Model Expo 2011

One more Model Expo has been experienced and my legs & feet are still complaining a bit. The main thing is that lots of fun was had, so I'll be there again next year. We'll see if I manage to build anything for the competition 2012, most likely on the last weekend. IPMSFi's section (International Plastic Modellers Society Finland, Imps from now on for simplicity) has always had one drawback that I've complained about: the lights are surprisingly dim so photos are somewhat difficult to take w/o a flash. And the infocards of some models are difficult to see because of the smallness and a couple of meters between you and them. For some reason I don't carry a set of binoculars with me :) In any case the models are generally awesome - I'm always so envious of people's skills.

Amongst the RC ships some silly person had built a silly thing:

Oh well, at least I was amused.

The missile boat was neat, too, even though I'm not a huge fan of ships in general:

To me one of the main things in the whole Expo is the Imps stand. Not that it's a stand per se but a big ring of tables covered in various scale models. This year it was confusingly sparsely populated: several tables were empty. I'll add a bunch of photos below, I didn't even try to take pics of all the categories because either it was too dim to get good photos or stuff reflected annoyingly.

Small-scale tracked vehicles

Bigger warmachines I

Bigger warmachines II

Planes

Planes II

Jets

Planes III

Tiny boats, with a mighty fine U-Boat

Revell's Bismarck

Some Star Wars -themed models. I even found my own silly attempt

A Sergei built by the infamous Komulainen

While I was cropping and downscaling the photos I tried to keep the notes completely in (where applicable), just in case someone could read them. It's bothersome to try to check what the paper says when it's halfway cut. But maybe that's just me, the rest of the hobbyists know everything already so they don't need to read :P

Someone from the RC people had built a confusingly cool Sturm (a finnish StuG), I had to stare at it for a good while with a confused expression on my face. Sadly I didn't see it driving around, I guess it was just posing and looking awesome. And collecting some trophies, of course.

Ps.531-4

The Armoured Guild that takes care of the museum in Parola had brought a real M2 halftrack to their stand. I had to take a bunch of closeups for reference, just in case. Obviously this clean setup doesn't show how awful that would look on the field but it's a real life example that I can look at when building this and that.

On Sunday morning I had a nice chat with the Risteysasema dyde, he's a nice guy. I was going to buy a replacement blade or to for my old and worn hobby knife but he had sold them all already. So I bought a new knife altogether. Oh and I also got a bit of brass tube for 'Mech modifications. That stuff could be really useful when building a bit better looking guns like the different variations of Autocannons or a Gauss gun. I know I'm weak. For a moment I pondered on buying a Panther kit but then I saw the Königstiger with an early production turret (the ones that are also called Porsche turrets). After I'm done with that I've built one of each interesting Tiger variation: a normal Tiger (can't remember which production model), a Sturmmörser Tiger, a Königstiger, a Jagdtiger, and this one.

Project 2/2011

Now that I got my other tasks done, I started poking around with this long awaited halftrack. Not that I've got much done, except a bit of the bottom part of the vehicle. Surprisingly I had to start with some kind of a water tank and the driver's compartment. At this point an alarm started ringing in the back of my head: "think what you're doing and how, these things aren't going to be nicely paintable if you build too far too quickly". I took yet another look at the instructions and the pieces and it's a good thing I did.

If I build the complete thing first and only then start pondering on how to paint the insides, it's a bit too late. There'd be either a horrible unfixable mess or a bunch of unpainted patches. The latter is more tolerable but there's always an angle you can look from and see the flat basecoat or plain plastic that wasn't touchable with a paintbrush or the airbrush. And my builds tend to have those accidental bald spots more than I care to admit...

This is why I decided that I'll first assemble just the inner floor with its benches, but I won't attach the driver's console before that's painted as well. If that's for only one reason, it shall be that all the angles would deny any painting post-assembly.

So I cut the roadwheel axises off, cleaned the awful mess left by the moulding process. That way they both are round like axises should be and they fit better in their slots. To the bottom plate I added the drivers' controls, all three weird sticks. This I'll paint before assembling it any further, so I don't need to worry any more. Of course I'll need to cover the insides well when I paint the outside but that won't be a problem of any sort.

But before I go any further with painting, I have to consult the wonderful world of the internet to find out the interior colour and all that. Though I'll hazard a guess and say Dunkelgelb because we're talking about an open-topped Deutsche Afrika Korps halftrack in the North African deserts... what else could it be?

Alpha Strike!

Last week I preordered one thing when the infamous Laurentius reminded of this. BattleTech 25th Anniversary Introductory Boxset, the starter set you need to play some awesome BattleTech. The guy who I talked with in the phone said "sold out, maybe we get more next week". On Thursday I finally got the email I had been swearingly and eagely waiting for, ran to the center of Helsinki to get some more stuff to further fill my TODO list.

