A steaming deckful of systemic shocking

Steam Deck 256 GB

This Spring's Steam Sale had the Steam Deck's different versions slightly discounted. I asked my old friend, who had bought a Deck sometime earlier, what he thought of it and how had it worked for him. It was pretty clear at this point that I was going to order one, maybe I was just confirming my decision somehow.

Device

The postal services delivered my order pretty quickly (or I was so busy I didn't even notice the time between ordering and receiving) right in the early April. I was delighted with the transport case that relieved me of the awful "where the hell could this be stored safely?" process.

As a physical device it was a bit larger and heavier than a Nintendo Switch. The photos here didn't show that there were two pairs of formula 1 gearshift -triggers in addition to the normal double R/L corner triggers, just like in Steam Controller (I liked it as a controller, I just haven't played many games that were nicer with SC instead of keyboard+mouse combo).

Testing

During these couple of months I haven't used that much time with the new toy, but I've played a bit. I think I completed episodes 2-4 of Secret Agent HD on the deck while I only completed the first one on the desktop. In Noita aiming the magic wand with the thumb controller was a bit odd but despite that I did get halfway reliably to the Snowy Depths. Or as reliably as with the desktop...

My aforementioned desktop was at least 8 years old at this point, and only recently I had ended up in this situation where it didn't run the newer games that I was actually interested in playing. I guess there were a million things that it wasn't good enough for anymore, hadn't been in years, but none of that had crossed my table. Now I could ogle at the modern games if they behaved well with this sort of a console controller or not. The touchscreen, what little I tinkered with it, worked just nicely. I also hadn't yet taken the time to reboot to the GNU/Linux side of things and start fooling around. No rush.

System Shock remake

The early June email flow woke me up to the fact that the Kickstarter project I just backed in summer 2016, System Shock remake, had its final product released to the wild. Interestingly the project team's original and mildly optimistic release goal was 2017, which has obviously caused some keyboard-smashing rages in the well-known type of internauts. I was just content with the thing being done and that I could try out the game I paid 30 USD for. As anyone reading my nonsense here may have noticed, I hadn't been able to run out of things to do over the years.

I almost forgot that this KS project also included System Shock: Enhanced Edition that I found in my Steam library some years ago and that I hobbled through to compensate for the fact that I didn't get a grasp of the game in 1994, 1995 despite spending my allowance on the SVGA cd-rom version and all. Maybe it was too different from Doom for my liking at that point in life? I couldn't remember such details anymore. Another pretty likely explanation was that the family computer, a 486/SX66/4 (later /8 and even /16) just didn't run the shocker well enough.

No matter, I practically didn't play the original System Shock at all and the Enhanced Edition on the slightly more modern hardware mostly gave me a headache. The places I could somehow remember and recognize and the story was known, but I didn't think that was going to be a problem for my experience. Most likely my old colleague Matti – who I suspected having memorized each of the pixels – might have been even more excited than myself.

 

So far I've been adventuring in the bottommost levels of the Citadel Station over the evenings of a couple of weeks. I've gotten beaten up or otherwise seriously injured often enough to make me limp back to the Medical Suite to cheese the autodoc and the recharging station. Despite my cautious approach I've managed to murder everyone from almost two and half floors now, having proceeded from the Medical level to the Research and Reactor levels. Some of the irradiated corridors I've avoided like the plague because just opening the door has made the hacker gag his guts out and the radiation damage has taken ages to fade away. Maybe I didn't need to be that paranoid, as getting the Isotope from the pretty hot room in Research wasn't that hurtful (I went in with full health and ran back to the autodoc straight after, of course).

The poor folks turned into cyborgs have been awful and they've lost heads and/or limbs in fights, just like in the good old Soldier of Fortune. Whenever I have managed to take it easy, the normal and few elite cyborgs have been pretty chatty so they've rarely been able to take me by surprise.

A few of the commenters I've seen have said that "this is how it looked in your memories" which wasn't quite correct as my memories came pretty freshly from SS:EE instead of polished by almost 30 years. It was very descriptive, I just found places much more recognizeable now, it was easier to get lost in the original.

