Project I/18

At long last! The first project of 2018 was about to begin. I decided to start from the top of the pile, also known as the two Metal Earth Models sets I got from the yule goat. Of those I chose for a change one from the rows of the baddies of the series, a well-known light freighter.

Before opening the packet I assumed that this wasn't going to be too easy, as the Falcon was basically a flying saucer with decorations. These not-too-straight angles had proven complicated in the previous projects.

Finished: Project IX/17

Off with the nonsense

After it was bathed and the liquid remains had evaporated the model was ready to be cleaned up. Because the resin was soft the support structure could just be simply and quickly cut away with sidecutters and any remaining excesses could just be scratched off just like that. I was a bit worried of squeezing the carbonite slab with too much force and causing it to bend or something. But my fears were vain, it wasn't that soft.

Sunbathing

For the rest of the day I left Solo into a tube lined with UV LEDs. A few hours were supposedly enough, but we left him there over the weekend to harden up.

Done!

I took the piece home as a surprise and said that I was going to paint it to look like it was in the movies, but Han Solo was snatched off my hands with words "Don't touch it!". I guess I'd paint any potential second attempt, then. There he remained, on the bookshelf, next to his older self, in front of a bunch of uncle Zahn's books.

Project IX/17

The Empire strikes back

My significant other was wondering why my first idea when playing with a 3d printer wasn't the obvious one, Han Solo in carbonite. I guess we just had different priorities in life :p

Again I bothered my colleague Nathan, during the last months of 2017 and we played with the Formlabs resin printer. Somehow I always managed to start these things in the afternoon so that the printers were left alone overnight.

Friday. Morning.

As soon as I got to work I brewed a cup of coffee and started chiseling the printout off the printer's printing plate. Let me tell you, it was turning my few remaining hairs even greyer, beating the softish resin lump off with a spatula. I shouldn't have worried that much as the violently treated piece was just the footprint of the support structure. For some curious reason the printing program (or was it the slicer?) wanted to set the actual model slanted at an angle.

First thing after detaching it the piece had to be bathed in spirits, twice. The first time it was submerged to the first tank for a good while and then removed to dry up a bit. Then it was submerged into another one for a bit again. One of those bathes was longer-lasting than the other one, but while writing this I just couldn't remember how it went. All I can say the other one was 15 mins and the other one a bit less. Maybe.

While inhaling the ethanol fumes I was admiring the details. Especially captain Solo's hands were amazing.

Battletech

Kickstarter

I Kickstarted* the BattleTech-themed game project of Harebrained Schemes in the late '15 and immediately in Spring '18 my Steam library had a game to be tried out. Maybe I was nursing some massive hopes as FASA's Jordan Weisman was going to be a part of the project and so on. After its release there's been a few updates, the latest I have played before the publishing of this post had a few new difficulty sliders for different areas of the game, a "make it go by faster" for the action animations, but skipping the tutorials wasn't implemented yet.

*) while I'm writing this I had 5 projects "on the way", two had a delivery estimate for 2015, one for last year, one for April and the latest for July. Luckily I wasn't in a rush with these things :D In the end I've always received what was promised, as long as we exclude that one brainfart of Peter Molydeux.

The campaign mode

Of course I started poking at the story that was set before the Fourth Succession War on the BT timeline. As soon as I had the game installed and had some little time to actually give it a shot, that is. The tutorial took me three evenings, the early (1 or 1.5 skull difficulty assumption) random missions were short enough to complete a couple in a session. Securing Argus was surprisingly quick, maybe because I had mentally prepared it to be a long and tedious mission with a hundred enemy waves.

Somehow it just bothered me that the main story missions seemed to be these things I have always loathed: "teehee, you have max. 4 'Mechs to finish a mission and you're gonna get a bunch of plot twists and many, many more times enemies thrown at you than what you got"-kind of things. Luckily the different turrets, could be blown up en masse just by dancing on their control building, for example. As long as you could find out the most optimal, quick and safe route to them first.

