Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Thanks Paradigm, Barzam and Archer. All it takes is practice, really. Set your 'mind in motion' and see where it goes.

Well, not that random Graven. There is a plan, and as soon as I figure out what it is, I'll share

Doc, Mentats of Dune? Hmm. I enjoyed Dune, but never had any interest in the sequels. Dune, magnificent read that it is, seemed complete to me. Travel to Arrakis would be bad, ah, here's why, even though the article is about Tatooine. Arrakis would be even nastier. Science was not Herbert's strong suit.

Set your 'mind in motion'

I see what you did there.

 Red Harvest wrote:
Doc, Mentats of Dune? Hmm. I enjoyed Dune, but never had any interest in the sequels. Dune, magnificent read that it is, seemed complete to me.

Mentats of Dune is the 2nd in a trilogy that are the sequels to the legend of Dune trilogy (that explains about the robot domination and the Butletian Jihad, hence why thinking machines are banned in Dune. It also sets up where the technology comes from; suspensors, body shields, folding space, etc...) and prequels to the prequels of Dune trilogy (that explains the history of the 3 important houses that are involved in Dune; Atreides, Harkonnen and Corrino, up to the events in Dune). This trilogy involves the history of Mentats, the Sisterhood and the Suk school.

However, the Legends of Dune, Preludes of Dune and this trilogy are written by Frank's son, Brian, in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson. The books that they have written are not looked upon as favourably as Frank's books. But I do enjoy them.
They also wrote a direct sequel to Dune, Paul of Dune, that slots in before the series of sequels that Frank wrote:
Dune Messiah,
Children of Dune,
God Emperor of Dune,
Heretics of Dune, and
Chapter house Dune...

Here is where Frank got to before he died, but there was more notes to finish off the story and Brian and Kevin wrote the final two books; Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. I haven't read these last two yet, having only just got hold of Hunters'. Reviews are not good, but I needed to complete the set.

To be fair, Dune is the only book that is a must read for everybody.
Frank Herbert's sequels are worth a look if you want to know where things go from there.
Whether you bother with Brian Herbert's books is up to you. I personally would recommend the Legends and Prequels trilogies if you want to learn about the history of Dune (Were the thinking machines really that bad? Why the bad blood between the Harkonnens and Atreides? Although that is being expanded upon in the current trilogy I'm reading, who invented the Holtzmann engines that fold space? etc...).

Also, certain parts of my Armies fluff would make more sense.

The whole series of books extend thousands of years in both directions from the time of Dune. Long enough that even names of places change slightly from book to book (e.g. Arrakis becoming Rakis is the only one I remember... I think...), which is a nice touch.

Travel to Arrakis would be bad, ah, here's why, even though the article is about Tatooine. Arrakis would be even nastier. Science was not Herbert's strong suit.

At least on Arrakis people did complain about the lack of water, wore stillsuits and rendered down the dead to extract the moisture. On Tatooine, they walk about in loose-fitting clothing breathing out all their bodily moisture.
I'm not really one to travel much anyway. *shrugs*

Ah, the Fridge Logic

I hope you enjoy the book Decent books are harder to find these days. Recently read the John Scalzi book, 'Old Man's War', based on some positive reviews. Personally, not impressed. My local library actually has a copy of a book by one of the authors Littletower mentioned ( Casares) so I'm going to get a hold of that. I also have the Long Earth series to finish. So I'm set for some end of summer reading.

A quick update. All I had time to do last night was make the permanent floor for the building. The one in the previous photos is just a place holder and slides right out, so that it is easier to get at the interior to work on it.

The final floor will slide into place, and out too. I don't think I'll permanently affix it.

and look like this. The slot is for the stairwell, or a suggestion of a stairwell.

I'm just going to use printed inserts for the interior.

hopefully I can get back to painting soon.

Thanks for stopping by.

Looking fantastic, nice solid look to the floor. Whole build is spot on.

Only really silly thing bugging me, internal framing to the windows! How arsey am I?!! Maybe just some white stickers, trimming it up!

Sorry.

That is one well-designed and well-constructed building! Very jealous of your precise construction skills

Tack så mycket, Mymearan.

Cam, the outer frames are only temporarily in place, since it is much easier to paint them then glue them into place. And You're not being arsey at all. I had a comment about the windows already, from a fellow scratch-builder on another forum. His quote:

A small issue with the window dividers:

They seem to be a bit flimsy looking and not really straight and true the way the rest of the building is.

