point I don't feel like sub-dividing out DieselPunk. Its just a continuum between Steam and Cyber, anyway.)

So the game table is covered in brass bits, monster specimens, gun parts, sticked up weirdness and all manner of shit from the thrift store. And it is beautiful. The creativity has flown like blood in the gutters of boredom. I have my new. And it's something old, that I've had all along. Its really very liberating -- damn near EVERYTHING I like fits, at least partially or with overlap, into SteamPunk, just as long as you define that term broadly enough.

Obviously, I'll be posting pics.

This does not mean the end of wargaming and miniature painting. But it does mean its going to take a back seat for a bit. I'll finish the paratroopers, and I'll finish my retroactive updates about them at some point. And I'll still be playing games, probably as much as I do now. Hell, we've got a Descent campaign starting in a week and a half! But there will also be pics up here for all the new crazyness.

Because new is good.
And Old New must be very good.

Rustungmacht stalking 1946

Through the ruins of an unspecified European metropolis, the armoured soldiers of the Rustungmacht stalk the night. Their eyes glow red in the gloom as they pick their way over piles of broken bricks, their boots crunching into gravel beneath knee deep water. If the underground factories can only produce enough of these powerful suits of infantry armour then none of the allied pigdogs will make it home for Christmas '46.

Obviously, we're in Weird War territory again. At some point I'd like to write a real background piece for these, but for now the simple version is that these things are 1940s grade Storm Trooper armour for use in alternate histories of WWII. They are gas sealed, have nightvision, and are totally bullet proof -- just don't go thinking you can take a bazooka round to the chest.

Edit: Because a bunch of folks asked, here's where I got these guys (and I ain't even gettin' paid...): Eureka Miniatures.



These are also the first real miniatures pictures I've taken with my new camera. Lets see how things turned out (again, pics link to big ass pics)...







I've already described these guys in an "under the hood" article, and the painting is really simple, just highlighted panzer grey. I did add decals to the shoulders for the numbers, just to give you something to look at. The red eyes were what really brought them to life. It doesn't really come out in the pics, but they have a nice thick coating of gloss varnish over the eyes to make them look more like lenses.



We've kicked around a few ideas on rules for these guys in Flames of War, but I've never fielded them. If I ever get around to comming up with something solid and doing a spot of play testing on it, I'll post it up here.



Also, the name may or may not change, but I kinda like it. Using Google language tools, I figure it could maybe translate as "powered armature," or Power Armour, without using the word "panzer."

Weird War II -- SciFi German Death Rays

Based on reverse-engineered technology salvaged from craft left-over from the 1938 Martian invasion, the German military first began field-trials of their various Death Ray weapons in late 1943. By mid-1944 units began to receive these weapons in limited quantities, typically with a single unit receiving a mix of weapon types. Fitted to existing halftrack mounts, these weapons were issued to anti aircraft units, though they were often intended for ground attack uses. Here we see both a Heat Ray and a plasma weapon of some type:





Ev
The Heat Rays were very popular with the troops and made excellent area-denial weapons. Effective in the anti-infantry role, when fired the weapon spewed forth a shower of white-hot sparks, instantly vaporizing organic tissues. The victim's remains are deposited on the ground as a roughly man-shaped lump of white powder. An interesting side-effect of extensive use of the weapon is a localized magnetic field which can knock out wired and wireless communications and temporarilly magnetize clocks and compases, rendering them useless for a short time.





The plasma weapon, referred to by the troops simply as a "death ray," is a more complicated -- and less reliable -- design, but it is the far more potent of the two weapons. Its science is a secret closly guarded and seldom explained by the scientists of the Third Reich, but it somehow breaks down the atomic forces holding molecules together. Any object hit by these glowing green globs simply seases to exist. Tanks glow for a moment before they disapear. Humans freeze in place, their skeleton briefly shadowed by their radioactive flesh, before they also vanish.





I built these models on a whim on afternoon. Based on Battlefront armoured AA halftracks (it is two vehicles, with different putty-made stowage, but I wasn't consistant when I took the pictures), the weapon mounts are removable, allowing the vehicles to return to standard duty.



The guns themselves are built up from old Games Workshop 40K heavy weapons. In this case I used a multi-melta from a Space Marine land speeder, and a plasma cannon from... somewhere (maybe Imperial Guard? I really don't remember.) The gunners are Battlefront side-car riders seated on cut-down Old Glory side cars, with some rivited plate armour salvaged from some old GierKrieg models. The controlls are disused gun sights, and the back sides were detailed with whatever crap from the bitz box looked right, mostly Space Marine jet pack and bolter parts.



Eventually I'll come up with some rules for these things as part of mysooner-or-later-but-probably later Weird War Two project.