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My group of gamers get together once a year for a apocalypse game.

(Some threads to prior year's battle reports)
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/490520.page
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/420150.page

For this year, we discussed the idea of doing a big fortress raid, attackers vs defenders. Sounds cool, but we don't have a fortress, and certainly none of us want to spend GW prices for a wall of martyrs. Gotta make a fortress then. And, on a deadline - game is Nov. 16th, so it's got to be fully functioning by then.

First, I speced out a plan for how big it should be, based on the size of table we have available;



I decided to make the walls modular, so that we can use it in a variety of ways, including for normal-sized games.

Looking at the plan, I'm making;
1 large gate - sized big enough to drive a baneblade through, so the doorway is about 8" wide by 6" high. This will be a 2-foot long section.

2 smaller gates - sized so you can drive a chimera through, so about 5" wide by 4" high. These will be 1-foot long sections.

3 large walls with defense towers - 1 foot long sections.

2 small walls - 6 inch long sections

2 corners - 6 inch long sections.

The walls will all be 4" deep along the walkways, 5" deep at the bottom, with the sloping side being the front of the walls.

Step one is building the frames for the sections. This entailed cutting out the walkways (tops of the sections), and sides of each section. The interior sides of the gates are the same dimensions as the exterior sides and are done at the same time.

I didn't start taking pics of this until I wrapped up tonight, because I hadn't thought about blogging the project, so the only pic I have from tonight's work is the final picture of all the sections, set up for scale.



The sides are attached to the top with wood glue, and 1/2" square dowels used to give stability (you can just about see them in the pic).


Tomorrow: I have a few hours to work in the morning and I'll get started on adding the fronts and backs to these walls. Not sure how much I'll get done, as I've got plans in the afternoon, evening, and Sunday.

I'll be keeping an eye on this ambitious project. Best of luck.

Didn't sleep much last night, as for some reason, my brain decided it wanted to recall all of my high school geometry. As a result, I woke up with a detailed plan for building the defense towers.

I decided to make the towers hexagons, using leftover 4" strips that were cut to be wall tops as walls. This worked out nicely, with enough to do all three towers without needing to cut more walls. The floors would be a bit trickier, as I'd need to cut out hexagons, three per tower, and they'd need to be fairly accurate.



I set about starting to do the math involved, but as I was using my handy 6" movement template as a straight-edge, I realized that the angle between it's two main sides was the 30% angle I needed for the hexagons. Score! This part suddenly went much faster.

Mocked up the sides and floors to make sure they fit, needed a little trimming.



I got this saw for $70 on sale at Home Depot, and it's great for projects like this, a real time saver over the hand jigsaw I had been using before.



All floors and things are ready to go, mock it up one more time.



Start assembly. These are the square dowels I mentioned in the last post, which have multiple uses. Here, they're holding the walls straight up and adding a gluing surface.



And as I progress, they are used to get the right spacing for the upper floor of the tower.



Finished one...



Finished all three...





Well, not completely finished. I'm going to use some round dowels to fill in the gaps between the walls, and then some spackle to smooth that out, and I need to bust out the dremel to do some minor trimming on the top of the towers so they're all the same height, but that needs to wait for the glue to dry.


Hmm, seems dusty down there, looking at the pics...

Very cool. I may end up stealing all of these ideas.

Very good looking so far, can't wait to see future updates.

Looks promising, subscribed!

I'd like to see how this turns out...

A terrain wip thread by redbeard? Yeah, that's an instant subscribe!

Added the front and rear wall plates yesterday and tonight.

I used a cheaper almost card material for these parts as they're not structural, and it was cheaper. I figured I'd use quite a bit of it, and at $5 for a 2'x4' sheet, it's not breaking the bank. It's not quite MDF, but it's something like that, I'm not really sure what.

First, added the backs. These were much easier because there was no angle to worry about, just glue them on.



Then the front; Note the use of more 1/2" square dowels for bracing supports. They're a very useful building material.



Had to do some tricky angle work to make the corners work, and to add the wall plates around the towers.

Here's where I'm at. It's starting to look like a fort.




After seeing these together, I'm contemplating adding two more corners and 3 plain wall sections, just to be able to finish it off. The walls would be easy, but the corners are a bit of a pain.

What's next:

I need to fabricate the two side gate houses and large main gate. I did a sketch on my iPad for some main gate ideas:



I'm totally stealing the dual spire look from the forgeworld imperial gates, cause it just screams 40k-fortress-must-be-a-church. The front gate battlement is going to be 16" wide by 8" deep, so there's lots of room to play with. I'm thinking of putting a big mega-cannon thing up there and counting it like the Aquilla Macro Cannon. We had another player ask to join the apoc game, so the fortress is aiming for between 2-3k pointwise. So far, it's going to be the new mega-fortress (AV 15, hard to kill). Each main defense turret will have a battle cannon on the room, probably some other guns on the sides, and maybe also an anti-air weapon on the roof as well. The small gates will have heavy bolters, and the main gate will also have several lascannons and probably another set of heavy bolters, or maybe a pair of hurricane bolters I found lying in a box.

