Some more progress on the AT-AT Monorail project.
The next step after getting the basic structure done was to add some detailing. This was going to take the form of an access ladder made by gluing strips of plasticard but instead I decided to go in the other direction and make them less accessible and went with a barbed wire anti-climbing defence. Plus the top part of the knee joint where the brass tubes are attached was closed off with some plasticard.
This is some standard model barbed wire looped through holes in some L-profile plasticard. Threading it through turned out to be a bit of a pain...
Close-ups:
For painting I went with my standard black undercoat + grey overspray + white overspray technique with more white than usual. To give a nice grungy start, the barbed wire and supports were given a thick wash of Coat d'Arms 137 Chestnut Ink mixed with a bit of very old GW/CdA Brown Ink and a touch of CdA 102 Black paint. With the slightly rough and matt finish from spraying with white from too far, this has given a lovely rust look:
The strut bits at the bottom had some of the same mix roughly applied to break up the even-ness of colour on the piece. I'll probably give the wire a very sparse drybrush of silver or boltgun and there needs to be some weathering on the rest of the column, especially running down from the barbed wire assembly.
The second and third legs are now in the state that the first one was in the previous post, the fourth one is in bits ready to be cleaned up.
In other news, courtesy of Clifton Road Games I've been given what turns out to be a display stand for pairs of glasses, the perfect base for a twin apartment block!
This is made from laser-cut perspex a bit under 5mm thick so is pretty robust, but also heavy. The shelves/balconies all slot into the towers so it can be easily taken apart and (mostly) flat-packed.
The balconies are a bit over 25mm wide at the front but taper down to about 23mm at the back which is a bit of a pain when it comes to adding walls. The current plan is to detail it by adding some doors and windows (probably just outlines using plasticard strip) plus walls around the edges of the balconies. The walls are likely to be magnetised strips of 1mm foamed PVC so that they can easily be removed for transport and storage.
For paint I'm thinking of going with black undercoat and then Army Painter blue with some grey and white overspray to dull it down a little and add some variation. The current plan is to try and mask out the OCEANBLUE logo so that it's still visible afterwards.
Yesterday I was at the Ninth Legion club in Newton Abbot and we set up a large table using both the OceanBlue building and what's done of the monorail:
I went for a table split between an industrial area on one side of the monorail and urban the other which worked well. Although I'd been expecting the tower block to dominate the battlefield nobody even wnet in it in the end - between our local house-rules of having no initial deployment more than 6" above ground level and the 12" room in the middle of the table counting as the bottom floor of an infinitely-tall building it was actually too out of the way to be useful.
We did discover that the monorail supports will definitely need some weighting down as they tended to be caught by sleeves during play...
Also obtained recently was a large 18"/45cm high and very dead RC Dalek, courtesy of Clive Dudley of the Plymouth Association of Wargamers.
A couple of happy hours of disassembly later:
This was not as straightforward as it first appeared as most of the screws holding it together were disguised under glued-on pieces and there were five distinct phases of disassembly!
Anyway, the bit I'm most interested in for scenery is the set of circular grills:
These would be great as the basis for an atmosphere processing plant, cooling tower etc. I'm not yet sure whether I want to cut them away from the lower half and build something new or keep it as-is and build up over the messy bits, but the area (not shown above) where the arms would have attached might make that awkward.
Also the lower skirt came with about fifty hemispheres which all detach separately:
The outer rim is 30mm diameter. These will probably end up used as some kind of pressure vessels - either back-to-back as spheres or on the ends of some 30mm polypipe as cylinders.
The skirt also has some possibilities after the hemispheres are removed, it could make a good secure office building:
Probably with internal walls added and then placed on the edge of the board so that the interior is accessible, so kept in the two separate halves.
Finally, but without a photo, the dome from the top is likely to be used for something or other, possibly some kind of large defence turret where the eyestalk was attached.
Ian
