Binary round numbers again

10000BIN

It's been already sixteen years of blogging and this nonsense has become a habit so I guess I wasn't going to stop quite yet. Probably my loved ones have been protected from my yapping thanks to me unloading that here for no one to actually read. Keeping that in mind I was trying to come up with some sort of a cover pic related to the number sixteen, and in no way did I want to use anything related to sweet sixten in here. Then it came to me that I could do something silly: according to discogs, Motörhead's sixteenh release waas a live album Lock up your daughters. My mental image of their work was that they did something like an album per year but the sixteenth studio album was Hammered that had never been high on my playlists, I opted for the total list. Also somehow related: vinyls are played at 45 rpm and I recently turned 45, this simply had to be an omen.

Last year's doings

Checking the logs I had completed nine projects in these twelve months, which wasn't bad at all. If you considered that out of the twelve months at least two were spent on anything but hobbying, such as vacations, going from place to place, and otherwise busy evenings. The remaining ten-ish month of evenings were kinda open for hobbying and that most likely was gently exaggerated. If all of these projects went through in a month and a bit, I did get to poke these things at a pretty regular average pace, which evens out the fluctuation caused by the excitement levels in different projects and their stages.

Air war machine(s)

Starscream

Starscream in his alt mode was the only plane for this past rolling twelve-month window. That was more than on many other years. Now I needed to buy his brothers to stand by him, lording over the skies. Maybe I could get to that in 2027 already?

 

Ground war machines

My main theme was tracked stuff frolicking in mud, and in the last couple of years I had mostly got my plastics from now-closed Tieto-Nikkari. I simply enjoyed browsing and chatting in hobby stores in person, it was so much more pleasant an experience than ordering online.

StuG III

These utterly unscientifically made variant choices most likely made this Stug a heretical one for serious people. I enjoyed the build, and the camo worked quite nicely after I fixed the red-brown parts. Probably someone also angrily inhaled some peas because of my cartoony lenses but I liked them and that's why I painted them that way. Panzerwerk's tracks were again awesome.

 

Hummel 

Last Spring was full of rumbling of German armour as the long-awaited Hummel came to the top of the todo pile. It had the exact same tracks as the StuG but somehow I managed to snap both sets here. Luckily fixingn them was easy. Then painting the humanoids failed badly, so the half-seriously considered diorama got scrapped before it started. That was a shame because there was a healthy amount of nice accessories in this kit.

 

BattleTech

From the next millennium I got a nice amount of stompy machines painted, and I still had a silly amount left.

Clan Jade Falcon

With these three I took a step away from the classic OmniMechs and had three very distinct Points from the preexisting units in my Cluster, the main thing was to keep the weight classes in sync. In a shallow V formation we had a Kingfisher, a Nova Cat, and a Crossbow.

My 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster just getting mentioned, they couldn't get to and from the battlefields to show the freebirths and other surats who are the true followers of Kerensky, not without a transport of their own. Now the map-scale Overlord-C Quatrefoil stood ready for action.

Clan Hell's Horses

These horsies were more like hotrodders but I imagined if you called them that, you'd get an ER PPC blast into your sad face. The flames were lots of fun to paint but as a total rookie I made a couple of them a bit too obscure. This Star consisted of a Fire Moth, a Pack Hunter, a Nova Prime, a Huntsman, and a Cougar Prime.

Clan Diamond Shark

These merchant-warriors got to join my samples of Clanners with a full Star. 80% of their equipment was repainted IWM stock, only the Piranha was a new CGL plastic mini. The Points were a Cougar B, a Stormcrow C, a Piranha, a Stormcrow Prime, and an Ice Ferret E.

ISD's Devastators

Because I didn't get all hot and bothered by the idea of painting my Merc minis as examples of famous merc groups, I named a unit for my own self and designed the unit to be of a tolerably small size. No Regiments nor Army Groups, just a three-Lance Company at most.

