Monday 12 December 2011

Fleet Scale Sci-Fi: A Flying Sauce!


Well, if not a flying sauce, then at least some flying cheek in presenting a few photos of the quickest and cheapest Fleet Scale Sci-Fi fleet you can imagine - namely Flying Saucers!

Not only are these the simplest of projects, but I can't even claim any credit for either the concept nor the construction - these ships were created by David Crook of 'A Wargaming Oddysey' Blog fame, and merely accosted by myself during a previous Lead Mountain exchange.

David came up with the brilliantly simple and elegant idea of using various makes of flight stand, principally including the GW flying bases as used in Battlefleet Gothic, paired and inverted as 'saucers', topped off with discs cut from wheel sections of cheap plastic AFVs from a boardgame!
On paper, they shouldn't be much to look at, but are so cunningly contrived in reality that even a quick blast of spray black undercoat and some silver gunmetal dry-brush thrashings produced quite a decent fleet in a veritable instant:


Not the finest of photographs, but you should be able to discern the differing types, from large command vessel, fighter carrier (Where David cleverly divided the saucer sections with a plastic slotta base) and plain saucers; a few blobs of various bright colours break up the outline as running lights or perhaps Death-Ray launching ports:


If you have a few such flying bases and stands languishing in your bits box, I heartily recommend this method for creating instant vessels of such an iconic shape - with my leisure time at a high premium recently, these were perfect for the quickest of projects, and the minimum of fuss...


Now, whilst time permits, I'm off to play Invasion of the Saucer Men -

"Keep watching the Skies!"

7 comments:

  1. Hi SoS,

    Wow! They look stunning! Simple but very, very effective. Worthy opponents would be the rocket based models I was knocking up from assorted plastic rawl plugs. Real pulp sci fi and as cheap as chips as well!

    Give that man a large one!

    All the best,

    DC

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  2. What rules do you plan to use with them?

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  3. Hi guys, glad you liked them, as I said - can't really take the credit - merely slapped on a coat of paint!

    As to rules, I've been playing around with Starmada X: Brigade for Fleet Scale - just have to come up with some stats for flying saucers I s'pose - that said, these wouldn't look out of place menacing some 6mm Sci-Fi ground troops - or even my Doctor Who in 6mm....hmmm.....

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  4. A great fast and cheap way to have a fleet on the table...hats off!

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  5. Fantastic! Only the transparent stands shouldn't have been sprayed black, but instead washed with thinned-down fluorescent green (or some other alien colour), to produce "shafts" or beams of light underneath the saucers. See Monsterpocalypse Martians for the idea.

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  6. Oh wow, Luka, what an amazingly good idea! I would never have thought of that - but having looked at the Monsterpocalypse ones at your suggestion, they look great - 'phase II' of these will definitely be done that way - thanks!

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