This is what I got:

I chatted with the guy in Fantasiapelit and he said that they had sold the box out twice alread. And of course I had to wonder how the hell does that happen? I mean, you never hear anyone playing BT in here and the shop itself hasn't got any BT related stuff, either. His thought was "Everybody plays in their small group of friends, there's nothing like these 100 player open tournaments like with Warhammers or anything, it's just not as social". Based on my little experience, I have to agree, at least that's how it goes with me. Though I'd be happy to play with more people and share the fun.
But I didn't start this to tell what I chatted about with random people, to the point!

It's a nice compact set. The box art is mostly a good collection of painted miniature 'Mechs, all done by the awesomely skilled people of Camospecs. Most of the box contents are illustrated by the same people. Beautiful.
The right side of the box contains the playbuttons, both the 24 plastic 'Mechs from the previous iteration of BTIBS and two new plastic OmniMechs. I really hope that the Omnis are a sign of a Clan Expansion Set in the near future. The rest of the box is occupied by a nice bunch of printed material:

• Introductory rulebook: an 80-paged rulebook that also tells what else you can find about the subject, such as the IWM & Ral Partha miniatures, FPG transfers for said miniatures, an ultra-awesome Camospecs (I at least use Cspecs as a source for painting my minis). The rules are obviously quite thoroughly explained compared to the quickstart rules, there are background stories and other such interesting things.
• Quick Start Rules: what you need to start playing very quickly.
• Inner Sphere at a Glance: a 55-page booklet that briefly tells the history of the Inner Sphere, a faction at a time, describing stuff about MechWarriors and 'Mechs and it also includes a TRO (Technical Readout) of the 'Mechs that come with the box.
• A cardboard cheatsheet: all the necessary tables you need for a round of the game, so that you don't need to search around the rulebooks. You can't live without one, bonus points for sturdiness.
• How the Core Rulebooks Work: tells how the different additional rulebooks and all that work together. If you go and get more rulebooks, that is.
• Painting and Tactics Guide: a nice guide of what you need and how you use them, from paintbrushes to paints, a step-by-step guide that tells how to set up a mini from cleaning the mini to flocking the base. All that with tricks and tips, for example: how to paint a red or a white 'Mech as they're somewhat more challenging colours. Himmel... After that there's a really neat part with tactics that tells you with pictures and tables how to play the damn game in certain situations! This is really a wonderful booklet.

And

• 24 Inner Spheren BattleMechs
• 2 glorious Clan OmniMechs
• Record Sheets for
  
  • BattleMechs
  • Tanks
  • Battle Armor units
  • Traditional infantry
  • empty 'Mech sheets for DIY 'Mechs
  • Summoner Prime
  • Summoner A
  • Hellbringer Prime
  • Hellbringer A
  Not a bad selection, though I believe in my gaming group we'll keep doing as we've done before. We print the things from HMPro based on what we use.
  
• Inner Sphere map in poster size, from around 3060 based on a quick google search.
• A couple of foldable cardboard two-sided maps. I opened one of them, it has the classic map on the other side with mostly flat terrain, a Depth 1 puddle in the middle, some light and heavy woods scattered here and there and a couple of max Level 2 hills on the top and bottom side of one of the map sides. The other side had a map I don't think I've played on with a hill, a river going through it and plenty of pavement and roads.
  The second map thingy is still in its plastic wrappings, I didn't get to open it yet.
• 2d6: can't live without them :)

All of this with 50Eur. I've made worse deals in my time.

Obviously I attacked the miniatures first, they're what I've been collecting and painting for years and they interested me the most anyway. Some sick monkey had decided to call the OmniMechs with their freebirth names and each and every one of us knows that this is not how it goes. Inner Sphere names are for barbarians. Swearing I opened the Hellbringer's box (Omnis come in small cardboard boxes and the BattleMechs in a minigrip bag). Sturdy looking pieces, a couple of them still in the sprues (hex base, searchlight, knee pads, upper arms and two of those button-like things that go to the rear legs), Confusingly enough the CT, RT and LT are all separate pieces unlike in the IWM metal minis. To my eyes the details look good and so does the fitting of the pieces. All the bits are connected with rectangular pieces / slots to each other so you can't really pose them specially straight out of the box, but I wasn't going to dremelify these things anyway so the default pose is good enough in this case. Some cleaning is to be done, of course, but that's all.

Summoner Prime jumped out of the box completely assembled, which surprised me a bit. Maybe the idea was to show the new users how to assemble that HellB? Oh well, this one needs a bit of cleaning before it can be painted but looks pretty nice as it is.

Then we get to the tin cans of the freebirth scum. I was pretty curious of how these are because I've read quite a lot of complaints about the quality over the years in CBT forums. The first thing that struck my eyes (and my fingers) was the strange material. I guess this is the infamous "bucket plastic" that at least the IPMSFinland people are always complaining about. Feels a bit floppy and soft in general. It'll take quite a while to clean this ones up, but that's how it always goes so I'm not going to complain much :)
I can't really comment yet on the scale of the miniatures, but the vast majority of these are confusingly small compared to my IWM metal minis. Though I guess a large part of that is because I've been building an Assault Cluster so I haven't got that many light/medium 'Mechs to begin with. My two Novas excluded (Elemental Star + Light/Medium OmniMech Star, fast 'Mechs (a couple of Fire Moths, Stormcrows and such) to carry the Elementals to the battle), of course. Perhaps I get to compare my metal Atlas that I painted as a part of my Model Expo 2008 diorama "Nuisance" (a Point of Jade Falcon Elementals swarming a ComGuards Atlas during the battle of Tukayyid). I somehow suspect that they aren't from the same mould...