That still had to be started somehow, this one was going to be the heavy-hitting brass knuckles of the Company - or if I became insane or overloaded with IS stuff, it could be elevated into a separate Command Lance but that wasn't on the list anytime soon. Thanks to life's randomness my unpainted 'Mechs had two Devastators that would give the funniness to my Company's name, and then I boosted them with a pair of Marauders.

Like I said, in my twisted mind this unit of mine should be 12 'Mechs divided into three Lances. Because I was me, I really wanted to fill up one lance with Catapults only. The third Lance would need to be something lighter in weight classes, I had a load of those in my BTTracker without a proper home yet.

Fire Mandrill

During the Spring-Summer I got temporarily confused of my whereabouts and found myself in the Clan Homeworlds because one of my Forcepacks had a Howler that pulled four old minis from the repainting pile. Doing something as bright as these five was a lot of fun and quite a change, and I thought it was heavily inspired by the flaming horsies a bit earlier in the year.

Gray Death Legion 

My unsuccessful attempt at fixing the Hummel's crew's uniforms gave me an idea for the grey stripes for the GDL. I painted these stripes more like narrow tiger stripes than wide bands some actual artists have done, but I did see some cow-like spots too so I was most likely in the clear with my stylistic choices.

Gaming

Of course I also spent some evening time also on the Steam Deck, and also sometimes when paint or glue was setting. More often I did that when I didn't feel inspired.

Cyberpunk 2077 && Phantom Liberty continued their devouring of my spare time as the Autumn rolled on, I had already completed most or all of the random tasks a year ago already and the map was pretty clera. That meant I had to continue along a main quest line, and of course taking a step forward took me into the rabbit hole of side- and subquests. Panam Palmer became my good friend, then I rescued both Judy Alvarez and the cop River Ward, both of whom I wooed. Silverhand was obviously pissed off because of River and that was just fun.

Some time later I had to continue along the main story again, but luckily taking another small step on that path triggered a trove of new sidestuff to be unlocked. I escaped with Takemura to a desert motel, and then I left him calling around and explored less urgent stuff first. At this point the DLC's Dogtown got unlocked and I started on the Phantom Liberty questset. I didn't check how long it actually took but I guess it took way over a month, checking every single corner and map marker. Dogtown was quite heavy for the Steam Deck, much more so than anything else in Night City or around it. I saved like an old Sierra adventure game enjoyer, and that way I managed to check all of the storylines starting from the most disgusting one and then reverting to key moments to make more interesting choices, finally locking the least annoying option as my canonical storyline. I sent my friend to the Moon.

After clearing all the long tails of the DLC story I returned to the main quest by starting Johnny Silverhand's Chippin' in quest, that took me to another side path. These were relatively quick ones. Then I got through both Rogue's and Kenny's quest sets and then I had to admit the truth: I only had one boxing match left and Nocturne OP551N, and I didn't like boxing so I went the other way.

Nocturne was the final main quest, and that had a couple of paths to choose from so I obviously played them each in turn as November turned into December. Either I was unlucky or was bad at guessing, I ended up checking the crappiest path last, unlike in Phantom Liberty where I managed the opposite. Well, I have now got rid of Adam Smasher three times, without autoupdates I'd have to do that one extra time and that also didn't appeal to me. No, I was not a fan of boss fights.

BioMenace Remastered

In December 2025 I bought the BioMenace's remastered version as soon as it was available and started playing it in January when I was completely through with Cyberpunk. This remaster had all sorts of awesomeness in it like a widescreen support, improved gfx, and I couldn't point the changes out just from memoery. I tried out the original mode and hoo boy, my memories had definitely gotten gilded! This new version was so much better and worked just about the way I remembered the good old DOS game did.

Another image you could hear

The old shareware episode was played through pretty much from memory, the next ones not so much. A new fourth episode was completely new and a good one. Playing through the game took about two workdays' worth of time with all the getting lost and whatnot, making the dark evenings of January much comfier. I hunted for a few of the Steam achievements but I didn't even think of the last four, speedrunning the episode 25/25/30/60 minutes. Just the thought of that felt like a chore.

