Wargames Atlantic wrote:

 Irbis wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:

Today we are taking a quick look at the final layout of The Damned Command frame.
We've had to make some really tough decisions over the parts that made it onto this sprue. There has been a lot of back and forth between the design team and the engineering team to ensure we put together the most comprehensive and versatile command sprue possible!

We've managed to include three human sized male bodies, a brute sized body and a female body plus all of the accessories needed to kit those models out!

Let us know your thoughts below!

I can also confirm that all parts that don't make it onto any of the final sprues will be made available for free too all backers as STL's!

Why are we talking about missing bits, again?

Look at how sparse this sprue is, much like GW used to make 10-15 years ago. Why not pack it with bits like GW is doing now? WGA should be trying to at least get close to its main competitor, not release substandard product missing a lot of what was promised when half of the sprue is empty. Yes, I get they can't match GW specializing slicing/packing tool but it would be trivial to fit at least dozen+ bits more here

Say, top right, you could put 4 different ogre heads there if the comically dumb horizontal left head didn't take all the space and was vertical, like the right one. Space right below, move horizontal comm backpack to the right and make it vertical, boom, space for 5 extra arms instead of current 2. 6A space, swap big and small torso, presto, room for 4-5 bits instead of just one arm. 4A space could be trivially condensed to half its size. Etc, etc, are WGA molding machines so bad compared to GW ones they can't do it or something else technical or is it just unwillingness to put in some extra work?

Hi Ibris - I usually bite my tongue when I see posts like this but I think this is a good time to educate folks a little on how tooling works, why we do it the way we do, and why most plastic injection engineers laugh at the GW frames. First - here's an apples-to-apples comparison of the new Damned Infantry frame and the Imperial Guard frame from GW:


As you can see - our frame is slightly larger, but has many more parts than the GW one (even if you account for theirs being increased by the same %)
But what's somewhat more interesting is that their smaller frame weighs more than our larger one with more parts. And the reason is bad engineering.

Now I know I'm swimming against the current here because calling out GW is like calling out Coke or McDonalds or Mercedes - brands that are so locked into the zetigeist of our culture that they can do no wrong in the eyes of their fans...but the reality is that the way GW tools their frames is...not good.

You'll notice we use round runners to carry the plastic through the tool. GW has those half hexagon things that are much larger. The reason they're larger is because the shape doesn't work well for plastic flow. For some reason they have stuck with it - but they have to design around that runner shape to make their parts fill. That's why they have two injection points on the frame - they have to really force that plastic through the frame from two points whereas we can just use one and get a perfect fill.

They also have some oddness in their gates (the piece that touches the part that comes off the runners). You'll notice they have some quite large reservoirs in the gates. This too is to help the parts fill better because their oddly shaped runners aren't working well.

The end result is that there is way more plastic in the runners on the frame than there are actual parts. Those frames APPEAR to have more parts but that's because a lot of the white space is taken up by the huge honking runners twisting all over the place. No manufacturer can leave less than about 5mm of space around a part (in order to keep the integrity of the metal mold face) and because these types of parts are so organic they sometimes need more "white space" around them than they would if they were all uniform. There is also the consideration of balancing the mold whereby you need to make sure that the plastic is flowing relatively at the same rate throughout the frame and filling up all those parts even if one is a thin spear and another is a giant ogre body part. It's very hard to do. Anyone doing this kind of tooling is working at the top of the game in injection molding.

GW makes great models, they have great detail, but the way they make their frames is just not up to industry standards. They make it work - but it also takes them a lot to achieve a final tool. Ever notice those little dots in the corner of one of the frames? That shows how many times the tool had to come off the test press to fix something and make it work better. This particular one has 10 dots. We usually have our frames working after the second try - and a lot of times our guys nail it on the first test shots.

Do we think we're better than GW - no of course not. We're the size of their company toilet paper budget probably. Do we think our tooling is better? Yes 100%. Will we continue to get better. Also yes. We're five years in it will be really interesting to see what we look like in another 5. Now, don't get me started about GW's move to all mono-pose models!