- by Iain Wilson



I've been fascinated for a while now by the various designs floating around for coffee tables and the like that 'float' with some clever cable design making it look like they have no actual support. In a moment of whimsy this week, I thought it might be fun to recreate this sort of design for the gaming table. And so... this happened:











The main part of the structure is made from various bits and pieces from the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprues. The circular windows on the bottom of the platform have a piece of thin plasticard behind them with a hole drilled through the centre. This allowed me to feed some clear fishing line through the holes and glue it onto the back of the plasticard. Once everything was painted and assembled, this would (I hoped!) securely hold the fishing line in place.









The base for the piece was made from a sheet of 2mm foamed PVC and some 6mm foamcore, with a few more bits from the terrain sprues for the support piece. I drilled holes in the base piece matching up to the holes on the platform corners, and made an indent beside each hole on the bottom of the base. This would allow the fishing line, when glued in place, to sit in the indents leaving the bottom of the base nice and flat.









Everything needed to be painted before final assembly, to avoid getting paint on the fishing line - I wanted the line to remain as unobtrusive as possible.









I glued the fishing line into the window ports and glued those in place on the bottom of the platform, and then glued the central support line in place. The it was just a matter of pulling the corner lines through the base holes until everything was sitting square and secure, and gluing the ends of the lines in place on the bottom of the base. There was a bit of breath-holding when I turned it over, and much rejoicing when it turned out to work as intended!





















It's a bit of an odd piece for gaming terrain, but sometimes it's fun to make something just to find out if you can!






To build your own generator platform of floating doom, you can pick up the terrain sprues along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge range from the webstore here.



What are you working on? We would love to see your models and terrain in the Comm Guild Facebook group!




For other building ideas, modeling tutorials, army spotlights and conversion walkthroughs, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here. And while you're there, grab a copy of the Maelstrom's Edge V2 Beta rules!

 Talking Banana wrote:
Insaniak, I'm sorry to say that your clever innovation leaves me feeling a bit stupid. Simply put, I don't get how this works.

If I'm following this right, fishing line is doing the load-bearing work of holding your platform aloft? Fishing line, if I remember correctly, is much like plastic string, and apt to collapse into a heap of spaghetti when not held taut, so I don't understand how your line is maintaining its vertical rigidity and keeping your platform airborne. Is the fishing line actually holding up the plastic bits, or is that an optical trick? Is the fishing line rigid, like metal wire?

In my brain's defense, it's still quite early in the morning here, and I'm not yet through my first cup of coffee.