Heretic + Hexen

While waiting for the winter solstice I played something simple, something that wouldn't bother me over the deckless winter vacation. Heretic+Hexen was pretty recently released so I started by blasting my way through Heretic. I did play some Heretic back in the day but only a fraction of the amount of time I've spent on Doom, and mostly the shareware episode even if I bought the cd version and completed the full set at least once. It was pretty confusing to notice how much of it I still remembered just like that, at least of the basic episodes. Those new sets like the ones that came with Doom + Doom II were of course unknown to me and full of surprises. Faith Renewed, the new extra episode, was very stylish and you could see how mad (in a good way) the wad builders had become since the days of the original release.

Hexen was also still lots of fun to play, I had completed it once as Baratus the fighter, and now I was so pleased that each hub had a book that you could use to change characters however often you wanted to between Baratus, Parias (the cleric), and Daedolon (the mage). The first hub was just about as confusing as I remembered, but the next ones caused fewer "wherethecrapamisupposedtogonowandwhatdidthatswitchdotoday?" moments. Or I had learned something in the decades in between. After the main game I started on the original add-on Witchkings of the Dark Citadel but that got to my nerves pretty quickly, it was so full of tricks and gotchas. After that the brand new Vestiges of Grandeur promised in my mind something amazing, and the style was indeed astonishing. In the very beginning there was little wandering, but things got complex pretty quickly while I was hunting keys, detached heads, diamonds and other puzzle pieces all around the hub. Mix in with that a number of Heresiarchs and the Traductus-Menelkir-Zekek -fights and you got a recipe for plenty of annoyance-reducing breaks.

 

Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition

Back in the nineties I played RotT a bit, both single- and multiplayer but only the shareware version. It was pretty hysterical with the countless weird traps, springboards and flying discs, but for some reason in my circles it didn't punch through. RotT's Wolfenstein genes showed through in the worst way with the maps being very confusing due to repetitiveness and that you couldn't have a good clue of what was going on, and the "a [wall | pillar] moves" message was somewhat cryptic at best. I didn't remember what the DOS version's automap told but this new one at least highlighted them nicely so that was an improvement against running around aimlessly.

In about fifteen hours I completed the shareware episode The HUNT Begins, and the commercial version's four episodefuls of The Dark War. The retail episodes had boss fights unlike the shareware one: a general Darian in the first, Sebastian Krist sitting in a cannon-chair in the second one, R2-D2's angry cousin in the third one, and El Oscuro who turned into a massive snake (I dind't find a single egg so I only got the bad ending) in the last episode. After those I gave a shot at the other and newer campaigns, Extreme ROTT and The HUNT Continues but in the same run those were, like those in the Heretic and Hexen pack, way too trick-trappy and intended for experts. Maybe I'd give them a new chance sometime later.

All this worked perfectly on the deck, and somehow the game attacked my eyes much less than on a proper computer screen. I even tried out the map editor, which was a bit funky without an actual mouse but I got a compiling map built.

Robocop: Rogue City

Half-reliable internauts had recommended the Robocop game and I picked it from one of the Steam Sales at some point. This followed both of the movies and their world, the city was just about as awful as in the movies. All the shelves of the baddies were jam-packed with Nuke, and the eighties look with punks all around was evident from the first moments on. The discussions were amusing, I was laughing at an encounter in the early game where a trio of drug dealers were lecturing a newcomer, who was selling Nuke and whatnot below the market price, about the free market.

 

Mixed in with the main quest there was a bunch of sidestuff to do like giving parking tickets, reprimanding a graffiti painter, and other police-related stuff. The most fantastic fetch quest was "get a towel for a colleague who forgot to get out of the shower" and I couldn't take it as anything else but a mockery of generic fetch quests. The first boss fight was against an ED-209 and I was about to uninstall the game because Robocop was slower than a cargo train without wheels and ED was blasting away non-stop. I had used all my ability points to getting always more XP so I had to just cheese the boss instead of playing like it was meant to be played: I stood behind a blown up van, protected from ED but able to whittle away its hitpoints. All of the subsequent boss fights were simple and clear, and therefore much, much less annoying.

