Two-Point detailing

The first details

Now that I had got up to speed with two Points, I felt like I should work more on them while the other three were waiting for their camo patterns. With the large parts done, I moved to the metallic parts of the 'Mechs, and I felt like trying out a new thing in this scale. In the previous project the dark grey + thin, mottled lighter grey on it worked pretty nicely as a metallic surface without using metal paints. I wanted to see how it worked in this scale and there was only one way to find out.

Dark grey metal parts

On the front side of the Dire Wolf the metal areas were pretty obvious (of course everyone had their own opinion on what should be "metallic" on a 100-ton walking tank and so on), at least they felt obvious to me and my so-called style of painting 'Mechs. I started with the Left Torso -mounted LRM-10 launcher's faceplate, then I painted the large gun pod barrels (2x UAC/5), and after those I painted the smaller four tubes around the UACs (4x LLas, 4x MPLas) including their lenses. Those intakes by the cockpit and the ankle joints in the legs got painted dark.

On the back side I decided that some smaller entities were metallic, such as different vents, grilles, elbow joints, and some moving bits in the hip and knee joints. This felt like a good amount.
 

Selkäpuolelta tulkitsin metallisiksi vähän pienempiä kokonaisuuksia, kuten eri jäähdytysventtiilit ja kyynärpäiden nivelet sekä lonkka- ja polvinivelien liikkuvia osia. Päätin niiden riittävän oivallisesti.

On the Summoner's front side I also started with the faceplate of the LRM-15 launcher, and the arm-mounted LB -10X and ERPPC barrels, then the knee joints from the legs.

From the back side I painted the grilles and vents, and the jump jet nozzles in the shins.

Canopies

Each of the cockpit viewport panels I painted with a bright red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23). I wanted the cockpits to be clearly distinguishable and a bright red really jumped from the green on the earlier miniatures. Maybe this was a bit more comic-like apporach than the flat black I used years ago, but I felt this made them look more impressive, even if less realistic. As far as you could consider walking tanks the size of a detached house and armed with insane amounts of weapons, painted in garish colours, anyhow realistic.

At this point I made the mistake of trying to paint the missile tips red with the horrible brush I was using. Those were to be fixed later, now there was more red on the faceplate of the launcher than on the missiles themselves.

Greening the first two Points

Customizing paints

The Olive Green was way too dark as it was, compared to what I was looking for. I jsut didn't have a good medium green, so I had to start mixing up this crap myself. I added some Vallejo's green (VMA 71007 Olive Green) into my airbrush, then I brightened it with some yellow ochre (VMA 71033 Yellow Ochre) and some Vallejo's thinner to improve the application.

Green Dire Wolf

Apparently the Dire Wolf had taken "the first mini of the queue" slot, so I painted that one first. The masking tape bits stayed on pretty nicely, but I wasn't also going to pull the hair off my head if there was some overspray.

Green Summoner

Painting the Summoner went the same way, I left the Autocannon and ERPPC barrels with less coverage, as they were going to be metallic anyway.

After demasking

To see the intermediate results of the masking I tore off the tapes from the Dire Wolf. I wanted to know as soon as possible if they didn't work like I expected so I could stop wasting time on a thing that didn't work. For the same reason I didn't mix up a lighter green for drybrushing, even as I knew that it would become messier without the masks.

The pattern was pretty tight, it felt like it worked nicely. Next I was going to jump onto the Summoner but now I mixed the lighter paint and drybrushed the Summoner completely. The highlighting shade could've been a bit lighter still, but it worked.

Drybrushed

As these photos showed, the greens weren't that much different, but you could see the shading. I also wasn't looking for a comic book -like super strong edge highlighting. With the mummy wrappings Summoner looked a bit funky, but as soon as I got the tapes off, it improved greatly.

Maybe this was the way I had always done freehand camo, but when looking at these photos I got a feeling that said "they always look like this". It didn't really bother me, it was funny to notice that I have had a pretty similar approach to breaking shapes for many years. These sharp edges between colours seemed to work nicely, I was pleased with that.