I guess I recognize a bunch of those, more or less correctly, even. Many of them are somehow faimiliar but I just can't get the name off of the tip of my tongue. There's a Commando, a Jenner, Hunchback, Atlas and a surprisingly small Catapult, a Cyclops, Dragon and maybe a Panther and a Spider as its friend... and a huge lot of things I can't name. Of course I'll find out with the booklets when I get to it.

I'm not sure if one of them is a Rifleman or not, but I guess it isn't. Maybe it's a Jägermech instead. They'll require some work and there's no way around it. In any case the important thing is that in a distant future my Clan Jade Falcon - Gamma Galaxy - 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster has a proper amount of targets available :)

Aforementioned Laurentius and I have pondered a bit on how to paint these IS 'Mechs. The clowns at Inner Sphere organize their BattleMechs in lances or four 'Mechs and there are two, three per company and three companies per battalion and so forth. I really can't remember those things well, I'm much more familiar with the Clan structure. In any case, there are six lances and they could all be from a different faction. For example the Dragon is clearly a DCMS thing and maybe the Catapult would go nicely with it in the same lance, with two more yet unidentified 'Mechs. It's a pity that the box didn't have a Hatamoto-Chi at all, it'd been another clearly Kuritan 'Mech that fits like a PPC bolt in a cockpit. Now I have to consult my Sources to choose what goes where. That Kurita Lance is going to be red, for example in the pattern of 2nd Sword of Light.

One of the lances is obviously going to be a Capellan one, maybe a Death Commandos scheme would be recognizable? Some of the heavier stuff goes to a Steiner lance, maybe in a Lyran Guards pattern and following that one goes to FedSuns, but preferrably not a disgustingly french-flag like Davion Guards unit, even though that's more than recognizable... Free Worlds League maybe needs one as well and the last one for ComStar because it's quite an important faction (Tukayyid).

On the other hand, FWL is such a boring bunch that maybe I should ignore them and paint one of the lances in a bit more important (story-wise) colours, maybe even a Free Rasalhague Republic or a more useful Mercenary unit. There are so many Mercs aroudn that it's not too easy to decide, but perhaps the Wolf's Dragoons are important enough, even though they're traitors. Kell Hounds are also important but maybe a bit overused, so something like the Gray Death Legion has such a cool name that I'm considering that one very seriously.

Oh and the posterified IS map:

First Vegas ending

Achtung, achtung, the spoiler alarm is still ringing!
As a side bonus: I'll start building again soonish, though it depends heavily on the weather (on a clear day it's so much nicer to paint on the balcony), but soon I'll stop talking about Vegas. At least I'll stop doing that here for a while :P

---

When I got my new task from Caesar (kill House, come back), I also talked a bit with Vulpes Inculta and the leader of the Praetorian Guard. Got some minor tasks, completed them promptly to gain some fame, marched back to Benny's suite to chat with Yes Man as the Wild Card -series of quests suggested.

At this point I had a good bunch of open quests, around ten of them. All except one (Red Lucy wanted some Giant Mantis eggs) were somehow related to the ending. I had already decided to see how this "sultan instead of the sultan" solution would play out, which meant working on the Wild Card quests.

The first task was to get rid of Mr. House somehow. After fooling around with a couple of terminals in Lucky 38 I ended up in some kind of a super secret place. There was a long catwalk in some kind of a weird hideout, somewhere deep underground. In the end another terminal and apparently a capsule or something. The hell was this? So, some hackzoring ensued! But no, none of that. It just opened, what kind of a quest was this supposed to be?
Oh well, open the stasis chamber, yeah yeah, I don't mind about any contamina... errr... who's exactly going to be contaminated? Me? Bah, let's do this already.
*pssshhhh*
Hey, it's semi-mummified House! Mein goth... I even forgot to take a screenshot of it, I was so confused by the frail old man connected to the machine and the network. He was complaining about how all his plans and decades of preparation were ruined and why did I do that and blah blah blah. Off with his head, I shot him in the face with a minigun. Then I observed a huge amount of "quest added - BLA", "quest failed - BLA" and I almost got scared if I ruined the whole game. I'll comment on that in a moment.
In the end I had two tasks left. The first one said "go back to Yes Man" and the other one was still the same Red Lucy's quest.

