Tag Archives: zeppelin

Links, Pulp

A Zeppelin Baggage Sticker

Leave a comment

I haven’t posted one of my “World More Pulpy” graphics in ages, but here’s something that’s been lurking on my harddrive for ages and needs some fresh air.

Here we have the luggage label for a piece of First Class Cabin Baggage on the American-Pacific Airship Company’s famous “Luxury Airship to the Orient” routes.

baggagesticker
Luxury zeppelin to the Orient! Well, in an alternate world, maybe. One without a fireball at Lakehurst, perhaps.

There were supposedly American companies considering trans-Pacific airship routes at one point; the Great Depression scuttled the first round and then there was that fireball at Lakehurst…

Here’s a couple of real photos from the actual Graf Zeppelin herself just as bonus content. These are once again from the spectacular Flickr Commons account of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives. The GZ’s cabin in profile and plan, from a postcard:

Zeppelin

…and a detail shot of the elegantly streamlined engine gondolas of the Graf Zepp:

Zeppelin

I actually have a couple of pulp figures on the painting table currently, the first in far too long, so perhaps I’ll get back to some pulp-flavoured posts here soon, in amongst the blizzard of Russian Civil War material recently!

Inspiration, Links

Links of Interest, 1 May 2012

Leave a comment

A few things to start your month off right!

Paul of Paul’s Bods has a rather clever nearly-math-free method of getting a perfectly fitting roofs. It would need a bit of adaption to work with the removable roofs I usually give my structures, but not much!

I’ve also just discovered the Flickr account of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives, which is full of all sorts of great interwar aviation imagery!

They’ve got autogyros:
Pitcarin Autogyro

The famous zeppelin USS Los Angeles:
USS Los Angeles

…and this fantastically pulpy looking volcanic island, with (unfortunately) no location information. I’m absolutely certain that steaming caldera houses a Mad Scientist’s Secret Headquarters or a Lost World, however!
Interior of volcanic caldera

The San Diego Air & Space Museum Archive’s Flickr account is all part of the fantastic Flickr Commons scheme, which has great museums, libraries and archives from all over the world putting their material on Flickr with no known copyright restrictions.

Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Red Airships!

Leave a comment

I am, as mentioned in the last post, neck-deep in prep for my Russian Civil War game less than a week away at Trumpeter Salute 2012. Nevertheless, something near and dear to the very core of the Warbard’s raison d’etre needs to be linked to…

Via the excellent Dieselpunk, who in turn got it from kitchener.lord’s spectacular Flickr stream, this Red Airships photomontage poster:

Nikolai Dolgorukov. Soviet Airships. 1932

I’ve long been a fan of pre-WW2 Russian design; there were some very talented people doing great stuff even in terrible conditions.

Anyway, back to final drafts of initiative cards, then painting the last 16 White Russian infantry for the game!

Historicals, Inspiration, Pulp

Spectacular Zeppelin Model

Leave a comment

Bit of a quiet week here on the Warbard. I’ve been burning up all my available hobby time painting Russian Civil War figures. There’s two dozen Cossack infantry finished, another three dozen regular White riflemen nearly finished, twenty Red infantry in progress, and a new unit of ten Red sailors well underway. Yes, if you total that up, it’s nearly 100 figures, all 28mm. I’ve been a busy chap. There’s six or eight half-written articles in the Drafts queue here on the Warbard, but I haven’t touched any of them in days!

Nevertheless, a short Saturday evening diversion from the painting table… we are well known to love zeppelins here. We have to bow down to the gentleman featured in this Popular Science article, though. (via Bayou Renaissance Man, who has more photos)

Even better? By my quick admittedly rough calculations, a 20ft-long model of the USS Macon is roughly 1:56th scale, ie 28mm… the gentleman in California has created a wargaming model, possibly without knowing it!

Tomorrow we game the Russian Civil War again using the Mud & Blood rules, photos and a game report tomorrow evening!

Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Zeppelins From Foam

Leave a comment

This has minimal bearing on the 28mm pulp gaming we usually do that might involve a zeppelin, but it’s such a cool and masterful technique I have to share: Creating Zeppelin bodies with foam insulation.

Basically, take long billets of foam, run a hot wire knife across a profile, and rotate the billet to create that distinctive “faceted” look of a Zepp body. Very cool.

Of course, I once calculated a 1/56 (28mm) scale of Graf Zeppelin would be about 19 feet long (nearly six metres!), so doing the gondola and a bit of the body in 28mm is (marginally!) saner. Only marginally, mind you. The small-scale foam zepps in the first link are a lot smaller and saner; they’re still about 3ft long, though.

If you are minded to do some zeppelin construction, in whatever scale, you could do worse than following the useful links from this Propnomicon posting called “Zeppelin Goldmine“, which has links to high-quality scans of a book of speculative 1920s designs for a Graf Zepp-sized trans-Atlantic zeppelin. The gondolas of those look fairly buildable as 28mm skirmish terrain, actually. One of these days…

Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Zeppelins. We like Zeppelins.

Leave a comment

There’s zeppelin on the curent banner for this site, and we’re notorious pulp gamers, so it should come as no surprise that zeppelins are amongst our favourite things here on The Warbard. Sure, they’re often explosive, prone to crashing in a stiff wind and all the rest, but let’s face it, zeppelins are just cool.

In A World More Pulpish (which is a much cooler place than reality) there’d be zeppelins everywhere. One glimpse of how A World More Pulpish might have looked, with zepps overhead, is found in this Feb. 2010 post over on Propnomicon, Zeppelin Goldmine.
Continue reading Zeppelins. We like Zeppelins. →