The Workbench This Weekend, Jan 26 2025

Spent most of the weekend doing online Society of Creative Anachronism nerdery (it was glorious) but did have some time to start planing my Build Something Contest 2025 for Lead Adventure Forum.

Planning a 28mm (32mm? whatever…) small shuttle suitable to get high priority cargo or a group of heavily armed ruffians/operatives/etc on and off the planet of their choice. Basically keeping it to about the footprint of a Letter/A4 sized sheet of paper, definitely inside 12″ nose to tail so it fits width-wise in a banker’s box for storage.

I laid a handful of figures on graph paper and figured that for the six-or-so figures I wanted the cargo bay to handle it needed to be somewhere around 70mm wide and 110mm long (and about 40mm tall internally, but that’s for later) so I cut up a few bits of card, grabbed the graph paper, raided the bits box and started laying things out.

Very early shuttle planning. The cargo bay is a separate piece of card so I can move it around. Click for larger.

The current plan is to build the box of the cargo bay first, then use the four hexagons as internal frames for two engines, then do wings under/around the engines for a stubby vaguely aerodynamic shape. Planning extended sides to protect the landing ramp from engine thrust, and a long vaguely streamlined nose at the other end.

Other details very, very much To Be Determined as I start building! I have raided and sorted the Bits Mountain and in addition to the plastic hex bases seen above there’s a few other things I’ve put aside.

Stuff! Wheels from Gaslands plastics for landing gear, various other scrap or leftover plastic bits for details, a blister of resin computer screens from the late, lamented Antenociti, a couple of which will probably show up in the cargo bay.

The weird eyes are from the local dollar store, there’s various leftover plastic scrap and kit pieces, an old blister of Antenociti comm screens that’ll provide cool details inside the cargo bay, and some other bits and pieces for decades of hording/collecting this sort of stuff.

Actual building is supposed to start Feb 1st, so stay tuned!

To finish up, the traditional workbench shot. Lots of painted figures I need to move into storage to clear the decks for this shuttle build!

The workbench, with shuttle planning underway. Some Mantic Terrain Crate SF fixtures on the left, a whole clutter of mostly-painted figures at the back that need to move to storage solutions, and lots of other clutter…

Best of luck to the other BSC 2025 participants, looking forward to seeing what they do!

Dead Animal Bits (in hard plastic)

Back at the very end of 2023 I happened to find a Kickstarter for a sprue of dead animal bits to make kitbashing and such easier, and I wrote it up in December 2023 here on the blog. It was run by Pete the Wargamer in partnership with Wargames Atlantic, who would do the actual production of the hard plastic sprue.

The campaign funded (just!) which was cool, and I put in for 3 sprues. Molding up an injection molded plastic production run takes time and it was late October 2024 before I got my loot, but communication from Pete was good the whole time.

So what do you get? The sprue is roughly 6″ by 8.5″ and well-supplied with everything from shark jaws to antlers to femurs to hacked-off hands on spikes or hooks! I was mostly interested in the antlers and goat horns, but there’s lots of other neat stuff to accessorize scratchbuilding or kitbashing with!

Right in the centre of the sprue there’s half a dozen big shark jaws; the top of the sprue has two different style of goat/sheep (demon?) horn each in several sizes, and deer/elk antlers in three sizes. Below the shark’s jaws there’s some feathers (the small things off to the left of the front view), some rib cages, a bunch of severed hands on spikes or hooks, another style of curled goat horn in two different sizes, a few individual shark teeth, and finally a batch of femur-looking bones, again in several sizes.

A closeup – this is the top left of the front of the sprue. Horns, antlers, hands and heads on hooks, and shark teeth here.

If you want to do whole units of antlered or horned troops you’ll likely burn through a bunch of sprues, but if you just want to add general weirdness here and there a set of these sprues should keep you happily adding weirdness for a good long while.

I’ll be adding horns and antlers to a batch of undead infantry I have in progress, and they’ll definitely be showing up in some of the stranger plans for my slow-burn 17th C pike and shot fantasy project, and in the best tradition of being inspired by random stuff that’s now in your Pile of Opportunity, I’m sure they’ll be showing up elsewhere too…

Wargames Atlantic now has the Dead Animal Bits on retail as a box set of three sprues, so if you missed the KS you’re in luck! (they also have some nice detailed photos, too)

Definitely a cool addition to the hard plastic wargaming items available, and I’m glad I was able to help make them happen via the KS.