So I marched back to Yes Man and he was as excited as always and wanted to go to Mr. House's termina. Ok, I walked there yet again with the robot. After a bit of in-game rebooting and updating of the rest of the Securitrons Yes Man gave a couple of more quests. Some of them I had already completed during my adventures. I had to go back to the power station that I mentioned the last time, though this time no one got angry when I just marched into the control room, flicked the switch to route more power to my robot army and left.
After that all I had left was to go to the Hoover Dam (the game at least asked if I knew what I was doing), flick another switch in the generator room (one of them) to get even more power for my robots and then kill all the Legion troops on the outside. While I was outside, I was sent to the infamous Legates' camp where I got to finally chat with him. Of course I hadn't thought of reading a "Meeting People" magazine to boost my Speech to 100 so I failed one of the many speech checks and the Legate decided that the time for talking was over. After a brief-ish struggle I killed him (and his face wasn't ruined! I felt cheated).

When I walked back towards the Dam a gate was blown up and a happy general who I hadn't even heard of before came in with his entourage of gas masked soldiers. He was happy until I had finished talking to him: I made sure that I was the boss and I had won. He didn't take it too well and got aggressive. Me and my small team, backed up by an army of Securitrons did a short job of them. Muah.
To finish the last task I just walked to talk to the Yes Man. He rambled a bit about what's going to happen and how he's going to update himself and that was it.
The hell?

---

Now about those "Quest X added", "Quest X failed"-things that occurred right after Mr. House passed away. Apparently until that point the end is still completely open. You can take it however you want, but that is the one that decides how the game will end. I had all four ways open: the Independent Vegas I got, House's Vegas, Legion ending and the NCR ending. When you take the deciding step towards a certain end, the rest of the quests will automatically fail and you can't get more from those factions.
Because of the end I went for, I didn't really get to receive the big no-quests like "Don't step on the Bear" or its Legion counterpart (can't remember the name now, sorry). Those descriptions both say that if you keep working against their interests, they'll stop giving you more quests. Ok. I just got them and they failed immediately because of how that part of the story goes, I couldn't "redeem" myself in their eyes. That also meant that I skipped a potentially big part of the story. Or not. That's the story I got this time. I just couldn't play all the factions against each other until the very end and only then decide who to go with just for the Final Quest. Cool, now that I figured it out.

Anyway, after the ending I just loaded an older save and kept going on from that. This time I went with Mr. House instead and see how his autocratic New Vegas would turn out. After that I'll go for the Legion's side and only last I'll bother with the NCR jerks.

At this point, after taking quests from "the House Always Wins, I" to "the House Always Wins, V" I've got more backstory and explanations. Of course it's because Mr. House is still alive to be able to tell me these things, Yes Man was a robot and couldn't tell me anything he couldn't read from the Platinum Chip. Now I'm supposed to get rid of the BoS people in the Hidden Valley and I dislike that a bit. But a job is a job and I'll get it done - a bit later. Because the quest didn't interest me at this point that much I decided to go to see what I had missed on the map so far. There's plenty of awfulness to be seen and killed.
One of the more awesome things I've already found is this NCR Ranger helmet:

It's perfect. I want many so my friends can wear them too!


By the way, I thought this was going to be a quick, short post over a couple of paragraphs only. Apparently I was wrong yet again.

What happens in New Vegas doesn't necessarily stay in New Vegas

I claim that I can manage another week of no modeling, even though the halftrack is whispering in my ear constantly. So I'll talk about New Vegas that I've played a lot lately. I accidentally completed the game, it only took 65 hours and that's not enough, even Fallout 3 took 103 hours... Though there's a good explanation for that, but before that:

Spoiler warning!

---

There. Don't read if you don't want to know more about stuff I'm not cencoring or anything. You've been warned.

---

After the last post and about thirty game-hours I had adventured all around the wasteland, completed a ton of random quests and slaughtered a ridiculous amount of baddies. And some neutrals. Oh well, some good people too, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a bunch of eggs, you know?
During my adventures I sneakily gathered more and more levels and before I noticed I had got to the level cap (at level 30) and that's all there is. The first DLC is supposed to increase it to 35 but I haven't even thought of getting any of those so far. Not that I cared about the levels but it's just so nice to hear the "bamm" when you get more XP and especially the "you gained a level" sound, boost my skills here and there (especially as some quests are undoable without certain skills being ridiculously high...). As my last perk I chose the Explorer so I can check all the places in the map. Potentially. Oh my, the amount of stuff I hadn't noticed and I thought I had been just about everywhere, the southeast corner excluded... Whoa.

While solving a quest for BoS I went to a couple of Vaults to find some spare parts. One of them was inhabited by a horde of Fiends, those psychotic narcs. With my awesome speech skills I told I was a drug courier and they let me walk around as I pleased. Hah. Of course I looted whatever I could and stole the rest (note to self: put points in sneaking the next time, it makes pickpoketing much more fun). I stumbled upon their boss, too, but he didn't have anything interesting to say so I kept wandering around. In the other side of the Vault I found a bunch of prisoners and a bit later a wounded Ranger. He was there to assassinate the boss Fiend (Motormouth or something) but as he was seriously injured, I just told him to fuck off and that I'd kill the dude myself. I spread a bunch of mines around, started shooting the Fiends wherever I found 'em. Then I released the prisoners and went for the boss. I guess I was there a bit too late in the game (too many levels under my belt) because they weren't any kind of a problem. Or maybe my sneaky criticals just were so lucky.
Who cares as long as my enemies die?
At least I had to shoot the main dude a couple of times to the forehead before he died away. When I checked what his corpse had I grinned like a maniac. That guy had had a chainsaw! A small red text "A chainsaw! Find some meat!" flashed through my mind and then I ran to the nearest city block with enemies with my chainsaw. That was just plain awesome 8)

