Wednesday 18 April 2012

Small Scale Sci-Fi: Drone Army Progress


In the current spirit of 'getting on with stuff', here's a few photos of an old project now almost complete; namely the Small Scale Sci-Fi Drone Army made up of the 3mm AFVs by Germy available from GZG.

In line with my previous efforts, they are mounted up on 50x40mm artist's card bases backed with magnetic sheeting - the general idea is to produce a number of army factions on roughly company-sized unit bases, that will then battle it out under the auspices of some Homebrew rules.


Bases will be divided into a number of classifications, from Super Heavy through Medium to Light via Scout, Attack, Aerospace and Infantry, etc, giving a quick play basic system of combat. In theory, bases will be identifiable by the number and placement of the miniatures thereon, as much as by their size or appearance.


The only exception so far, in typical fashion of course, is my version of the Germy Cyber Tank, which is intended here as an Ogre-type vehicle, in the guise of the Drone controller unit.
Then again, I haven't yet sorted out how Aerospace units - VTOL, ground attack, shuttles, drop-pods will be based yet either......


The base colour is provided by some Homebase sample-sized matt emulsion named "Delicious", to give a sort of Martian dust look; I have a vague and somewhat experimental notion of using a playing surface that is not flocked or even coloured - so the unit bases themselves will be the only colouring - each faction sort of taking their background along with them as it were - not sure how much play this will actually have though, in the long term....

Moving on to one of my favourite notions when handling Sci-Fi, namely the all-scale 'mash-up', where mixing and matching various minis can provide some interesting effects - let's see the Drone scout machines alongside some 6mm USNC Hardsuit Infantry from GZG:


I think that they would make some pretty good mini-warbot type machines to accompany 6mm troops, kind of like some of the robots currently under development:



Next, the Germy Cyber tank alongside a couple of items from Brigade Models in 6mm, the German Thrall Hover Truck and SAC Wildebeest Command APC:


Given the size of the Germy piece, it would certainly give most 6mm a run for it's money, if not an Ogre, then at least a pretty big mega-tank thingie:


My plan is to go back and flesh out some of the other factions for this project, namely the Alien Telosians and Krevlak, the Humanoid Mid-Tech Rimworlders and Federation - looking in particular to add in further units and make-over the somewhat sparse bases, and then do a couple of other factions that have a movie theme, then work on the rules themselves - so hopefully more to come on all of this in the near future.

2 comments:

  1. Your classifying bases into simple categories is very much going down the HOTT/DBA route you know. Even a skirmish set, like something based on Song of Blades and Heroes might work.

    I've been playing around with giant monster games recently, but some of the bits I've put together for them would work with other scales - my giant Nazi robot miniature, for example, towers over 3mm scale tanks, but makes a nice ersatz dreadnought for 15mm figures and a decent companion robot for 28mm figures.

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  2. Hi Kaptain, yes. that's exactly the feel I am looking for - generic and easy - a bit 'boardgamey', perhaps, but nice and fun and functional.

    Your giant Nazi robot sounds fun, and as you say, can be up or down-scaled accordingly...

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