Chekov's Robocop 2

As the mechanical law enforcer did not bunny hop or run, the game was full of robotically stomping around and around. Few of the lawbreakers got arrested, most got american-policed with a clipful of bullets in their brains. Robocop's default Auto 9 pistol had unlimited ammo and you found modifiable chips for it so you could upgrade and swap them around for different kinds of fights. When that one just didn't cut it, there were limited-ammo pickups from pistols to automatics to shotguns to grenade launchers and even the Cobra autocannon from the original movie. Of course the baddies also used these against you and that's how you got them: from their cold dead hands. The heavier ordnance meant that you couldn't just march in and execute everyone, sometimes you had to hide behind corners.

Blood: Refreshed Supply

In the Spring I continued my nineties-shooting spree with another Build remake. The four-episode Blood was something I played in my teens, this one also had an original add-on campaign and a couple of newer episodes (Death Wish & Marrow). I spent something like fifty hours on these but I had to admit that after the original Blood the extra episodes were, again, mostly too "haha, gotcha!"-filled like RotT and I simply didn't enjoy griding through them.

Noticing getting fed up with that sort of gameplay I decided to check out something completely different from my long backlog of Steam library. I took a look at the list of games I had mostly got as bonus items from bundles I had bought for one single game or so, and kept my eye open for things that would a) work on the deck and b) could be interesting. There was a number of those.

Papers, Please

As an Arschtotzkan passport inspector I stamped people's passports. The rules and regulations changed daily, and as my salary was based on the amount of applicants processed, being slow, careful, and meticulous meant starvation, but declining acceptables or allowing entrance to wrong people came with warnings and fines which also meant starvation or even death (to me). Some rebels made contact and if an official asked about it, I once made the mistake of telling the truth and got taken camping. That made restarting the day and denying knowledge.

In the end I managed survive along with one family member for the whole cold month, and escaped to a neighbouring country with them. Someday I'll try again and check what other storylines there are to be found.

Human Resource Machine 

HRM was a programming-themed puzzle game by the makers of World of Goo. The funny thing was that some of the levels got optimally solved on the first attempt even in the very end, while some took a good number of poking around to even solve them in the first place. The more mathematical problems weren't my forte.

The Bridge

A physics puzzle that just flew nicely and beautifully for the first three levelsets, but then I got stuck in a level in the fourth group as I just couldn't get the two separate gravity directions aligned in a loop. I couldn't get further along, so I gave up instead of swearing ':D

Guacamelee! Gold edition

The name alone told me I probably wasn't going to complete Guacamelee, in the very same way I gave up on Teslagrad and some other semi-recent 2d game. The game itself was incredibly pretty and good on the ears. To my gentle surprise I found the energy to beat some minibosses and the multistage arena fights way further than I thought I would, because in between those the actual levels were lots of fun. I dropped the deck from my hands when I got into yet another multistage fight where I should've memorized every move by heart to get a bit further in the story. That started feeling like work, and I uninstalled the game which was a pity because I really liked the game outside those arenas (and boss fights, you may have noticed a pattern).

Dark Forces remaster

Four games later I returned to something that was going to be quick and fun to play through, and I remembered the remaster of the original Dark Forces, and I went for that even if I had just completed the original original only a few years ago. The maps were as maze-y as they have always been but I had a good time.

The top of my backlog

I barely got started assembling the plane that Project Assistant I had asked for before the summer vacation started. My worries were baseless, the 1:144 scale plane did not require much time on the assembly line. What was totally unpredictable was their painting interest, I could make no predictions. I mean, there was still that Kamov and the tiny ISD model from years ago, both missing their finishes.