I kept walking around the map however my quests required and when I was around somewhere I tried to make sure I checked all the yet unfound locations instead of randomly checking whatever, whenever. At some point I got to a power station that was held by the NCR. One of the guards said something like "don't go to the control room" when I marched past. Yeah, yeah, I won't. I went through the first door without paying any attention to its redness in the hud. Inside a bunch of troopers were sleeping but they got up, yelled at me and one of them started shooting. A bad move if I ever saw one... In a moment they were all spread around the walls. I checked the room, found nothing mentionable and went out again. The rest of the guards got angry at me for some sick reason and started shooting without any chance of talking them down or anything. Before I could say "a kitty", half of them were reduced to smoking piles of ash and the rest soon followed. They started it!
I was content, anyway, for I hadn't been the aggressor and so I hadn't lost my fairly good social standing with NCR. But then the last guardess had emerged from behind the transformer station and met her end by Cass' shotgun. The next thing I saw was a "NCR infamy gained" notification.. Damnit.
Oh well, at least they didn't hate me yet, they were just somewhat mixed towards me and my actions.

That gave me the push I needed to go and check Caesar's base. I had been invited so long time ago, so I decided to go and have a chat with him. Couldn't hurt, now could it?

I had my long-ish chat with him, got a few tasks around there and one of them was to go to the basement under the hill. I was going there already for that was on the todo-list from Yes Man. Speaking of whom, he's the one who gave me the idea of killing mr. House and becoming the ruler of New Vegas myself. Caesar wanted me to blow up everything underground.
So there I went, found a telecom device of mr. House and had a chat with him, too. He convinced me to keep working for him, or that's what he believed. I accidentally activated an angry looking army of Securitrons and the noise made Caesar believe that I had blown stuff up. What he doesn't know doesn't hurt him...

This might be a good place to take a break because otherwise this post would be longer than a day without noms. And no one wants that. It's a pity that I haven't got any good pics of the rest of the story I was going to tell. Maybe I'll conjure up some at some point.

More basing

I decided that I'll finish the base as soon, or quickly as possible. There were two main reasons for that.

1. I was in the mood
2. My next models are already begging to be started with

So I took my pin-vise and started drilling a hole to the mdf-plate. Its place was handily scouted when I spraycoated the asteroid base: for this the asteroid plate was on top of the mdf-plate where it was going to sit in the finished version, so I just sprayed directly from above. Some paint went through the small hole I had made with the iron wire so there was a neat, precise spot on the plate as a "drill here" sign. As I was patting myself on the back I noticed my tiny mistake with the toolset. My pin-vise has 0.1mm bits and the iron wire has a diameter of 1mm. So I had to misuse a couple of my other tools but in the end I got the hole as big as it needed to be.

Just in case my white glue wouldn't be enough I decided to pin them together. I marked six places and drilled shallow holes in those spots. After that I poked the end of the thin wire in each hole at a time and cut a short piece. To prevent them from falling off at critical moments (that always happens) or just being in an awkward angle, I spread some thinned down white glue around them. Thinned down so that there wouldn't be any funny lumps on the mfd-plate when I try to attach all things together.

Had I been a bit less enthusiastic, I had realized before attaching the ministicks that the bigger wire needs a place to go to, too... While the tiny pins were occasionally digging into my palm I dug a trench on the bottom of the mdf-plate. When the extra iron wire can be bent to be out of the way and maybe giving a tiny bit of extra rigidity for the whole thing.

That's the actiony pose I had intended. Now I just need to clean up a bit here and there, like taking the sawdust remains off and all that.

As an ultra extra bonus a shot directly from above:

Forking the base

Yesterday I went for a manly shopping run.

First I ended up in the shop that used to be called Risteysasema but nowadays it's something like mallikauppa.fi. Never been there but Tapsa recommended checking it, so... I asked for a good "ground material" for my asteroid and I ended up choosing some gray Woodland Scenics "ballast". Thanks for the recommendation! The bag says it's good for railroads and gravel roads so I bet it's good enough for an asteroid as well with those merits. He didn't have all I was looking for (but my todo list got longer again) so I had to set my course to Kamppi.

From Hobby Point I got - as I had half-expected - some Tamiya pigments and a container of Vallejo's burnt carbon (iirc). Oh and one button of white water paint, just in case I feel like going for a hasty winter camo again. It worked pretty nicely on Hobbes' surface.