Jagdpanzering 25-26

Weathering session 1

Now that I had noticed that my paintbrush set was missing a brush that would work great for blending oil paints, so I needed one. Or a couple. On one Tuesday on my way home from the office I popped by the nearest shopping paradise and after asking from the personell I found two fitting makeup brushes from Normal. The other one was round-tipped and the other a flat and a bit stiffer.

Before any more complex operations I repainted the wooden bits of the engineer tools with the wood-coloured paint. I didn't thin it down or anything, just repainted the worst-looking parts.

They were better now. I'd try out the mahogany-wood layers again on the next Panzer.

25: Buff and Light Mud

From somewhere I had gotten into my mind to try colour modulation, so I applied some light (ABT035  Buff) dots around the upper third of the model. This was a pretty light-coloured paint, and besides the Light Grey it was the only one from the Lights & Shadows set I hadn't tried out yet.

The paint application was done with a toothpick to keep the dots small. I started from the top of the barrel and the front of the tank. Then I blended them with my new brush, and when I was content, I proceeded to the next area.

After this colour modulation test I got to to the weathering part. I picked the light mud (ABT215) from the weather set and thinned it down very scientifically "a bit". I didn't want to use the paint direclty as thick as it was in the tube, but I didn't want to turn it into a wash, either.

I spread my paint around the running gear, lower hull, and wherever mud would've flown while spinning in the great outdoors. Blending this I used the rightmost brush seen in the first photo.

After drying from Thursday to Sunday the result was neat and did look like dried mud. Without side-by-side before/after photos I could't tell you what was the end result of my colour moduulation session. It didn't seem to have ruined anything, which was from the better side of the potential results.

Especially in the lower hull I liked how the dry mud looked like at this point. I had left the guiding teeth undone on puprose and that looked a bit funny at this point.

26: Wet Mud

After all these years I really couldn't tell if I had come up with it myself (unlikely) or did I learn from somewhere that when working with mud-sand weathering the bottom-most layer should be your lightest and most dry layer of filth. Then you'd just build on top of that always smaller and fresher-looking layers. I thought that was pretty evident in the springtime when looking at buses and cars: the old dry crap covered the most, while the freshly splashed puddle-mud had a smaller coverage.

On this same line of pseudoart mimicing real world, I thinned down some dark mud (ABT130) and added random splotches around the running gear and the lower hell. In addition I added some marks on the rear deck and on top of the casemate, by the hatches, to represent the muddy boots of the crew.

After choosing the fresher mud areas I spread and blended the mess into something less obvious.

The lower glacis plate's right corner looked like it needed to be softened up later on. If that didn't dry too much... For the sake of science I allowed it to dry for a longer time.

This last photo maybe showed that I finally remembered to paint the jack's handle with the Wood paint. Somehow I had left it Mahogany for a long time. Now it stood out a  it less, but how'd you tell apart a light wooden colour from dark yellow anyway?

These wooden handles did not spark joy in me, but I felt they were still maybe the best wooden bits I had done. Perhaps I could add a brown acrylic wash on them later on? Had I been smart I would've scratched some lines into themt to add some woodgrain texture and that'd help in the washing stage.

With the layers of crap the tank had become quite dirty-looking. Now it was the time to put the oil paints away for a bit. Next I wanted to test how the pigments and Abteilung's thinner worked together instead of Vallejo's pigment binder. So yet another new thing to be tried on in this project.

Trying out something very new to me

So this is what happened

For many years now I've been thinking, not very seriously, for something that had just gotten stronger in the last months. For example, Adam Savage's tested.com channel in Youtube has occasionally had videos where he has done weathering with oil paints (among other products). At some point last summer I joined the #miniature-painting channel in the company Slack, where some colleagues have been showing off some oil paint weathering/blending stuff on their WH40K items. Other skillful modelers with their videos haven't been too harmful (or helpful, depending on your point of view) with this theme.

I noticed that I had been talking out loud about this, caught myself looking at the oil paint tubes at a local bookstore half-seriously, or checking for people's comments in a Finnish modeling site about different brands, and finally I found myself ddg'ing for some local stores (physical and online) and their Abteilung 502 offering. I really, really would've loved to go to a store near my office, or ordered something from a local-ish store. But. But the useful-looking colour sets were either out of stock, or had an offensively long waiting time, or didn't exist in their catalogues at all. So I had to look further away. Funnily enough the offering of (the German) Amazon was quite limited, they of course listed a huge variety even if they had none to actually sell.

