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.

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.

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!

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