Thursday, September 29, 2011

Blue Lights in New Hope City

I recently purchased a copy of Two Hour Wargames: New Beginnings, and truthfully it is a thing of beauty. It provides more role-playing opportunities than D & D 4th edition and certainly has a more realistic combat system. I've already got plenty of 15mm characters and civvies painted up, but unfortunately I was not in possession of the police officers or vehicles that the rules call for. As of now I at least have transportation for them, thanks to Mattel.

I now have four of these sleek, futuristic police cars (though one still has to be painted, and I've got a ways to go in general), all at a $1.07-1.09 a piece, not terrible. The little plastic rivets on the bottom were easy to drill out, after which I primed the body and painted the whole black with white doors. I'll be following these up with painted headlights/tail lights as well as Space Wolf transfers on the doors. The cars themselves are a little oversized, but don't look bad next to 15mm figures as compared to actual Matchbox patrol vehicles.

The toy car used is Ultra Rage, 15/15 from the Track Stars '11 Hot Wheels line. I picked it up because it was shorter than the other cars and it put me in mind of the Antenociti's Workshop G.O.T. Police Cruiser. While it's a little more high tech than most of the equipment that is used in my Imagi-nation, I like to think that Itor's government would be just as likely to buy new, shiny equipment as it would burnt-out rust buckets.

There's also a call for a SWAT van in the rules, and I'll probably pick up Khurasan's Locust Patrol Truck for that purpose. As for the police officers themselves, I'm not sure... at the moment I'm favoring either Rebel Miniatures Riot Police or perhaps 15mm.co.uk's Megopolis Police Patrol.

Monday, September 5, 2011

More 15mm goodies

I just finished the basing on a few of my random projects, and here they are:


A different take on the Cnidarians... lots of blue and Tamiya Clear Red.


Coalition Spider-skull Walker pictured with a pair of SAMAS PAs for scale.

Side view: The railguns are indeed cut-down golf tees.

15mm Sci-fi Vehicle Exchange Entry



Here's my entry in the 15mm Sci-fi vehicle exchange, a GZG Chariot APC and Hammer's Slammers infantry squad. These were part of my first 15mm sci-fi purchase, one that was intended to test the waters, and I was certainly pleased with them, but ultimately they're not an integral part of anything I'm currently working on. The APC was eventually used to test out my Blackmoore's Dragoons tank camo scheme, and really it turned out a lot better than successive tanks (I abandoned my attempted at digital camo for a simpler one). The Slammers themselves were block painted and dipped, but I'll be repainting them to match the APC before they're sent off.

New Acquisition - Hot Wheels City Sets Garage

While wandering through the Wal*mart clearance section I chanced upon this little gem for $5.00:

Unfortunately all the stickers were applied at the factory, but I've managed to remove all of them. The smaller sign is absolutely useless for most applications, but I kind of like the larger one. The interesting thing is that it doesn't really scale with anything (well duh, it's Hot Wheels), but I think it looks nice next to both 28mm and 15mm figures. If I'm lucky I'll be able to make it work with both. Here's some out of the box pictures:

Top view of the Blue and Red buildings.

The "garage"; I've already removed the car platform (the clearest indicator of any intended scale). There are actually doors on both buildings, but one was the sticker and the other doesn't stand out much.

A good view of the garage glass windows. I rather like them, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to preserve them (since it seems impossible to disassemble the building without breaking it).

The red building, whatever it is. The protrusion is part of a car launching mechanism that I'll probably dress up a bit.

Scale pic with a 10mm Mechwarrior Jade Hawk, a 28mm Urban Mammoth Triad Boss, and a 15mm GZG Alien Mercenary.

I don't know where I'm going to go with these buildings, but I at least expect they'll see some use in my Janitoria games.