Also, the second floor seems a bit warped. I'm not sure if that is an element of the picture taking process or something that is actually a problem. If it is a problem you should definitely fix it. Your overall level of quality makes errors like that really stand out.

An example of his work is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4Ua6nlC1U

Interior framing will be much simpler. There will be no muntins. It is a PITA to line them up, and something to be done after the outer muntins are in place. But, using something like vinyl tape-- white or brown-- would work. That's what we were taught to use when I was in school.
That's the thing with WIPs. :S But thanks for the C&C. Better safe than sorry.

As I mentioned, the half-building was an experiment, because I wanted to play around with some ideas. Well, first of all, I needed to refine the whole windows thing. ( Not a fan of the Windows. Especially the new spyware edition. ) So, here is my solution: make them modular.

added a frame around the window frame to keep it straight.

It slots in nicely, and no curving. And as a bonus

I was able to add a frame to the inside as well. Something that was on the "get around to it" list. And I probably would not have got around to it for a while, except Cam mentioned it, prompting me to think about it now-- and probably saved me some time and effort down the road. Thanks, Cam The interior needs much work, but mañana.

Here is why I was experimenting, for the objective room. Early WIP shots.



Although I am thinking about removing the 'feet' from those columns. I'll decide after I finish the roof and maybe a second story of some sort-- since it won't always be an 'objective' room. I'll worry about the interior, well, mañana otra vez.

Other thing, other experiment.

The planter, how believable is it as granite? I ask because I was thinking of facing the half-building in it, and the objective room too.


Quick progress report. The Tic-Tac container displays,

Added panels to all of them, and vents to 2 of them. Now to worry about the narrow sides. a narrow poster, or something else?

Found this foam at the craft store, thought it might make for quick roads.

Add on some cracks, and othe signs of wear, tear and use and I think it will work well. And maybe paint the lines a bit neater. Or not. Road lines tend to be a bit fuzzy around here.

Thanks for stopping by.

For a moment there, I thought you were redecorating your house. Your actual house.

Looks great Red.

Love the windows. Apologies if you've said this before but what are use using to glue the clear "material" with?

They are just pressure fit. If I sandwich the 'glass' between layers of paper and glue the paper, it keeps the 'glass' in place-- sort of a frame and panel construction. Alternatively, a drop of PVA at each of the corners will hold them in place on the frame. If I had to glue them I would probably use a silicone adhesive, similar to what is used for glass aquarium tanks.

To take advantage of the AAA...

I am going to migrate everything from my thread in the Infinity forum to here. Now that the Infinity forums have been re-organized, it seems a better arrangement to have all the terrain stuff here. First off, the photos of all the fence pieces, 24 of them, I did last year for the LoER.



And a simple arrangement


A larger arrangement


A still larger arrangement


And the largest arrangement

Plenty of room for a garden-- a few planters. maybe a building? A fountain? Palm trees? Endless possibilities.

A few detail shots,

Shoot-out at the OK Corral, or maybe the QK corral

and how it may look against the guesthouse

Nice match, eh?

A top view


The garden shed-- need to put a vent on the roof at some point, to serve as a handle... and oh, a leaf and a garden trowel inside it. Y'know why. But it is fine for now.



Thanks for stopping by.

Beautiful walls man! How did you make them?

Start hereabouts and work your way forward http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/330/583487.page#7321531

But a quick overview would look like this:

Fit layers of cardstock to a form and laminate the layers together so they hold the shape. Remember the paper curves easily on one axis, but not on another. Try it sometime. Same reason paper tears nicely on one axis, but is a ragged mess on the perpendicular axis.

And another AAA... the migration continues...

Here comes the Comfort Station Zebra, another LoER entry from 2014...





The HVAC unit¹ and the stairs make for nice partial cover positions, and so does the roof vent and window section.
The interior is playable too, with the space large enough for a 25 mm base in much of the area, and one can place the mini or something else atop the walls for those areas which are too tight.





And here it is with a few of the Hab module pieces. (This is not part of the entry, BTW)


This was much fun to build.
¹ note that it has 4 of something to hold the nameplate to the case

I forgot about the buildings with realistic HVAC and toilets

If only I could have made the toilets flush.

