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Oh the pipes on the individual towers will connect (or have the hatches/spacers put in to take up the gap). They're just not on yet as I haven't done the final fit.

There won't be any gaps between the domes/stacks in the finished version.

I like the fifth option the best, although I think there's a bit of clutter underneath and it might get a little fiddly. Connecting the silos together would help with LOS blocking.

I'm the guy who built the top example you showed, I went with option 3 so that it would be a connection point for walkways, other buildings

Ah cool. So that was your monstrosity being sold on Facebook. It's where I nabbed all the pics. A truly inspiring piece.

Can't you do 5 but leave the domes unattached? Then it can also serve as a large open platform.

I'm voting number 3. Seems the more appropriate to my eyes.

M.

great work, I feel your pain on cutting around the connecting joints, something I had to deal with on my rig, right pain, look forward to watching this grow

Ray Dranfield, the designer of all this fantastic terrain, has a Twitter feed. On that feed, he just linked to this Instagram account called 'Addicted to Kit Bashing.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Ray Dranfield, the designer of all this fantastic terrain, has a Twitter feed. On that feed, he just linked to this Instagram account called 'Addicted to Kit Bashing.

This is an amazing account - really highlights how well everything is thought out. Great if you need EVEN MORE inspiration.

I've said it before and i'll almost certainly say it again. You're a bloody mad man. This table will be an absoute beast when you finish it.

While I'm probably a bit late to the party, choice one of triple silos is my favourite, choice 3/5 is probably more practical for a Necro table though.

Well it has finally come time to put together what I've been experimenting with, and in the end I opted for the best of all worlds, that being option 5. It gets me a second U-Shaped walkway, which I was going to build anyway, two more straight walkways, which I was going to build anyway (only they're a little longer), and I get a modular set of three towers. All the pieces are useful individually and together.

So here goes...

The Three Towers + Modular Walkways
To start with there was a problem. With the original U-Shaped Walkway had a spider-drone thingy hanging from it which, as it turned out, stuck out a little bit from the inside edge of the platform above. This meant that when you put anything on the inside curve, it would cause the spider-drone to bend back. Once the pegs on all the underside pieces (clips, struts, wires, etc.) are in there they do not come out, so I went and found a pair of pliers for some impromptu terrain surgery:



The end result isn't pretty, as the pegs are in there and will be forever (circled in the pic), and the spider-drone is now harder to use without the pegs to hold it in place. It's not the end of the world though. I have around 30 or so of those things unbuilt, so I'm not concerned.


I needed to use more of the end-caps to act as spacers on the three towers, as the pipe-ends on each piece don't reach across to the next piece, but a single end-cap slotted into each one works perfectly. I'd need to cut them out first, so decided to go back to some of my original furnace sprues (that have been cut down) and just desprue them completely:


And now you can see the towers with the end-caps in place, and how that fits:


Next up was making the straight walkways. A simple process that used 2 double length and 4 single length platforms:


And the last piece was the second U-Shaped walkway, this time using the three-way pipe as supports at the end, with some more pipework and a kiln/chimney on top.


I added in the shields round the edges, a newly build spider-drone (slotted in a bit further back this time), and put in some more under-wires in this (and the original U-Shaped Walkway), and it was done:


Here are both of them side by side:


Up next was the crucial stage of adding the platforms to the towers, and keeping them centred so that everything still matched up afterwards:


It begins to come together!:


Finally I added the shields to the straight walkways as well as the small plastic square plate you get on the straight walkway sprue. Added one to each end of the straight walkways so that they clip in very easily:


And that's it! It's ready to go and complete. Turned out exactly as I wanted it:


Of course this is how it all breaks apart, allowing me to use all the various bits in combination with all sorts of other parts pieces I've made, including the Outer Ring:


As I've been playing around with the curved walkways, coming up with all sorts of new configurations for them, you find the odd things that work even if it wasn't intended, such as this crossed-walkway platform using the two U-Shaped Walkways. I love how it's always so easy to come up with new configurations of floors:


Insanity Check-In
I didn't call this Blog "Industrial Insanity" on a whim. It really is an account of building these fantastic kits and my insane methods of purchasing and organising terrain. To illustrate that, here are some insane photos...

This is my box of struts. It is three layers deep (that's a Promethium Forge box filled with the things):


All that despruing I've been doing recently? Well it's created quite the pile of empty sprues:


I have dozens upon dozens of clips to hold everything together:


I continue to keep a massive amount of platforms, and they truly are the life-blood of these buildings. Without these things nothing would work:


And lastly, the furnace sprue. It has my two fav pieces within the entire Sector Mechanicus product range, namely the three-way pipe and the furnace itself. They're also like McDonald's fries in that almost every kit comes with at least one. I've made so many of these and yet still have so many spare:


That's 17 of them. Untouched. Unused. Not a single thing clipped off yet.

Yes, I know I'm crazy.


And that's all for now. After this build, the next thing is... the monster...

BYE

...I don't think you can make the v3.5 Chaos Codex out of these kits, HBMC.

That's some really nice work on these pieces - any chance of a table shot with all the terrain on it, if it'll fit?

GW posted this on their facebook:



Interesting to note that they didn't do anything to fill "inside" bits of the generator underneath, but do appear to have cut away the pipes.

It's making me wonder if I should still build one like this...

Do you plan on incorporating pieces from the Mekboy terrain, the GSC drill, or the Sector Frontera terrain that all seems atleast stylistically compatible with the Sector Mechanicus kits?

I’m interested to see what you come up with.

The Fragdrill in particular is straight up SM terrain, with some very interesting components. I'd be interested to see what you could do with that!