Airbus A320

Of the fifty pieces most of them went into the landing gear and the engines. The biggest excitement here was the fitting of the parts, and how much adjustments were needed. Most importantly the artist's ideas and plans were in a complete freeform mode at this point.

The obscure future

While I was finishing up the Hummel I was thinking out loud that I could try out a larger-scale airplane in a future. Just poking at the very much smaller scale Airbus I got more into the idea of it. That worried me a bit as I truly was an armour modeler at heart.

Halfway to thirty

 

Riding the wave of puberty

An old fart was remembering himself at fifteen, when I was on the last year of elementary school: this view we nerds mocked with whenever subjected to a family computer running the latest from the foul B. Gates and his company. Just like with ie where your only task was to download a proper browser, the first thing with Win95 you wanted to exit it to do something, anything.

Some things haven't changed in these decades, my loathing of Windows has remained strong :D Project Mumblings and its Finnish-speaking sibling haven't been quite as annoying as I was at the same age, at least I hoped my verbal output has improved a tiny bit during their 15 years. 

A rarity these days: Panzerkampfwagen

The semi-accidentally bought Panzer IV Ausf. F2 by Border Model was a really nice set, and like I praised them while working with them, the Panzerwerk Design tracks were great and I wanted more for my next tank. As soon as I figured out what that was going to be, got one bought, and started assembling.

Lego

The Bumblebee got bought primarily because I wanted to do my part to ensure more Transformers lego sets in the future, not really because of the character itself. Still, the set was fun and supported my childhood memories, and this was about a quadrillion times more cool than the flea market -found and equipmentless G1 Bumblebee.

Last Autumn's father's day arrived with more buildables. Executor was also glorious, and actually fit somewhere, unlike the large ISD that was waiting for space and time inside its box.

Fresher stuff, Soundwave was orderable on 1.8., and as it was known, I ordered it the very morning. I could've started my first post-vacation morning a lot worse. That, of course, didn't make the waiting any easier or nicer. Luckily Soundwave was delivered right at the end of my second workday so I could start that evening already.

Rocket launcher diorama

As anyone knew, I hadn't made practically any dioramas. Generally speaking I had no materials, tools, nor even ideas - not to mention space - for making display things for my constructs. Maybe the airplane stands like Focke-Wulff's grass field with a Kübelwagen, the Fulcrum's much-suffered Soviet concrete base, or the Flanker's flight stand could be called vignettes, even if the difference between the two was a bit funky. This setup was the first one in ages that felt that it would justify a somehow fancier title.

Urged on by my colleagues I started on it, but I had to admit I didn't really need much poking to get going. My absolute amateur skillset glared a viewer from here and there, but the main thing was that I had a good time and I was generally quite pleased with the time-consuming thing.

Mechs

Last rolling year had been nicely loaded with plastic 'Mechs. Five different sets, fifteen minis from scratch, and five with a repaint of cockpit panels, energy weapon lenses, and Jump Jets.

Ghost Bear

Two final Points for the Star from Delta Galaxy, a Stormcrow and a Viper:

Jade Falcon

Retouching the Operation:REVIVAL Star, meaning Executor, Puma, Timber Wolf, Nova, and Mongrel. This improved my somehow annoying day by a factor of craploads.

 

Otherwise heavier hardware: Warhawk, Turkina, Ebon Jaguar.

 

 

Blood Spirit

Funnily enough I forgot to take a final group photo of the Star that was for the Clan that turned the practical opposite of the so-called espirit de corps. Clan Blood Spirit, Alpha Galaxy, unspecified Cluster, Trinary, and Star: Mist Lynx, Kit Fox, Stormcrow, Ice Ferret, Shadow Cat.

Jade Wolf

Some Second Line ClanTech BattleMechs for a very short-lived Clan [in an inverted N-pattern from rear left to front right]: Marauder IIC, Warhammer IIC, Stone Rhino, Hunchback IIC, Supernova.