Masking tape madness

Camo design

So far I had always painted my OmniMech camo patterns by hand, this time I felt like trying out a sharper edge to the shapes by using masking tape. For a short while I pondered on testing a pixel camo, but what worked fantastically in a 1:35 rocket launcher might not work as well in 1:285. Maybe I could put that idea into use for a different unit, and keep the 3rd Talon in more or less uniform pattern.

I pulled a lenght of masking tape onto my cutting mat, sliced off different triangles and pointy bits, and started laying them all around the Dire Wolf.

 

Somehow it felt like it could've been better some other way. So for the next two Points I wanted lines or stripes instead of splinters. I took another length of tape and cut it into low sinewave -like shape. These wavelets I wrapped around the Summoner and Mad Dog, cutting the longer wavelets into shorter ones where and when needed.

At this point my warmachines looked like half-peeled mummies.

When I got to masking the Gargoyle I decided to make a bit different pattern again, and made mostly different triangles, larger ones than what I did on the Dire Wolf. I thought that a machine this ugly I should also make a bulky splinter camo.

 

A hindsight moment: at this point I managed to forget that on my second session I didn't get more than one lower leg masked from the Hellbringer.

A grey start

A grey basecoat

I spent a fleeting moment pondering in which order I would paint the camo pattern. I decided to start with grey, because the green tone would recuire lots of fine-tuning and on the other hand, painting green over grey would be simpler than getting this kind of a medium grey over a darkish green. So I covered the miniatures with Vallejo's grey (Cold Grey).

Light grey drybrushing

To make my stuff easier I drybrushed the minis from all angles with a lighter grey (Stonewall Grey). This way all the grey bits of my camo pattern would already by somehow highlighted.

At this point I pretty much skipped the barrels of guns, because they've been traditionally metallic and not camouflaged.

Priming white

Brushing to victory

My first idea was to airbrush the primer on, but I didn't want to prime these bright red because these weren't 1:35 tanks. I had a bottle of white primer, but I had thinned it down somehow weirdly before so I didn't feel comfortable blasting it through the airbrush. Instead, I brushed the paint on.

Project I/23

BattleTeching

After a somewhat intensive and involving scale model I wanted to do something quicker and simpler to pass some time. My media sources had had a surprising amount of material about Mechwarrior 5: Mercs mods and getting that on the Steam Deck started intriguing me more and more. The Humble BattleTech book bundle this Spring didn't help much either, as I now had a good pile of CBT era eBooks on top of the ones from the Clan Invasion Kickstarter.

So how to scratch an itch that already has a lot of material available? By picking up the unpainted bits and choosing what looked most fitting for the mood, of course.

A pretty heavy Star

It's been a known fact that my heart has beaten most for the 'Mechs in Mechwarrior II, because that's how I got my first dose of BattleTech. As my 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster wasn't complete, I was going to keep at it and I picked the 'Mechs from the heavier end of the scale.

The Kickstarter delivery didn't have all the essential Clanner units, or not enough of them in some cases, I had ordered two more Stars from CGL. At least last year they had any sets available for very short times in their store, they seemed to sell like bread at a circus). Of course the Omnis that I wanted in my collection were spread out to different ForcePacks, because why not. My to obtain -list contained Summoners, Hellbringers, Mad Dogs and at least a Dire Wolf and a Warhawk. The pack that contained the Warhawk I didn't order yet, a copy of each was findable from two Packs: Clan Command Star and Clan Heavy Striker Star.

From these two boxes I chose the next five Points to form this little Project:

• Dire Wolf (Clan Command Star)
  
• Gargoyle (Clan Heavy Striker Star)
  
• Summoner (Clan Command Star)
  
• Hellbringer (Clan Heavy Striker Star)
• Mad Dog (Clan Heavy Striker Star) 

Generally I called this project a Command Star, even though I had preallocated them into Trinary Beta in my unit list. Somehow I had to keep track of them while all was in progress, quiaff?

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.