 Haighus wrote:
The Fragdrill in particular is straight up SM terrain, with some very interesting components. I'd be interested to see what you could do with that!

 aka_mythos wrote:
Do you plan on incorporating pieces from the Mekboy terrain, the GSC drill, or the Sector Frontera terrain that all seems atleast stylistically compatible with the Sector Mechanicus kits?

I’m interested to see what you come up with.

I have a pair of Fragdrills. One will end up looking like this:


The other one will be built as you'd normally expect, but probably bigger than the stock kit (because it's me!).

The buildings from the Frontier World Killzone are interesting. I do like the single-story non-ruined building (of which I have 4 sprues, so enough to make 2 of them), but I'm going to see what options there are for them (if any). I want to know if they can stack!

My intent with the Frontier World stuff is to incorporate it somehow into a little overrun Mechanicus outpost. Combined with the ruined parts of the Derelict Manufactorum, and some of GW's creeping vine stuff, I want it to be workable as overgrown terrain and/or the remnants of a settlement on a death world (harder now that the Deathworld Killzone is gone).

On that subject, there was a CoD Mechanicus building I made a number of years back that pretty much fits with this purpose:




Inside corners are a complete bitch with the CoD kits, but I made it work. I've always liked this little outpost, and it should fit with the rest.

As for the Ork terrain? I don't have the Mekboy Workshop, but I did pick up two sets of the junk piles from the Speed Freeks box. They, like the terrain from Rogue Trader, are in a box whilst I figure out what to do with them.

And, y'know what, whilst I've got my camera going, let's take a few more photos!

The modularity of my Sector Mechanicus terrain is a major factor that I honestly never planned for. When it turned out so well with the Outer Ring, I figured let's keep going. The recent Three Towers that I build was made with that ethos in mind, and to show you how different elements of it work together and with other parts, here are some extra pics:

That's the two U-Shaped Platforms with one of the towers. Works well as a standalone piece, much like the two main towers that make up The Nipples.

Also you can see The Monster starting to take form in the background. That's almost its final layout.

I made slightly longer straight bridges for the The Three Towers, and they work just about everywhere:


Finally when you combined my original straight walkways with some of the towers, you can do more interesting things with the Outer Ring:



Also Miniature Market did a sale towards the end of last year... and I may have bought more maps that only just arrived as one of them was a pre-order:



That's all for now...

BYE

I have a question for y'all.

I've been thinking on and off about what other things I can do with my as-yet untouched mountains of Sector Mechanicus terrain. I've got a few interesting ideas floating around for some more Necromunda-y pieces, but then I thought to myself:

What if I remade the original Necromunda terrain using the Sector Mechanicus kits?


Rather than being, at most, 9" tall they'd be about 15" tall at the highest. I am building a building that is taller than that now ('The Monster', or 'Rita Tower' to use its official name), but I'm wondering if it would be interesting to put together a set of Sector Mechanicus stuff that mimics, as much as possible, the original card terrain from the first edition of Necromunda:



Any thoughts on this?

That could be cool, HBMC.

Seconded. Just remember the walking platforms

Absolutely!

It is always good to incorporate nostalgia elements.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I have a question for y'all.

I've been thinking on and off about what other things I can do with my as-yet untouched mountains of Sector Mechanicus terrain. I've got a few interesting ideas floating around for some more Necromunda-y pieces, but then I thought to myself:

What if I remade the original Necromunda terrain using the Sector Mechanicus kits?


Rather than being, at most, 9" tall they'd be about 15" tall at the highest. I am building a building that is taller than that now ('The Monster', or 'Rita Tower' to use its official name), but I'm wondering if it would be interesting to put together a set of Sector Mechanicus stuff that mimics, as much as possible, the original card terrain from the first edition of Necromunda:

Spoiler:

Any thoughts on this?

I thought about doing this, there are some shapes the old one has that are gonna be a little more challenging. 5 sided double decker with a hole for example. You'll start thinking about the shapes and realizing that there were certain sorts of small parts to make connecting the bigger tiles in atypical angles easier.

Epic stuff indeed

Ok, so I did some preliminary layouts. We'll call the three story building in the pic above the "Square Building". We'll call the two story building with the hole through it the "Pointy Building". And we'll call the two-story building with the tower runing through it the "Tower Building".

So, with basic layouts to get approximate shapes we have, as follows...

Pointy Building:


Square Building:


Tower Building Upper Level:


Tower Building Lower Level (with tower for reference):


There's no perfect way to make the Tower Building 's shape without using tons of single and double straight pieces, and they remain the most valuable/least accessible pieces to buy of all the Sector Mechanicus bits. I also like the hole in the middle of this version of the Square building. Could make it more interesting.

Anyway, those are the preliminary ideas.

For the square tower have you considered using the newer (Manufactorum) kits?

New Munitorum kits?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
New Munitorum kits?

Correction Manufactorum, newish
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Sector-Imperialis-Manufactorum-2019

Not sure how that'd help. Those a walls, of which these buildings have none, and all the floor pieces are the same size of smaller (and are ruined pieces).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Not sure how that'd help. Those a walls, of which these buildings have none, and all the floor pieces are the same size of smaller (and are ruined pieces).

I was thinking of the square tower in the top left corner:


Instead of using the round tanks:

Tower Building Lower Level (with tower for reference):

Or are you talking about making the lowest level shorter?

Oh, right, I see what you mean. Sorry. You mean actually making a square tower out of the Derelict Manufactorum walls.

It would require 24 panels to do a 2x2 tower three stories high. That is a considerable amount of resources. I only have 18, and I've already assigned those panels to a very different building.