Gathering all your 'Mechs around a fallen enemy to kick it to death: risky business that ought to end up in you getting your ass kicked nine times out of ten

The game's intro movie was just gorgeous, I really liked it and the overall style. Each cutscene in this game was not a prerendered video clip but a slightly animated painting-like image with background music. Just like behind the link above.

Then the main bit, the campaign mode. Its point was the running of a mercenary company: as time progressed, you got new contract offers and you could choose, in which order to do them, if you wanted to. Sometimes you could only choose one of the interesting ones (as their validity dates excluded each other). The same system didn't typically have many contracts open, often the contract required many days (planet to planet) or more typically many weeks (system to system) worth of traveling. Which also costs, because when you travel, you aren't working. So, touristing around wasn't going to be sustainable for awfully long with the monthly bills and whatnot to be paid.

Offline-multislayer

After I had gotten past the very beginning of the story, I thought against my deeply ingrained habits that I could give the multiplayer mode a shot. Of course, in the time of the evenings when I could play something, no one else was online nor were there any games open. The very few existing lobbies were full or otherwise blocked. I really didn't feel like opening up  my own games in the vain hope of someone else testing that crap at the same time.

I played against the AI instead, mostly with mixes of different Catapult variants. The four K2 battery in a hot desert was amusing once, just like trying out very weird custom variants (maybe the most idiotic was a 'pult with two flamers and nothing else, with which you could mostly attempt DFAs and go for the melee attacks).

After my experiments I mostly played with a Lance with one or two sharpshooter dual-PPC 'Mechs and the rest being 2xLRM15 + 2xMLas units. Sometimes the enemies fell quickly, one by one, to the relentless missile rain, while sometimes my team got their metallic asses handed to them. As it should be.

Stop the press, I got online after all!

Just for shits and giggles I thought I give the multiplayer option a chance one random evening in late August and behold: there was a lonely lobby open. I tried to join, got in and into the game (with a randomized Lance). The fight began in a decentish way, as we killed a 'Mech each on the same turn. I took a noticeable risk with my third back-shooting unit in a row (which happened to be a Catapult) and alphastruck despite the overheat warning, as I wanted that enemy 'Mech down on that round and not the next one. Yes, it fell gloriously but my 'Pult required a cooldown round and that among some bad, rushed choices turned the tables against me and I lost. But it was fun!

MechLab

Do guess, how much I liked that the 'Mechs had typed hardpoints instead of proper Critical Slots? Exactly, not one bit. I guess it made balancing and difficulty levels simpler when all the BattleMech models could not be hyperoptimized to the point of ludicrousness. This way the models were actually somewhat different instead of every player-machine being a perfected monster.

Still, the MechTech was supposed to be exactly for that, replacing the autocannon in slot X with a death ray. Her or his skills would then define, if it took many years and zillions of C-Bills or not, which would've fit this game like a PPC bolt into a cockpit, as these freebirhts hadn't yet (or again) invented the OmniPods and time == money. GRRR!

At least the armour amounts could be tweaked freely, the jump jets were somehow capped, maybe (even by hull?) and those damn typed hardpoints ("missile", "laser", "ballistic", "support" (MG, Flamer, SLas)) could take any of the type as long as the space (slots) and weight limits allowed.

It just kept offending me that to build a K2 you needed a different hull for it instead of taking your Catapult frame and swapping the LRM units with PPCs. I have complained, am complaining and will keep on complaining about this braindead rule.

In the game itself

Playing was nice and pleasant. The UI took a bit to get used to and I have to admit that I most likely haven't noticed all the cool little things yet. While playing the tutorials I collected way too much damage when I didn't think of how the direction of the incoming damage was important - and that the straightest route was never the sane nor safest one. But quickly it came back, I started going around to catch my enemies unaware and that stopping the movement too close to an enemy wasn't wise, as the nasty buggers played just as dirtily as I did - when I remembered to. Basic stuff.

My pilots have been pretty bad still (IIRC none had better than level 6 on any skill), the screenshot's even older than my memory. All the four main branches had a justification and honouring the ways of RPGs you couldn't get them all maxed during one game.

My character's name was twisted into Iesed (somehow this reminds me of my EVE Online test where my first name was assumed to be faking to be some sort of an importantish thing in the game universe and I got some negative feedback from the company running the game) and just used the random last name generator. Calvo - bald in English - somehow fit me like a PPC bolt into the viewport and I happily accepted it.