Now that I got home, I mixed some water and white glue to make some nicely spreadable but not-that-quickly-setting goo. I spread that stuff over the foam base I had prepared last week. In the middle of the first sector I realized that I hadn't made a hole for the iron wire, so I punched a hole and didn't even make a mess! I'm getting better at this :P Just in case something was going to go wrong I spread the thin glue goo a sector at a time. When the first one was covered I just applied some of that ballast stuff quite liberally. Then shook all the excess crap off, GOTO 10.

That wasn't good for my shoulders, working in weird positions and all that. Or maybe I'm just broken. The end result was pretty neat so I decided that I'll let it dry well so that I don't blow all that ballast off when I start spraying it gray. As I had gotten in the "let's do this"-mood, I approximated a good lenght of wire I needed for the holder. My original idea was something shaped like a square bracket and a support leg going from the back of the plane.

I did some measuring, cut the wire and started bending it around. For a moment I thought I could take a shortcut (not bending the wire 180º but just going down) but it didn't feel too good in the terms of supporting the model. So I decided to go with my original idea because it sounded like it worked better. After each bend I checked if all was going as planned. Just to make sure. And just to be on the safe side I made a couple of extra bends under where the belly of the Imperial X-Wing would be, even though I didn't think it was absolutely necessary. Just in case.

That's how the fork ended up. I'll paint it matt black later so everybody gets that it's not a part of the picture:

Of course I had to check how the "final pose" would look and if it ends up like I had hoped:

At this point I can still finetune the whole thing and there's plenty of time and space for it. Maybe those caves need a bit of filling or maybe not. Who says that all asteroids are as smooth as potatoes, anyway?
I guess that's most of what's left: fixing the MDF-baseplate, painting the asteroid and attaching it to the baseplate with the model supporting metal wire. Oh yes, I've got a good feeling about this!

Fixin' the base

I got to work one of these afternoons. I cut a hex-ish shaped piece out of the large chunk I got, using the baseplate as a rough template. It wasn't as simple as I thought because that foam is quite thick. The main goodness is that it's a lot sturdier than normal styrofoam and doesn't crumble as awfully.

The whole piece was quite thick compared to the scale of the model so I cut off about a third of it, with the idea of making the cut very irregular. That irregularity was to make it more natural looking. Of course it doesn't look much at this point:

So I impaled that thin piece to the proof-of-concept piece (that rectangular MDF-plate with a metal wire going through it) and sprayed the whole thing flat gray. It'll need some fixing still, but it's a start. It's also nice that I can work on the balcony with these things better now that the sun stays up for a bit later so I don't have to struggle with the little light that comes from the living room windows... ain't the approaching spring just awesome?

Next I am going to cover the top parts in thinned down white glue and then dump a load of sand on it. And then, I thought, I'd spray that again with the gray thing. I believe it'd be quite space-y. In case it doesn't go as I think it should, I can still repaint it until it ends up how I want it.

I'm just hoping that the gray base wouldn't make the whole view way too gray with the darkish metallic Imperial X-Wing. We'll find out soon enough.

New material to accompany the Imperial X-Wing

A bunch of days ago I asked from a guy I know, what he as a more experienced modeler thinks of my plan for the X-Wing's base. I had thought that a salsa jar lid would be a nicely sized and shaped thing to put stuff on. The asteroid could've been modeled with some styrofoam that's been softened over a tea candle or something. Then the model itself would be lying on a plastic pipe (cotton swap pipes, to be more exact) and there would be a piece of metal wire that hooks to a hole in the bottom of the model. Or a bunch of them. But drilling holes in my model? Didn't like the sound of that.

This is more or less the reply I got to my email: "I may have some extra finnfoam at work, it's nicer to work with than polystyrene and maybe some MDF plates and some heavier metal wire. Would it be fine if I popped by on Friday?". Of course it was fine. And as usual the five-minute visit ended up being more than an hour and a half, for we both seem to have the habit of talking quite a bit whenever there's someone to chat with. This is what Tapsa brought with him:

A plate of lightish blue finnfoam, an assortment of those mdf plates with nice edges (I have absolutely no clue how that thing is to be called in english) and a small roll of strong-looking metal wire. The idea is to twist a piece of that wire to make a two-pronged fork to have the model sit on (between the wings). Then the wire would turn back from other end to go down, through the finnfoam and the mdf plate where it would be finally connected. At the moment I think that the biggest problem will be the making of the asteroid shape so taht it doesn't look too fake. Soon we'll see how badly I guessed. Again.

I really was going to keep a short-ish break from modeling and all that but then again, there are my pieces and it's less than two months to Model Expo so I have to actually build that base before it. Meanwhile the next special vehicle (SdKfz) is already whispering from under the table "Build meeeee.... buuuiiiiiiillllldddd meeee". Auf deutsch, natürlich.

Maybe I'll go and play a bit more of Fallout so that kind of whisperage ends for a moment at least.

War. War never changes.