I'm now thinking of adding the same slope to the front and sides of it, so it matches the walls a bit more. It's a bit more effort, but I think the look would be worth it.

I'm also working out how to make the gate sections have working gates. I'm thinking (game-wise), you can declare opening or closing the gate if you're in the gatehouse, declare it during your movement phase. At the beginning of your next turn, it changes state. If it was open, and is closing, anything in the way is crushed to death! (Mwhahaha)


Question for people reading:

Are you more interested in seeing process, or results? Would anyone like a breakdown of what sorts of tools I use for this?

I'm totally digging it. I'm more into building Atlantic Wall like stuff but I'm a sucker for all types of threads about forts so please do post many photos.

M.

Last couple of nights work was mostly structural, working on the main gate house.

Working on buildings like this, you need to start from the inside out, and this one is going to be tricky because of angles around existing walls, as well as making a functioning gate.

The first step is to measure out how large the gate needs to be, and how big the main internal support braces need to be. This needed to be done in steps though. First, I got the depth of the supports cut out, and made the cuts that allow it to sit over the walkway piece.

I also cut out the pieces for the gate. I can't cut the tops of the supports to size yet, because I need to know how high the gate will reach in its up position.



Then, I got the idea that the front gate should have an engraved aquilla on it. That took the most of last night.



Meanwhile, I installed magnets into the walkway over the gate area, and into the bottom of the gate. These will hold the gate when it is in the up position. Need really big magnets on the top, to hold the weight of the gate which is substantial.



Glued the front and back of the gate together, and here it is.



After verifying the gate worked as planned, I glued the support walls in place, and then added the rear of the gatehouse. This needs to sit drying overnight.



Last thing tonight was then cutting out the roof of the gatehouse. I'm using the same angle as the defense turrets, which should help visually pulling the project together.



Nothing tomorrow, going to the Bears game. But, I've got Friday off work, so with luck, I can finish the main gate, and get a start on the small gate houses.

So, picking up with a whole day's worth of work, which started with a trip to home depot to get more wood - I used up a bit more than planned so far. I also got another couple of clamps, because you can never have too many clamps.

Apologies, again, for the picture quality. My basement is quite dusty and that seems to play havoc with the flash.

After getting the top of the gatehouse done, it's time to get the walls done. To do that, I had to remove some of the battlements, using my trusty dremel cutting bit.



Once that was done, it was easy enough to get the sides in place. The angled front sections proved more of a challenge though. I had to work in a couple of support floors at the mid-level, and remove a chunk of the front wall in order for this to work.




With that out of the way, I went and build four more feet of basic wall, two corners and some straights without gates or towers, in order to be able to make a fully enclosed fort. Nothing too exciting in terms of pictures, but here's a shot of the full layout, to give some idea of the scope of this project.



Next up, it's time to work on the small gates. I did these like the big gate, but with an extra crossbar, which controls the height that the gate will rise to. These will be big enough to drive a Russ through, but I don't need, or want, to make these gates 12" tall, so this will allow me to make much shorter houses.



We have decided that the main gun over the gatehouse will be counted as one of the new apocaypse gun things. But those are expensive. My friend Art happened to have an armorcast gun, and it looks like it will do the trick. He worked on putting that together while I was doing the gates.



At the end of the day, here's where things stand.



Other thoughts:

I bought some laser-cut doors from Demo's Laser Cut designs. They seem reasonably priced, and should get here tomorrow. I've mostly got the arched gothic doors, which will be used for all the wall buildings. I've also ordered some sci-fi widgets from Miniature Scenery, which look to provide some nice surface textures.

I've also decided to make interior buildings. Last year, my wife and I took a vacation, and we visited a couple of 18th century forts - Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, and the Citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Visiting these, you realize that a fort isn't just walls, it's protecting something, and that something is generally troops and equipment.

I'm going to be making the following buildings to be in the fort:

Barracks (maybe 2)
Doc station/Medicae
Command station and communication center
Magazine
Garage
Mess hall

If I do this right, we'll be able to utilize the buildings, and their layout within the walls, as a kind of Zone Mortalis setup, and should add some interest to the idea of having some elite troops deep strike into the fortress during the battle. (Something them at Fort Ticonderoga never had to worry about...)

Today, I built two small gate houses.

Other than the size, it was pretty much the same plan as the big one, except I made these square to save on their footprint, and so I didn't have to muck about with getting the side angles right. I did have to do some creative cuts to get the side of the gatehouse over the angled wall though, but nothing a little measuring couldn't solve.



I got my doors in the mail. They're a touch short, but I will mask that by putting a 1/4" square dowel underneath each, and it will look like an entry step.

Here, you can see some, along with the gate in place, and demo tank proving it can fit through, even with sponsons.



Along with the door, I got some antenna towers, that I will probably add a skin to, to make them solid. I made a couple of small towers to support these as well.





Nope, I'm not stealing ideas from the FW gates at all...

Tomorrow, I hope to build my interior buildings, and then that's it for the major assembly, after that, it's all refinement and embellishment.

Looking GREAT!!