Anyway, the migration is almost over. Only one more after this.

Here are the Hab modules, from the first LoER I entered, in early 2014. Lots of photos, so spoilered.

The planters first. We need them for the low visibility zones, and the planter portions can provide some partial cover. Planters make excellent scatter.
All views under the spoiler:

The back of the chevron shaped planter is meant to go against a wall of the hab module, so it is not painted, just primed, and hence, not shown.

Power, always a need. So here is a generator, which serves as another nice piece of scatter.
Top views:

You can see the LED inside the generator. Yes, we like to light up the terrain in Infinity. It is the cheerful brightness of the near future

Front Views:

More under the spoiler


I did not have time to print any sort of warning signs or anything else that would have added additional character to the generator. Maybe if everything else is done in time, I can go back and try. It's hard to photograph something that is internally lit too :(

Here are the HVAC pieces. All good Hab modules need air conditioning eh?

More under the spoiler

And here is the Commications Array, so folks can phone home, or something

More under the spoiler


Here is the Comfort station. It is large enough to house a shower, a few sinks and of course, the toilets. The last photo shows the LED inside. No I was not going to do the interior on this


More under the spoiler


And finally the Habitat modules themselves


More under the spoiler


Here is the interior. I ran out of time and could not add the interior stuff to it. The plan was for a few bunks, a table and some benches, and a few cabinets and foot lockers to be used as interior scatter. I did not add LEDs here, because they would get in the way of play. The windows are removable, if it becomes needed, as are the doors. I chose blue doors because when I researched my big building, I noted that a large number of doors in that part of the world were painted blue. So, I paint my Bourak building doors blue.


And here are a bunch of group shots showing the whole thing in action-- as a listening post, or outpost or FOB or research station etc. As you can see, it will be quite playable, and actually looks like a nice enough place for our little metal meeples to lay down their weary heads after a hard day of fighting, or exploring, or whatever... watching cable pirated via the Comm Array

More under the spoiler


Thanks for stopping by.

Dat toilet, holy crap at the detail!

 Red Harvest wrote:

I've been watching blog about this and below mentioned buldings...
I bow down with words: "I'm not worthy".


Awesome terrain pieces.

Your work makes me cry with joy. Seriously. The level of precision you have accomplished, consistently, is amazing.

Yes the granite is believable. The windows look great too.

I noticed the E6000 adhesive in the background of one of your photos. Does that work well?

Such awesome stuff I may have to steal the glowey generator bit

It is a subtle effect because the slits for the light are rather narrow, but it works. I used red plastic inserts for the them. ( cut up one of those cheap binders for it.) I see I should have a photo or two of it in dim light, so the lighting shows better.

Cleatus, it is rather messy to use, and I have yet to try it for the purpose which I bought it, which is for those plastic lids I was using as roofs. I'll post something when I do give it a try. If it does not work, I'll be giving the Liquid Nails silicone adhesive a try.

The Final bit of the migration.

The National Museum of the American Indian, a 1/200 version of which I built for the NOVA Open 2012 Narrative Tournament, shown in the following photos.


For the first building on the Bourak Table I am still working on after 2 1/2 years, I built this. Someone suggested calling it a sand castle


A close-up of the rooftop details


I am still in the process of finishing several of the smaller buildings for the board. They need paint. The half building is meant to be placed along a table edge. I'm not so sure I'll keep the rooftop garden.


For scatter terrain, I built this. I call it an Urban Oasis.


I also built several more pieces to accompany it. All will be painted to match, and two of them will get water effects.


I also made these in lieu of trees, Communication Arrays ( I think that's what they could be). The effect is supposed to be red marble. It doesn't photograph so well ( Or I don't take photographs so well.) I have a few more ideas for them, and the basic design.


Here is the tabletop I built for it, using floor tiles. It is a heavy tabletop. I like the lip around the sides. Keeps things on the table (like dice...)


I have a few different ideas now. Evolution happens, eh?

Thanks for stopping by.

That's just so beautiful. I'm lost for words.

Yeah fantastic stuff.

 Red Harvest wrote:

By the power of Gray Skull!

Gray? Skulls? Oh dear. ( You'd have to read through this blog to understand.) (A He-Man reference?)