As my description is at least trying to say, I've assumed I'll be writing about other things, not only about scale models. My main reason is that I can't and don't always have the time to build and/or paint. Another reason is that gaming is another of my hobbies (coding for fun is one as well, but haven't had much time to do that lately...). These things work nicely together, for you can do both in different states of mind, weather and schedule: in 15 minutes you can either assemble something but it makes no sense to fire up Civ IV for that. Or half an hour isn't enough for an elaborate painting session but it's more than fine to kill a bunch of Crimson Lance fools. Just like one just doesn't always feel like playing/building/something, so options are always a pure victory.

I mean, playing through a Fallout in my style is a big and a long-lasting Project, so it fits under the topic really nicely :) Anyway, I'll prepare my short story with a long background explanation.

Oh, and before I continue, I'm warning about potential spoilers.

I won't be hiding any story parts or anything else, either, I'll just write what I come up with. There'll be a bunch of text and most of it is going to be just general ranting and all that, so maybe the "quality" of my postings will suffer for
this post - or maybe for every gaming-related post as well. Who knows?

My experiences with the Fallout series is such: second one I've played through a bunch of enjoyable times, Fallout 3 1½ times and this New Vegas one is still under progress, obviously. For some sick reason I've never got my hands on the original Fallout, my friends never lent me Fallout Tactics (they were always busy with it themselves) and the xbox-based BoS I tried once quickly at a friend.

The third real Fallout by Bethesda was something I was expecting with a great amount of curiosity: how can you turn this awesome RPG with turn-based combat into one of these modern real time 3d-thingamagicks? Thankfully the VATS sort of brought the shooting back to the turn-basedness, for the moments when real time shooting wasn't feasible (it's somewhat nicer to shoot down enemy grenades in VATS). VATS lets you aim at different body parts and gives the to-hit percentages to help in the decision-making. My old favourites from Fallout 2 (the eyes & the groin) aren't included! Blasphemy! Especially the eyes not being in the list annoys me to no end. What do you do with a good set of spiked knuckles if you can't pop your enemies' eyes out with them? Why can't I swing my super sledgehammer at that slaver's groin?

Now that I got to that part, you can aim at bodyparts when you're shooting, but if you're armed with melee weapons or just your fists, you can't aim at a specific part at all in the VATS mode! What the hell? You could shoot someone's knees off but you can't cripple them with a hammer? Why not? I'm waiting for a mod to fix this insane missing feature. Also, with my skills, I couldn't choose if I was punching or kicking, like in Fallout 2. Maybe that's not implemented. Pity, but not as much as the no-targeting-for-melee-weapons. Bah.

Ok, I mentioned mods, it's awesome that these new Fallouts can be modded to your heart's content. The games are nicely harsh out of the box, just like Fallout 2 was. Swearing, smoking, drinking (+1 charisma, -1 perception (or so)), slavering, whoring and all that plentiful more or less justified violence. Oh, you can also use drugs if you want to see how the addict side of the game world works, and if you aren't afraid of the withdrawals. Or you can join those aforementioned slavers, at least in F3, haven't got to see anything for or against in New Vegas.
I once got addicted to Nuka Cola in Fallout 2, it was pretty surreal: that was the first bottle I drank :D Those combat drugs give you bonuses and all that, but my fear of negative buffs from withdrawals have kept me away from them. For some reason this was all fine and dandy for our friends in Australia, but using morphine for greater damage tolerance (strong painkiller, anyone?) was not. It was scary enough for them to consider not rating the whole game, which translates into the game being practically banned in Australia. So Bethesda renamed morphine to Med-X and one of the first mods, and the first one I always install, is Med-X to Morphine. Despite my character using Morphine every once in a while I haven't ended up being a morphi- or any other nist, in the game or in real world. Tards.

Oh, and there was (is) one big instance of self-cencorship in these two games and that confuses me quite a bit, hopefully others, too. In the good old Fallout 2 I was running around Den (if I remember correctly, after Arroyo you find the first three places in this order: Klamath, Modoc, Den). There are numerous kids in Den and they do some pickpocketing. Once I got some caps stolen from me and I replied with a sledgehammer into his face. The brat died instantly and his/her corpse slid all the way to the edge of the map. I got my caps back and went on my merry way, back to Modoc. The locals had turned into less happy people, their speech texts were enemy-red and replies were pretty harsh. One of them attacked me and after the thing escalated into a bloodbath I decided to run away, for at that early point in the game I wasn't quite up to an ethnic cleansing of the village... yet.
Anyway, after getting away I checked my stats to see what the hell could be wrong, what was my status among the groups I had contacted already. I noticed that I had a brand new Child Killer perk among the few ones I had already had. I decided that things weren't how I wanted them to be so I loaded an earlier save and let the kids be in the future.
Well. If you end up pickpocketing them and dumping some lit dynamite or C4 in their pockets... they die all the same but you don't get the negative karma :P

For their own reasons the Bethesda team decided that in their game this won't do (and obviously the kids in these games are just as annoying as in the movies). Naturally I, to protest, got a childkiller mod to Fallout 3. I only used it to try it out. Funnily enough, if blowing kids up was doable out of the box, I'd avoided doing that like the plague itself. Now that it's forbidden and you have to mod your game to do that... Blah.

