Dual-Scale Infinity Remote

At the end of my Salute 2012 purchases blog post, you may have seen that I started assembling a 'spare' Infinity Remote (A Yu Jing Yaokong) so that it can be used for both Infinity and as a 15mm walker/large Tachikoma.

As there is little scale-specific detail on the model itself, the main way of giving it scale seemd to be the base - by using a 1.5mm ply disc instead of the usual 3-4mm high plastic base it sits lower to the ground and looks more convincing next to a 15mm figure, plus I came up with the neat idea of adding a magnetised 15mm trooper taking cover behind one of the front leg plates.

The base will be getting a sandy texture so a couple of small indentations for the trooper's legs shouldn't be too intrusive when used for 28mm gaming. Painting-wise the model will probably get a sandy and green camo pattern as this will fit both my existing 15mm forces for Gruntz (and the club's desert terrain) and my 28mm Haqqislam force for Infinity. Technically Haqqislam have their own chicken-style robots but I prefer the looks of the Yaokong.

The Yaokongs come in a box of two with several optional bits of equipment so that you can make all four variants that exist in the rules - a mobile turret bot (reaction remote in Infinity terms) with HMG, a sensor bot with rifle, a bot with guided missile launcher and a walking Repeater/inforwar extender.

Which, being me, means that it's magnet time...

First up is the chin gun, this was just big enough to get a 2mm magnet into.

More problematic was the 'shoulder' mount which was quite small, so instead of drilling out the existing mount I filed down the whole area and added a new hole. Even then, the drill broke through slightly on the side and made a hole which will need filling. The magnet was purposefully recessed so that the optional pieces could slot in slightly.

The optional parts for the shoulder mount. The boxy one is the guided missile launcher which again involved cutting and filing away the whole existing pin and mount. The sensor array and headlight were small enough that 1mm magnets were enough to hold them in place. In theory the snesor array and the GML have an eztra fin each but they're likely to break very quickly once the model is being used so they're not likely to be used.

The body and all five optional parts. The single-barrel piece for the chin didn't go so well, the magnet ended up at about a 30˚ angle. For 15mm I think that barrel is so chunky it'll have to be a cannon of some kind.

The legs were pinned together where they cross in the middle, plus some extra paperclip sticking up to go into the body. As the tips of the feet were so small and I was worried about gluing to the ply disc base anyway, all four feet were drilled and had short lengths of paperclip added, with corresponding holes in the wood. The large holes are for some 5mm disc magnets for transport in a metal box, this will all be disguised by the layer of sandy texture and maybe a bit of plasticine to break up the flatness.