As the time ran forward in the campaign some random events fired at half-random intervals. In those I had to solve some crew or ship -based issues in the role of the commander, choosing from a multi-choice optionset. If I did this, crew member A did something better and maybe B worse; if I did that, C happened. In the pic below we had ran out of mocca (a critical error anywhere!) and I could've either given the last cupful to Dekker or Medusa, quaff it myself, or as I did, share it evenly between the two. This way they were both happy for a month (proper caffeination is damn important, I know) and the team got some nice bonuses.

In a different event my choice got my Mech Tech Virtanen to work like Scotty himself for a bunch of days (or was it weeks?), in a third one my crew's ouchies cured faster (sadly that buff lasted for a month that were in transit the whole duration and more, and no one was getting cured after a fight). I found those funny and they kinda made the crew feel a bit more than just names + portraits in a list.

Salvage

While negotiation the contracts you could set your payment within certain limits. For that you got two sliders, one for the monetary compensation and another for the salvage rights. Playing with those either gave you more money and less junk, or vice versa. In case you turned one of both purposefully downwards, your company got a reputation boost, which didn't pay any bills but helped you get more lucrative and difficult contract, as far as MRBC was concerned. Whatever you did with these sliders, you always got some money and salvage, in case you caused any salvage to be had*.

Each different faction had their own reputation points as well and if a contract required a good relationship but you didn't have one, you couldn't even try to negotiate. So far I haven't found more than one mission that'd needed a bit warmer friendship with the Capellans than what I had.

*) I once ran with a single Light 'Mech through a prototype-stealing mission without firing a single shot. That was easy, as I just had to run around the map instead of running directly from dropoff site to the nav alpha. The enemies guarding the site only saw my Locust when I was parked in the backyard of the science centre and on the next round I was already running away at full speed, back to where I started. That was lots of fun as well!

A mumbled verdict

Based on ashamedly small amount of playtime (34 hours) I have enjoyed BATTLETECH, it's been a decentish substitute for Classic BattleTech with paper maps, dice, miniatures and friends to play it with. The rules have been bent here and there (to hit -value gets better when someone even shoots at a target, walking/running are different actions and after sprinting you couldn't shoot (even badly) anymore and so on), but somehow I've kind of accepted them. Maybe HBS folks wanted to make those '80s rules easier to swallow?

Whatever, the game has been running nicely and I've had a good time. I've even enjoyed some very funny moments, even though playing alone in front of a screen can never reach the fun of tabletop gaming.

The Project Mumblings approve and thumbs are lifted upwards like flak cannons, towards an incoming Overlord-class DropShip.

8

Time's a funny thing

It wasn't that long when I turned eight myself. Right?

Straightening the tags

Hypnotic gestures be damned, now we're working on numbers and other important things. For a good long while during July-June I poked around this blog's tags with the goal of making them more useful. I thought that maybe by using the model kit maker as a tag per project I'd maybe able to track what sort of stuff I've worked on. Those tags I left away from the general queue updates (unless I accidentally mass-added something somewhere) so that e.g. "Hobby Boss" only was set on while working on their models.

For a bit I pondered if I should've added the scale as well, but I decided against it as it wasn't going to limit the findings much. 1:72 would give you just about all the flying things, 1:35 would contain ~90% of all the rest, while the remains would be random, along the lines of "this 'Mech is that scale and that Imperial Walker is that scale". If I followed my own rules as strictly as I ought to.

I had also used pretty general-purpose model and type tags with different variants, like F-22 vs F-16A or my both Warthogs getting tagged as A-10. Then there was a Panther Ausf G, which I wanted to split as Panter and Ausf G, because I could end up building other German things that had a subtype G. Or a Leopard 2A6M that'd only make my repeat most of the tag's name, if I ever made a bigger scale Leopard but a different variant.