That was the last post from the Infinity forum thread, so it'll be all new material from now on, and I'll let that thread sink to the bottom.

I recently had the idea that for an urban board, instead of the ubiquitous shipping containers that one sees on an Infinity table-- well many of them-- I would go with, well, shipping containers on wheels, that is to say public transportation buses. I did some calculations and estimated that for a 1/55 scale bus, I would end up with a block 47mm wide, 199mm long and 61 mm high. But good luck finding anything in that scale. I did find some interesting papercraft buses, and re-scaled one from 1/64 to 1/55. It turned out 48.5mm wide ( so close) 64mm high (Not bad) and 249mm long. ( a bit too long) But still, I think the dimensions work. Photos with minis for scale:


Shown with a papercraft car scaled to 1/55

and shown with the Icestorm shipping containers


My eyes tell me that the idea of 'shipping containers with wheels' will work just fine. Now I just need to come up with a bus design that looks sufficiently futuristic-- there are a few out there. And make a bus stop of the future.

Completely off topic, but look at what I won. It just came in the mail yesterday. Nice way to start the week-end, eh?

Some sort of enter a code contest on a cookie package ( Keebler cookies) They are rather nice headphones. A bit "bass-y" though.

And they are red. Red ones sound better. Truth.

Thanks for stopping by.

hey red!
the word "bus" shocked me so much that i had to take a look...
i know i have become sort of a stranger...i am so behind many of my subsribed blogs... sorry mate...

but since you made the recent rewind^^ it kept me quite good in touch of the past works... that new building you´re working on looks frightenly realistic...and i too thought you showed RL construction sites more than once^^

back to the bus...i still get the feeling it is not wide enough... but scale might get betrayed due to the angle of the pics...for a suitable fitting look...maybe you could use these ultra fast trains as a body to work from... like the German ICE or the French TGV or the Japanese shinkansen?

also...just remembering it due to the picture overflow...the tic tac displays is an absolute awesome idea... i have collected quite a few over the years of my kids...there are varying in size also... so this is a splendid idea i need to nick^^

cheers, vik


also...again...on a totally unrelated side note...read the zombie survival guide...and er...well...how to put it...it was not my favourite read...

That's cool, definitely something to work from! And the desert board, just wow!

Would you mind sharing where you found the bus/car templates, my Batman board could do with a few!

Oh, I love the bus! Want one!

Wow... Love the sandcastle. That's going to be a great looking table.

Thanks Insaniak.

Paradigm and Graven, I found that bus template here http://paper-replika.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5864:new-york-city-bus-911-memorial-livery-papercraft&catid=124:transportation&Itemid=207689 The wheels are a bit tricky. But I sort of cheated on them. Lesson learned from assembling the fornt end loader last year. ( And sadly Canon seems to have taken down those papercraft files :( Good thing I downloaded all the ones I wanted already.) They are on A4 paper (?) and at 1/64 scale, so you may need to do some re-scaling and some image editing for use in Batman ( 150% size increase to get 1/43 or 35mm scale)

There are more here http://paper-replika.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=48:bus-truck&layout=blog&Itemid=200765

Paper-replika.com is a pretty cool site in general.

No worries Vik. I've been more or less absent all last month. Now bus width. it is indeed wide enough for scale, but that enormous base always distorts one's perception. I think for things like vehicles some sort of base-- something unobtrusive like the clear litko acrylic bases-- for them would be the way to go. Hmm, I have some scraps of clear acrylic...

Theo gets credit for suggesting the tic tac container. Getting things to fit inside them is a bit fiddly. But once assembled, The do look nice. That metallic paper works really well. Too bad the only source I know of for it are peanut jars, and peanut butter jars.

Papercraft trains Vik? Here they are http://pc-maker.net and the Shinkasen here http://pc-maker.net/pt/800.html and I'll poke around for the ICE and TGV. Ah found one, http://www.railfaneurope.net/tgv/papermodels.html for the TGV. The one ICE I found looks not so nice.

Hmmm, A table that is a bus/rail station? That might look really cool. perhaps a future project.

I liked the Zombie Survival Guide book because it reminded meof those old US Army Field Manuals that we used to get when I was a kid in Boy Scouts. As a parody, Brooks nailed it. There is one about Robots somewhere, but I have not read it yet. Ah here http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Robot-Uprising-Defending/dp/1582345929