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 Round (dec) numbers

Oh my. We were now standing with ten full years of utter nonsense behind us, which was also known as the 'Mumblings. If we were looking at this just by the amount of years, next year I could, for a short while, declare that I was exactly four times older than my blog. What a shocking thought that was.

Apparently someone still reads this, or looked at the pictures if nothing else. Cool, if someone has found this stuff interesting enough to check!

Leveling up slowly

Just for the fun of it, and I guess going the cliché way of using this sort of a milestone for this kind of stuff, I took a look at what the ten years ago built models looked like. First, a Sturmpanzer IV, aka Project III/10:

Fast-forwarding five years forward, an F-16A, aka Project IV/15:

Another five years brought us to the latest finished model, the Su-27, aka Project I/20:

If there was something that could be quickly said, my photography hasn't improved that much, if at all. Maybe I should've bought the light tent instead of thinking that I should consider one... But on a bright side, I thought that my airbrushing had gotten somewhat better since those first few models.

Last 365 days' achievements

I did get something done during this last year, even if I've been doing everything at a pretty calm pace. The Königstiger I was pondering about a full year ago has obviously not gotten to the desk yet, but maybe its time was soon. As soon as I found the Wehrmacht decals I had put in a good safe place, in order not to misplace and lose them.

Finished models

So, this year I finally wrapped up the woefully time consuming update of Shu Ondiv, the Flanker and a couple of Lego sets (Slave I and Saturn V). These last years have indeed been really slow, or I've been much more careful and concentrated on what I've done and that's why everything's been so slow.

Projects in progress

I had just started with the M 65 Atomic Annie, that has been suffering from the Covid-19 situation, the summer in general and my little technical problems. It was on a good roll and whenever I could work on it, it had been nice to work with. So far, at least.

The rest

For the last year's anniversary post I wrote a couple of silly lines in Python and that was so exciting, for a change, that I ended up coding more. I started with a traditional nonsense generator (the MAD magazine had these "write your own Indiana Jones movie script" and similar), but that got out of hand very quickly. Based on some sort of a whim I started making a Doom story generator.

Of course this started its life as test.py, the script was insane and unmaintainable, as it started out as a set of random tests and grew from there. A couple of weeks ago I started redoing it more properly, in my opinion much better structured and more sense-making.

Primebrushing

Handcrafting

While my airbrush was being taken care of by professionals I still wanted to get things forward. I used a normal paintbrush to apply the white primer onto the so far assembled modules.

I started from the business end of the cannon, the various pieces that were going to be all around the barrel and the carriage itself. As before, my primer may have seen its best days already, but I didn't think of buying a fresh one (nor a bottle of Olive Drab), while I was in a hobby store already.

This was why I had never called myself smart.

The first couple of evenings

Honestly, I had forgotten how slow - and in this case ugly - business priming models was! In the photo below one could see the results of two sessions of brushing around. I had protected all the contact points and moving parts as well as possible, as if I was working with the airbrush.

As a task this was somehow unmotivating, so progress was painfully slow. Another reason for this slowness was that the real life ate lots of time while the nice weather on the summer evenings, for some reason.

A (forced) technical break

Servicing the airbrush

Lost

During the spring/summer I changed my Badger's "ultra fine" bits (tip, spray regulator and needle) to "fine", as I had once again managed to lose the tip and there weren't any spares available. At all. Not that there were countless fine ones, either, but as the storage balance said 1 instead of 0, I had little space to ponder on where to head. Also, in my use cases the ultrafineness was a tertiary level detail, because I wasn't a freehand artist nor an artist of any other sort for that matter.

Stuck

As soon as I had gotten the atomic cannon project to a state where the first subcomponents were paintable, I finally assembled my airbrush with the new bits. Apparently I had cleaned it awfully badly the previous time, because the trigger didn't budge when pressed.

After a bit of grunting, pressing, pushing and applying cleaning products I got the trigger to move again. Wisened up from a previous mess-making moment I didn't yet load the paint pot with paint, but tested just blasting air. Nope, it didn't seem correct. Next I squirted a small amount of airbrush cleaner into the paint pot, cupped my other hand over the paint container and tried again.

The liquid came out both from the actual exit point but also from the open mouth of the paint pot. Paintslposion averted. At this point my skills and also time for searching and trying out stuff was running thin, so I decided to visit my royal supplier with the device and ask some stupid questions. As it happened, I was going to go to visit the office in a couple of days from that moment, so I had a pretty good luck with the timing.