Then again, I thought that it'd be quite silly to set up a tag just for one unique project (such as the A-10 N/AW that I was most likely never going to repeat). But had I added too fine-grained tags somewhere I could always remove them, just like I had half-recently done. A few things that ended up being useless (once-used "Duke Nukem" was the first to come to mind) went to /dev/null and hopefully got replaced with some more useful ones.

All in all, it didn't make sense to go too deep with this stuff, as the reader's UI didn't - as far as I knew - allow searching with multiple tags. That was a damn poor implementation, but I guessed anyone interested in something would find something this way. This tagset has lived a bit lately and I assume it was going to do that until I was content for a while.

My modeling situation

Lately my progress and modeling in general has been slow, after the long and slow T-35 I made some supposedly quick and easy MEM sets. But even those didn't get much attention thanks to the real life (the heatwave!), it's been calm so far.

As I had foreseen, during my four months on childcare leave were so full of home stuff and this and that, that I didn't use the younger one's nap times on modeling or anything. Being completely and utterly honest, most of that time I just wanted to sit down in peace for a short moment and didn't feel like doing anything too taxing :) I guess this all's going to change quite a bit as everyone gains more age.

While you're reading this I've been back to work for two weeks, the real life timeline will soon meet the blog's scheduled posts. Or not.

Project assistant 1: status

Somehow my Project Assistant's own models haven't been finished or even progressed in ages. At the time of this posts's writing the following models/projects are stuck in the inspiration limbo: Ka-50 (IV/17), Revell's ISD (VI/17) and an IS-2 (of that I haven't posted anything, if my memory serves, the 1:72 scale tank has been built but that's it).

The potential Project Assistant 2 isn't old enough to even pretend to be interested in anything but throwing everything around. Well, the Aggregat-9 has been fwooshed around with proper sound effects for who knows how many months, so maybe not all hope is lost! If I get a second modeling buddy, we'll see later.

Finished: Project VIII/17

Sienar Fleet Systems

TIE/sa Bomber

To be honest, I cannot recall ever seeing this TIE/sa marking anywhere else but the wpedia, everyone else has always talked about the TIE/B or TIE Bomber. All the same to me, now I've used this marking as well.

I took a bunch of photos from different angles and as usual, applied them below. The next day I brought the model back to the office and proudly presented it around. Confusingly few people recognized it, but as the hit percentage wasn't a flat zero, I couldn't complain much.

With a very little coercing I ended up promising to show the Bomber and a couple of "real" models one Friday afternoon at the Tinkering Club. Their response was somehow staggering in its positivity.

A sickeningly quick proto-paintjob

My first thoughts had been to clean up the model and so on. But then I thought, why bother being fancy with a prototype? Especially, as I didn't have a clue of how this material would behave with the paints or anything.

Primed

White Vallejo sufrace primer, what else could I say or describe? Same, same. I just sprayed it on and enjoyed the whiteness.

Airbrushed greyness

Just for simplicity I started by blasting Vallejo's USAF Medium Grey all around (VMA 71120) and then dusted it a bit with the USAF Dark Grey (VMA 71123) for some hopefully subtle variety. Then I  attacked the solar panels with a bit of some of a much darker grey to make them stand out more.

The paintbrush approach

Later I thought that maybe I should do the most visible surfaces again, with a thicker layer of paint. In this case losing even some of the model's surface scruffiness would only be a good thing. To protect the command pod's viewports I applied a bit of masking tape before blasting it with a dark grey, just like what I did with the solar panels. These pics below are from the "just before removing the masks and actually taking the paintbrush in hand" phase.

One final round for the detailings

To wrap this one up I applied some Citadel's black wash (Nuln oil) on the viewport transparisteel bits and the solar panels. The double sticks in the rear parts of the pods I painted red (VMA 71085 Ferrari Red) and then I used some plain black with a piece of a sponge to mostly-drybrush and dab at the port of the missile/rocket launcher and its details that always have made me think of exhaust redirection vents.

As soon as the paints had dried I applied some semiglossy varnish on the black-washed pieces (Vallejo 70522 Satin Varnish) because that one looked more natural than the wet-looking gloss varnish. In this case the result wasn't optimal, as I think that my varnish had gone beyond its best before date already. Some of the photos still showed the effect, which was good enough for a proto model.