Maybe I get to my real topic now?

---

So I got Fallout New Vegas as an xmas gift in the spanish tradition: the sixth of January (reyes magos, three magical kings). Almost two months have elapsed and according to Steam that means roughly 35 hours of game time. Nowadays I play semirandomly from ~30mins to ~2 hours, depending on how I feel and all that. And when I feel like it.

I'm in the very early stages of the main storyline. I mean, I've only solved a couple of short "go there and ask about who shot you" tasks until I got to Vegas' the Strip. In the very beginning you get to know that you were a courier and were carrying a platinum chip, someone caught you, took the chip, shot you in the head and buried you. Apparently the attacker was a clueless retard or you were just plain lucky for you survived. The first mission is to find your killer and get back the platinum chip to complete your job. After one or two of these "go there, talk to someone" tasks later you hear that the killer was someone called Benny and he lives in the Strip. Nice. It's just not that easy to get there. The straightest route is full of Deathclaws and the detour gives you a ton of more quests. I solved them however, what sounded most interesting (= less deadly) or was just around the corner already. While doing all that the map got populated with more and more markers and those ended up giving even more quests or small tasks to complete.
The variety of bigger and smaller quests go from the classic "get a needle from the haystack, take it to the pharmacist who gives something to be taken to someone who gives you candy and 100 exp" to "Gather a mob and defend the town from escaped prisoners", and awesome quests like "Find out who sold my wife as a slave so I'll shoot him/her in the head" and "Hire a ghoul cowboy to do soem 'escort' stuff in my bar", not to mention some honest mercenary stuff.

While doing all this, running amok around the desert I've raised my dude's level to almost 22 (out of 35 before any DLC) and only now I dared to go to the quarry that's crawling with Deathclaws. There's a Deathclaw Mother, a Deathclaw Alpha Male (didn't remember those when I got there...) and a horde of smaller ones of all sizes and ages. So far all my attempts of trying to sneak by the quarry have ended quickly in myself being torn from limb to limb and my poor friends being eaten. All this in less than half a minute. Now I went into the quarry and started sniping them - without a real sniper rifle, of course. Now I survived because I went on the ledges so the monsters didn't always get to me and my friends on the first or even the second attack. Still it took a couple of dozen attempts. At one point I realized that the Alpha Male always storms the same way so I run, dropped all my 38 frag mines in the same pile, ran back, attacked from a distance. He went head on to my trap, crippled his leg and it still took me. Raul and the robot a ridiculous amount of time, tries and ammo to kill that bastard. Of course it's just correct: there are places where you shouldn't go if you aren't tough enough, you'll get killed in a heartbeat. And if you are tough, you're still not guaranteed to survive. In the early game, armed with small worn out pistols, tire irons and wearing a leather coat it's a suicide. Now, weating a Combat Armor, armed with various rifles, laser guns and explosives, it was still a challenge. Awesome!

At the moment, based on what I've seen and heard in the deserts of Vegas, there are two main groups against each other: New California Republic (NCR) we know from Fallout 2 and Caesar's Legion I've never heard before of. The NCR has spread its area of influence from the distant-ish California and the Legion is a brutal, apparently pro-slavery group. At some point the Legion people got angry at me and went from neutral "says hello when crossing paths" to "shoot at sight". I guess I was in too good a relationship with the NCR.
I haven't decided who I friend in the end (if I can choose, that is): NCR who seems to be a bit rude and I didn't like them at all in Fallout 2. And when you chat with the Legion's representative, they have a fun-sounding approach to life. We'll see how the thing proceeds and what I hear if and when the background stories get revealed a bit more. As the more recent happenings go, both NCR and Legion reps promised that my "possible crimes against them will be forgotten" and that I should go and have a chat with them. That NCR ambassador I met already for he was just behind the corner but I'd need to travel quite a bit to meet Caesar. I guess my quests will take me closer to the southeast corner of the map soon, so I'll talk to him too, when I get there.

Or maybe I'll just stay with Mr. House, enjoy the security provided by some heavily armed robots and spend all my different monies in the casinos. Oh, I found Benny all right. I threat.. persuaded him to have a private meeting and beat him to a bloody pulp with my spiked knuckles. He tried to get me to join him and his team, he also promised some quests and stuff, but revenge is sweet and I didn't want to have those spiked knuckles being smuggled there for nothing... Maybe in another life.

For the first time it's happened to me that I've ended up developing the speech skill quite a lot in Fallout New Vegas, it's actually quite useful. In all the earlier games I've either bribed (and then stolen my caps back) or burned my way through so this is quite an exciting new thing to me. Always, especially in Fallout 2, I've made some sort of a kickboxer thief (unarmed + pickpocket + small guns), now I'm more like a Han Solo type of a loud guy (guns + speech + melee weapons). Yeah, I know, Han Solo isn't a melee dude but I like it and hadn't thought of this before, maybe survival would've been good for this type of a guy.

I guess I'll stop now and continue in another post, no one is going to read this kind of an endless rantage :P