Are you going to go with a grey stone or a beige stone for the color or your fort?

Grey. It has that imperial feel. Plus, on a budget, grey primer is far easier to find.

Only if it's not an official GW primer
Like how it's coming but feel it's too small for a fort
M.

Sunday, I built the buildings for the inner courtyard. Most of them are fairly simple - 4 walls and a roof. I've left the roofs removable, so that guys can be moved inside them easily, and cut out door spaces.



There's one command building that has a high enough roof to see over the fortress walls, I figured a commander type might want to get a first-hand look. So that one gets battlements.



The largest is a garage, with a doorway wide enough to drive most imperial tanks through. And, I decided that it should also have a landing pad on the roof, just cause.



So, here's the overview of the courtyard buildings:



So, that's all of the structural work done. I started refining things by taking an orbital sander to all of the main panel seams, so they're all flush now. I also sanded down all the uneven battlements to get rid of the jagged look. Next step, getting messy with the spackle.

This is looking better and better each time I pop in this thread!

Epically scaled build

Will be waiting for the next update!

Yesterday and today after work, I did some work on finishing off the main construction.

First, I cut out pieces to reinforce all the parapets, getting a fixed size for them all, and glued them in place. Can't sand for 24 hours after doing this, so I went and played my online bloodbowl game, although I also cut out some 1/4 dowels to serve as door jambs and got them glued in place.



After that glue was dry, I sanded all the parapets down so they were all identical height and the edges were flush. Then, it was time to start spackling.

The spackle is this horrible pink goo that's the color of peptobismol and smells vaguely like starwberry(?) As it dries, it turns white, so you know when it's ready to do another layer, or sand it. It says apply with a spackle knife, but unfortunately, some of the angles I need to fill require me to work it in with my fingers, and... well, let's just say this is my least favourite step of the project.



Well, this takes 5 hours to dry to the point where I can do the next coat, and I need to work tomorrow, so second coat tomorrow night, and then sanding it all down on Thursday, by the looks of things.

That's incredible so far! Looks like an absolute blast to play on! Thanks for sharing your progress, and I'm very impressed at the speed with which you're getting this done.

This is amazing to watch. Subscribed for sure!
I can't wait to see this monster when it's finished.

Last night, I added the second layer of spackle. Today, I got my dust mask out and sanded all the excess off. I've got chalky-dust all over the basement now :( Still, there's no other good way to do this.



Then I had the bright idea to give the parapets a more finished look by putting caps on them. So, I cut a whole lot of 1/2" strips and went about applying them over all the walls.



I need to finish off the tops of the gates and turrets still, and it does do a good job of hiding any slightly-off joins at the wall edges, as well as adding a little bit of surface texturing to the wall fronts.

Finally, I glued on all the doors for the turrets and gates. (And, for fun, mocked up the main armaments for the turrets. )



Tomorrow: cutting more 1/2" strips and doing the angle math for the tops of the turrets. And figuring out what to add to the front of the walls to give them a more finished look.

Are you going to add small arms or just the big guns?

M.

that is briliant!, i will be watching this thread, the only suggestion is the turrents should be in the middle of the tower

This thingi s Awesome!! I think you could class yourself as "fairly safe" being behind those ramparts!

Got to admit the grey sounds like the way to go for the wall colour!

Going to keep checking in on this one for sure!! Good Work!!

Miguelsan wrote:Are you going to add small arms or just the big guns?

I've got a ton of heavy bolter sponson pieces from old leman russ tanks that I'm going to mount on the buildings, but I need to cut some stuff that looks like housing for them. Current plans are to have 2 heavy bolters on each tower (1 per exterior side), 2 on the front of each gate, with an additional lascannon on the front of each gate too. I've also got a set of hurricane bolters that I'm going to try any mount as extra small-arms defense for the main gate, and possibly work in some flamers to cover each gatehouse as well.

the_valeyard6 wrote:that is briliant!, i will be watching this thread, the only suggestion is the turrents should be in the middle of the tower

I'm not sure about that. Aesthetically, possibly. But from a gaming perspective, putting the turret in the center really reduces the footprint available to deploy models in, and these are gaming pieces.

Finished the tops of the buildings. They look a lot more finished now, it's starting to look like something.



By the way, if anyone ever needs to know when you're going to use algebra, geometry, or trig after high school, it's on projects like these...

Here's what I'm planning to do tomorrow:



I reckon I need about 40 of these, and they'll go at the edges of the walls to add support. I'll probably use a little thinner ones on the back side - those are 5/8", and I'll probably use 1/2" on the back.

40 seems like a good starting point. This is immense and looking great so far.

Looking at this as a newly-started painter, I'm speechless. Let me put it like this: you're able to not make me give this hobby up in fear of never being good enough, simply by completely knocking me off my chair with the sheer magnificence of the project. And it should be the other way around. Exalted.

This sounds awesome man. I'd love to do something like this one day, I can't imagine how fun playing on a board with that on would be like.

But ugh, the maths. I'm best at mental arithmetic and I still can't stand writing lists without a calculator or just flat out using an army builder.