Queue

In addition to the digital stuff I also had a couple of bits in the Clan Invasion box, and then all that came in the awfully-long-awaited Mercenaries KS loot. Nope, I was not going to run out of BT stuff in the backlog, which meant that at my rate of painting there could be stuff for a couple of years. The previous ones have been in slow progress over some years, so the assumption was indeed years.

BTTracker

I have been randomly and casually improving my tracker, at least whenever I noticed that some earlier solution turned out to be too clunky. Not that it interested anyone else in the known universe, but I was thinking of posting about it at some point anyway. That one made my hobby life easier and that pleased me, even if a smarter and so much more time-efficient approach would've been a super simple UI and a db model.

Air farce

This I have said often, that I have never been that much into planes, especially anything more modern than a Me-262. Still, I was beside myself when Santa brought me an F-15 and I even managed to start on it before the following Saturnalia! In the name of science it might be fun to get the other two F-15 models from different manufacturers just to compare them.

Games

Since the last anniversary post my Steam Deck has been graced by the Doom set (having bought the original at some point I got an autoupdate to DOOM + DOOM II which then also included Final Doom, Master Levels, Sigil and couple of others) from start to finish; I played through the Duke Nukem 3d's four episodes, of which the last was completely new to me; some more Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries that got somehow stuck with my mod setup and I just uninstalled the damn thing in annoyance; then I returned to Factorio v2 in the late winter.

For some unexplicable reason I started working on the Lazy Bastart achievement in  Factorio, which meant I could only build a minimum amount (<= 111 entities) of anything by hand, and everything else had to be done with assemblers. This time I started with a Main Bus straight away (8 for metal plates, 8 for copper plates, 2 for steel beams, 1 rock/brick, 1 coal, 4 green circuits, 4 reserved for upcoming products) that also took a bit of extra time because I had to tweak and poke around constantly, but at least it kept the spaghetti at bay. Unless you looked at the smelting area I built into a bit too tight a spot for extensions, which I refactored into tidy input-output lines took the evenings of a week.

My slow tinkering then kicked me in the shins when my sisteen smelting lines with roboti arms, and their neighbouring 20 centrifuges choked my six steam engine parks. I had to do some emergency extensions until my factory had the four nuclear reactors and their accompanying bits constructed for me, which then moved my energy worries to a more distant future. The beauty of this kind of planned automation was that even if it took a while, even the resource-intense things got built while you did something else. In this very practical case the fission reactors, heat exchangers, and turbines had been ready for a while and I didn't need to start building them when I finally I knew I needed them.

Pretty soon after that I noticed how my 24-lane Main Bus was too narrow after all and I needed four more lanes (2 red circuits, 1 blue CPU, 1 sulphur) and I tried to get the liquid pipes also somewhere so I could move the lubricant to the CPU subfactory and the electric motor factory on the opposite side. The next time I'd start with even more pre-planning and at least eight lanes more to start with a round 32 width.

Despite all this silliness I got my rocket factory started and had them launch rockets with satellites at a calm pace, after assembling only 103 items myself. In comparison to a normal game the early part was noticeably slow and hand-holdy, because I had to carry materials back and forth and change the recipes of my few Assemblers until my setup had reached the critical mass and I could just collect the technomechanical fruits from the containers.

Cyberpunk 2077 had fallen off my interest list because I simply didn't care for one-expression Reeves' prominent presence. The ~5 years of reading/hearing people's praise of the game, Steam Deck support and new big updates got me over my grumpiness and I bought the Ultimate Edition from some Spring Sale.

Creating a character took just about all of my playtime for my first gaming session, as these things tended to go, and I wasn't in a rush in this new world. I chose Nomad as the background, jumped into the First Act which was a long intro to the game. It took me over a week, about 10h, and then I stepped into the actually open world. The last time I played anything similar was Fallout 4 (311,5h for a single but pretty thorough playthrough about nine years ago), so I didn't have much to compare to.

