Finished the build on the Vault

And here we go, the finished build on the Vault building for the Mega Terrain Contest This update has been rather overdue, but what can I say real life is a hassle at times:







The walls of the walkway down to the keep's main entrance are still unattached at this point. How else am I ever going to get to that door with a paintbrush right The one thing I regret is that the pics don't show of the textured undercoat of homebrewed to give the foamcoat a similar structure as the GW sprues. That and all the plasticard support struds with punched rivets are tough to spot as well, nothing a paintjob won't cure of course! Something I hope to get started on once I finish my thunderfire cannon and subjugator assault squad.

A ton of stuff has gone into this project, here's a selection of the goodies:
- nearly four complete bastions
- dozens of cut up bulkheads from the cities of death sprues
- 2 full sheets of foamcard (25 x 51 cm)
- a few dozen skulls (resin, skeletons and cut of building sprues)
- a combined amount of about 1 A4 of plasticard of various thickness
- 6 tubes of bison second glue
- a barrel of mini-cocktail sticks (lining up foamcard sections, applying glue etc)
- tons of card and ductape
- various imperial and semi-chaotic bits and bobs
- textured metallic, sticky sheet...uhm stuff. No idea where this is used for normally.
- some etched brass trinkets
- and everything else I've already forgotten about

Next up some detail pics:







And then we of course have the AA and extensions:
- only 2 will be used at the same time, but all configurations have been taken into account
- so 2 lascannons, 2 autocannon turrets and a comms unit (lovely design from GW by the way!)




For the finishing touch we have some Iron Warrior action shots, yes the Relictors were having too much fun in the slightly chaos-looking bar to come over:

Update on the Vault

Well work is slowly continuing on the Vault building project. I'm putting the finishing touches on the 3rd level tomorrow and then it's on to the entrance and right tower's two remaining levels. Naturally there are a ton of holes and small things to tackle, but I'm keeping most of that minor stuff of till the entire structure is done:



And a quick detail shot of the entrance into the second tower:



Next update should be online in two to three days!

Reaching for the sky, well kind of anyway

Good evening everybody, time for an update on the building project. As some of you may know I managed to get my hands on two strongpoint boxes two weeks ago. I really couldn't resist, especially with them being two for the price of one! Not quite sure I'd really like the kit all that much, but how could I resist this great deal.

After cleaning all the sprues last weeks (and turning two boxes into a single one), I have to say that the Planetstrike building kits are quite nice. Very pleased GW had the (common) sense to add some texture to the walls and defense segments, that will really help people from all skill levels to turn them into great looking pieces of scenery.

So far I've discovered that if you keep a few things in mind, the Bastion is a sheer joy to put together:
- There are a few corners (especially the ground bunker level) that don't fit together thighly. Luckily this does not influence the structutal integrety as all the parts and surfaces that need glueing line up just fine. So a quick greenstuff fix will take care of those holes.

- Be careful when glueing corners of the higher levels together, things may seem to fit perfectly but that may not line up when you add that last wall segment. Some gentle bending and bashing may be needed.

- It may not be the smartest thing to fully assemble a bastion, this due to the holes in the top level (the grates). If you leave the part you can see through there (on the inside of the bastion) plastic it will look bad when looking into the top bunker. A quick brush with some Chaos Black will fix this and I greatly suspect that I'm one the few people who even noticed this.

- A lott of this stuff also works quite well with Cities of Death sprues, however it will take a bit of trail-and-error as cities of death wall segments don't line up with all bits.

- Cities of death sprues line up perfectly with the higher level bits of the bastion kit. The bunker section, however, is about 1,5 cm lower than the cities of death bits. Which equals a ton of cutting and filing, slowly turning my apartment floor light grey, to make everything work.

- The higher level wall segments are an absolute threat to combine though, this as they are the same height and weight. For the bigger pieces we're talking exact same volume and for the individual wall panels of CoD it works out perfectly if you glue two of them together. Personally I can't wait to see what people will come up with when combining those kits. If forsee some cathedrals and a full blown admech complex on the web somewhere in the not so far future.

Now on the stuff everybody is really interested in, the pictures (click images for bigger version). The Vault / Library at in its current form, apologies for all the clutter. I ran out of space to put stuff as two strongpoint boxes and several CoD sprues take up quite a bit of space:


Right now we're looking at a variant on the Indominatable Fortress:
- Two Bastions
- Left Bastion - 3 automatic weapons
- Right Bastion - 4 automatic weapons and a comms relay
- Bunker/Vault entrance - stairs leading down to the underground storage facility and to the left and right of the corridor raised firing positions. Plan to add a walkway between the both and count it as a single bunker and the official entrance into the Fortress (instead of using the main tower as dictated by GW's suggested rules in Planetstrike).
- Not sure yet on AA guns, both the Lascannon and Autocannon turrets just look so great.

And a quick pic of the back:


Quite pleased with is so far, though there's still tons and tons of stuff to work on before I can even dream about starting to undercoat and paint the rather colossal contraption.

So what do you guys think? And keep an eye out for a new update on tuesday, need to do some work on my thesis tomorrow

Building some terrain.

Put together a modified template for my Astronomican building project. Not quite sure if I'll be sticking with duc tape reinforced cardboard, but I needed to start somewhere:



You'll be seeing several updates over the next weeks, so I hope that by then I'll actually have something worthy of the term building or terrain feature. Initial ideas are still rather sketchy, but version one will be an attempt at something I've conjured forth from my warped mind and have dubbed 'the vault'. And if this works out I'll also have a cool, big building that fits the theme of my latest army project - the Relictors.

The general idea is a hidden base where the boys kept their unholy artifacts after the Inquisition took their previous batch. We're looking at 2 towers based on bastion kits with a home-made vault entrance in front of them. Think semi-daemon gate, with all kind of weird locks and stuff and you'll get the jest. The rest of the building is still very sketchy, but there should be room for a comms extension, as well as a (removable?) rockit silo and maybe even a raised defence or landing platform.

On an utterly unrelated matter I also have a pic of a little something special I got my hands on yesterday. SkekSil, better known as Chamberlain from the classic 1982 The Dark Crystal movie: