Launcher terrain base

A diorama idea

Now I had the launcher and five guys around it, what was I going to actually do with them? Just having them scattered around didn't sound like any sort of a solution. That made me think if I ought to make some kind of an imitation of map topography with pieces of styrene sheet, but that sounded pretty risky considering the expected squareness/rectangleness of the base itself.

I thought I had seen a piece of Finnfoam (XPS foam) left from my 2011's Imperial Incom T-65 prototype and its asteroid base. The leftover piece, if I still had it, would be stupidly shaped but might provide a solution.

The baseplate

Surprise of all surprises, I had it stored, and it was larger than what I needed. For an initial idea I dropped the dudes into firing position and marked the overall area with a pencil and a ruler.

Of course I didn't own anything that was perfect or even good for cutting this (or any other) thickness of XPS foam, and I surely wasn't going to start sawing it apart. I cut the thing with my well-used xacto knife instead. The result wasn't beautiful.

Ground shaping

The first step into locking my scene started with a 90° counterclockwise rotation of the launcher rack, in comparison to how it was in the previous photo. I drew a deep line along the front plank, and opened the foamboard a bit by twiggling the end of the ruler in it. Then I set the front edge in place, and marked the rear leg's place the same way and repeated the ruler-widening. The launcher sat nicely in place, so one potential crisis was nicely averted.

 

My groundforming started with shallow slices cut off from behind the launcher. Being limited with imagination I ended up making pretty much an arc, which I then tried to deform by chopping a radial groove into one part.

I also, obviously, tested out my space by plopping the guys in place with rockets and all. To counter the shallow decline on one side I drew a shape for a tiny bump on the opposite corner, which ended up looking like a nicely aligned arc. Exactly against what I should've done. At this point I was thinking if I wanted to turn this into a road of some sort, or even a cobblestone plaza. Especially that kind of a semiurban space didn't match my idea of where these were used in 1941, so they were going to be in the countryside with their howling cow.

A bit pointlessly I marked the things, and without any thinking in the same way we planned our Doom wads back in the day. These didn't stay visible for long, I just tried it out while I was poking around anyway.

To get my bump started I covered the corner with white glue and laid my random pieces to somehow fill the area.

For a moment I had a small rock in there, the same I used to press some random shapes all around the sheet. In case the Project Assistants weren't in the habit of saving cool-looking rocks for an army, I'd used a balled-up piece of kitchen foil instead for the shaping.

Preparing the surface

While my glue was curing I used the rest of my Mr White putty, and spread it along the outer edges and then also the upper surface. I let the white glue -covered surfaces to wait for the next day and an application of the new Tamiya Putty (Basic Type) I got some months ago.

At this point my plan was to cover this all with putty so I wouldn't maybe need to panic using oil paints to tweak the ground style. Abteilung's mud and industrial earth sounded like great names for this theme.

Puttying the final corner was its own operation, I applied excess lumps to places that looked like they would benefit from extra coverage or less sharp angles. Of course I could still later on cover the surface with thinned down white glue and sprinkle ballast on it to break the remaining flatness.

This intermediate result of two different putties looked a bit funny, but I decided not to get stuck on that but would prime it all and then see how to proceed. Somehow it felt like staring at it wasn't going to help at all, but to make it even weirder.

Of course I had to dry-fit my bits again, with the assumption of getting some inspiration or a mental guideline. It looked much better now than a few days earlier.

With all the equipment I started thinking that the adjuster guy, who would be standing on the bump, could be standing on some disgusting and sloppy mud. The others could have a bit more dry, sandier ground. Perhaps I could even give a shot to the Vallejo snow effect as long as it wasn't dried up in its bottle/jar.

Side plates and more surface texturing

I managed to get annoyed with the sides of my Finnfoam pieces and that led to a decision of wasting some time in making side plates. To get them done I cut proper chunks off my thinnest styrene sheets, only one of them ended a bit short. These I glued onto the sides with white glue.

Straight plastic and not-straight edge required some gap-filling. Being lazy I taped the open edges with Tamiya's masking tape and used a number of days to slowly fill this up with white glue. After a couple of runs I trusted the solidity and cut the upper edges of the styrene sheets to follow the contours of the terrain. Based on these lines I resumed my silly filling operation.

Finally I used glue around the terrain and sprinkled ballast for texture. I didn't cover all of the ground as I was going to use some weathering mud to get variety onto the earth. Later we'd see if this made any sense in reality.

When I was happy, or at least content enough, I tore my tape off and glued pieces of L profile onto the corners to hide some of my crims. Luckily I had two sizes of that profile, as the smaller one I had thought of using was a bit too short.

 

This was an unplanned improvement. Now I could paint again.

Repainting

For the best coverage I airbrushed the bare side plates and all the ballast-covered parts with Vallejo's black primer. To get a bit of a lighter tone for the ground I mixed some sand yellow (VMA 71028) into the black and dusted it around.

For some reason I didn't want to leave the sides flat black. Maybe I thought it was too harsh, even though it was a perfectly reasonable way to separate the frame from the content. Still, I painted the edges and corner reinforcements with black grey (VMA 71056).

I drybrushed all the ballast-covered surfaces and the harder edges of my terrain, using a shade brighter colour from the one I airbrushed some moments ago. The difference wasn't huge, but I wasn't looking for a dramatic look. This quick dry-fit made it look like the guys were on a lava field. I expected the upcoming mud and snow to help a bit.