By the midsummer week I had continued the main story only by meeting that one dude in a café, then I did what I always did in RPGs: side quests, subside quests, minor quets, look a squirrel! until there's nothing until the big story has been kicked a step forward. One evening I was greeted by an achievement pop-up: street cred capped, and I hadn't even paid any attention to it yet. So far I had done all the tasks in the Center, and continued southward to Heywood where I moved a bit further to Pacifica and even Westbrook to just solve things and simply drive around.

By the summer vacation in June I had spent a silly amount of time just running around, solving mysteries, and I still hadn't progressed in the story. Had I even been near the fence I was supposed to lean on to meet the guy? Doubtful.

Between the vacation and today's Project Mumblings birthday I completely cleaned up Westbrook, Watson, Santo Domingo, Heywood, and Badlands of gigs and NCPD tasks. I even spent a moment with Takemura at some point, and then left him to wait for a better moment again. Last weekend, having done everything else I practically found on the map, I started some mission chains for both Judy and Panam. No idea where those were headed yet.

My Doom story generator and the pygame proejcts have been on hold for a bunch of years now, even though I did poke my generator's texts at some point. Nothing to warrant sharing, though. Maybe I should just sit down and go through all the sentence constructors and then continue on to something more exciting or silly.

14 years done

A year of trying out new stuff

All in all this previous year of Project Mumblings has been an example of trying out some new stuff. I got properly started playing with the oil paints, dared to try out the jeweling effects and even the Jump Jet nozzles. Despite that I've left the OSL and NMM off my traveling workstation, and I felt those two would be much more at home in a more fantasy-themed paintings.

https://deathgenerator.com/#mi1

Oil paints

Yup. I did bring the oil paints up a year ago, and now they felt like they had sat nicely into my toolbox and hobbying processes. Of course there was a lot to learn, and I didn't do anything special with them yet, but there was space for that.

Jeweling

This thing I had avoided long but started pretty happily with my Heavy Star's numerous death ray lenses and even continued even happier on Morgan Kell's Archer and of course I kept at it for the Doomguy Urbie and Grendel A. On an insane moment I also gave this a shot on a more serious model, the mine-clearing T-34's side lamp.

As a decorative detail this was astonishingly much more fun and suitable than I had ever dared to imagine. My own requirement level was of course a tiny bit lower than what the actually skilled mini painters had for themselves, but I was content myself.

The non-weapon lenses, like laser pointers, cameras or who knew what sensor lenses, needed a specific colour. I didn't want them to be confused at a quick glance with S/M/L Lasers or PPCs. Otherwise the grey I used on the T-34's lamp was fine, but that wouldn't stand out from the common grey surfaces on the 'Mechs. Or maybe it would, I had to try it out somehow.

Chipping

Also the first time I dared to try out the self-made scratches on the tank, as the mine-clearing tank sounded like a prime candidate for uglier dents and such. This, too, proved to be incredibly fun to paint, even relaxing. The biggest challenge was to keep the chipping and my evergrowing excitement in check so the model wouldn't look like it stood in a heavy meteor shower.

At some point in history I read / listened to / watched some other modeler's thoughts and they always said they painted radial scratches around their turret openings to do exactly what I had done: to depict what had happened with random rocks, tuna tins or squirrels being lodged between the hull and the turret. So yeah, I felt this validated my idea and that it wasn't a complete brainfart as I wasn't the only one doing it.

Surface texturing

This trick was just freshly on my table and I didn't have any results on how it looked with paint. My first feeling was that just the paintbrush-stippling might be enough for my very basic needs. In the second stage the quickly drying putty was way too quick to kick, so that didn't build my confidence. Maybe I'd try this extended method with a different (and fresher) putty before tossing it into /dev/null.

It was worth noting that soon I'd have a layer or two of paint over this attempt, so it'd give me a better viewpoint on how this worked out. The future was always in motion, but I was confident in being much wiser about both stages of this method by the 15th anniversary of the 'mumblings.