Cojones, I thought, and ordered them from the makers themselves, AK Interactive located in Northern Spain. My shopping cart ended up containing some Odourless Thinner (ABT111), a Mapping Technique Lights and Shadows set (ABT303, containing ABT002 Sepia; ABT035 Buff; ABT050 Olive Green; ABT092 Ocher; ABT155 Light Sand; ABT170 Light Grey), a Vehicle Weathering and Effects set (ABT302, containing ABT001 Snow White; ABT080 Brown Wash; ABT093 Earth; ABT125 Light Mud; ABT130 Dark Mud; ABT160 Engine Grease), and two rust colours (). To go with them I also ordered three new synthetic paintbrushes, I also wanted a metallic palette but those they didn't want to sell at that point.

The palette I found from Hobby Point's web catalogue, though they didn't have any of the smaller ones (with fewer of sub-bowls or whatever those were called) I preferred when I asked, so I left my contact info and set to wait for a later delivery. The same evening I got an sms telling they had found one last larger palette and put it aside for me. That was nice.

I ordered the paints on a Friday two weeks ago. The palette (and an 8B graphite pencil) I fetched yesterday, and in the early evening the courier brought the packet to our door (they knocked at the door while we were eating dinner, I got up and to the door immediately and the dude was already marching away, having gotten about ten meters away). At least he turned around to bring the box instead of sending the traditional "we tried to deliver but you weren't home" message.

So yeah, that's what was going on this time. I wasn't expecting my first attempt (the currently WIP Jagdpanzer IV Ausf f) anything mindblowing but just some first steps in learning something new.

Why did I order this amount of paint just to try a method out? Well, I thought that if I was going to try this I would try it properly and just one single colour wouldn't give me enough data. I could've gone even more overboard with paints but I thought this'd be a good start, and that these paints would last me a good long while.

New products in the pipeline

Right after the solstice I got a gift: a set of Vallejo's mud & puddles weathering effects. I really hadn't considered making a diorama for my King Tiger (the hull fitting issues alone dropped any fancy ideas from my mind), so I wasn't going to apply them all now. They'd get to be in a project soon enough.

At some point late last year I had ordered a couple of weathering effects for the engine room. I had grumbled about my oil stains gotten ruined in an earlier post. Now I had more coming in, accompanied with some fuel stain liquid.

Now, a couple of months later the bottles had finally arrived. I started messying up my tank even more the same evening. Cackle.

A new toy (again)

A light tent

Again I received something interesting to celebrate myself starting another orbit around the nearest long-running fusion reaction. Good thing I hadn't gotten the light tent ordered in the last weeks before the event, despite my best intentions :D Packed up this was a convenient briefcase-like setup, which carried two lamps, and a camera stand with a heavy base that also kept the background in place. There were two background sheets, a white and a blue one.

Testing testing

I was working on the Königstiger's power source, so that's what I used to take the first seriously planned photos. Just to see how these worked out, I took a bunch of photos, out of the sheer fun of testing.

Imperial TIE pilot

Taken with phone #2

Taken with phone #1

Megatron

An unweathered panzer motor

I was almost burning to take some photos of the tank in progress, but as it was so badly in progress, I didn't want to wait until I reached a particularly good stage for photos, not to mention the full tank being completed. For this business the Maybach motor was a great subject, as soon it was going to be sealed into the tank's hull so that the details would be lost in my awful memory. Only small glimpses of it could be seen anymore, if even that much.

These photos looked much better than what I have been taking for a bunch of years, in the living room, relying on the sunlight and the ceiling lights, trying to avoid blocking everything with my shadows. Now I'd only need my own work to improve as much as the photos...

Pre-project work

Stocking up

Early in the year I ordered a couple of sets of VMA paint and a couple of extra bottles to top all this up (cream white and two different shininesses of brass). Ten points and a parrot sticker to who first guesses, what we'd be talking about next week.

"A Panzer" won't cut it, I'll have you know. We expect and even demand more accurate definitions around here.