In service

At the time of me writing this the airbrush was either being serviced and cleaned, or waiting for its turn, so I was kind of waiting for an sms telling me everything was now ok or a call giving me somewhat more bothersome news. In any case I wasn't going to go to the office for the third time since mid-March in a few weeks yet, so the pickup was going to have to wait for the second half of August or early September, even.

Cannon's tail end and some other small things

The breech

Most likely this cannon worked a bit differently from the ones I was used to, so if my comments have gone slightly off, apologies.

As far as I know, guns that get loaded from the rear end needed a breech, so I assumed this device also had one of those. At least there was a massive steel block in a correct place.

It was pretty impressive already and at this point it was still missing meters of barrel. The block in the end could be moved back and forth, the four rods didn't block its movement at all.

Testing the inclinator

As I had gotten this far, I wanted to check if the inclination adjustment mechanism worked or not. I glued the righthand axle onto the carriage and held the left one on by hand.

After the first couple of spins that felt weirdly contactless the barrel started rising upwards. In the second photo it was at the maximum angle.

Carriage, decorated

The instructions had recommended gluing the gun axle holders on, but as I said, I had ignored that, for it was obvious that I had to paint this monster in chunks. Maybe I should've started before any building, but I hadn't had too goo experiences with that approach. At this point I glued on adjusters, wheels, support pieces and whatnot until I ran out of them. The foldable mesh/grid walkways I left for a later date.

LOS-firing

To check, yet again, that the bits were aligned, I set the cannon's barrel to the transport mode and as ready as I could imagine it could be. Maybe that was more or less the state where a new grenade was loaded in. Or perhaps some fool had thought of using this gun for some very direct firing. This was a nicely playable model.

More plumberiness

Wide ducts

I continued assembling the busier end of the cannon. Below the barrel itself a three-cylinder recoil handling system. Next to it, in the photo below, was one of the core pieces of the gun's cradle.

With one of the tubes this looked like a small-scale Karl-Gerät's gun. The cannon barrel itself was still waiting to be installed, for at this point it would have been on the way more than anything else.

I had to admit that I lost a shameful amount of time searching for the teethed piece that was responsible for the gun's elevation. The stepping plate seemed a bit flimsy at this point, but I thought I could strenghten it later, if needed.

These four rods I didn't clean up completely yet, as you could see in the photo. Fitting each four was a bit of a surprising struggle, but they got installed without much violence or threats of getting thrown into the trash.

Interrupted plumbing

Results of the previous round

To begin with I checked what I had accomplished the last time. The carriage rotated neatly on its turntable, which was pretty cool. From the rear end I saw that the ground plate had ended slightly tilted, which in this case meant that if I was ever going to make some display terrain for it, the butt of the cannon had to be on a slight slope.

A barrel in three stages

One of the key components of the atomic cannon, the barrel, consisted of a number of sections. I took this photo below when I had gotten the three first bits done and squeezed them tight with tape. Especially the middle tube wanted to split apart like an overripe banana.

I had glued the two narrower components together and was about to proceed to the next step in the instructions, when I tipped my glue over. The remaining session time I spent on cleaning up.

That was a shame, for I had gotten to a pretty good pace, quickly.

Carriage work 2/2

A massive box trail

First things first: I wasn't 100% sure if this counted as a box trail but that term made more sense than the others - but if this was false, my apologies!

After a good amount of dry-fitting I glued the left half-block of the trail into the bits I had built the last time. I also remembered to add the missing axle-gear combo for the gun's elevation. The ways all these parts were all to be attached to weren't too clear in most of the cases, so I was being pretty damn paranoid before going for the glue.

Onto the front and back ends of the bottom of the carriage a few pieces were added that, among other things, added structural integrity and helped keeping the thing in its proper shape. In the front of the next photo was the three-wheeled oddity that was used to rotate the cannon. And in the rear, guessing by the teethed bits, a part that was somehow tiltable and got installed to below the module that contained the hydraulic rammer.

Some visible progress

The front of the carriage got a large-diameter (~2,7m) ground plate and the wheels that we saw in the previous pic were running on a track on top of it. This reminded me of the artillery in Suomenlinna for some reason. That setup in the rear of the carriage didn't get much more attention, my guess was that its tiltability was to allow for a less-than-billiards-table flatness of the firing position, meaning that it could be set on natural terrain in addition to some proving grounds.

These long beams that ran along the length of the carriage didn't want to go in place decently, so I had to hack them a tiny bit. The one on the right side in the photo below needed much more tweaking than the other, first one. Still, nothing traumatic happened. Next I could start building the ordnance-delivery mechanism itself.

Carriage work 1/2

The first evening

Being a nice boy I followed the instructions and started with the carriage. Perhaps I should've painted these pieces first, but that train went already. The first photo showed an interesting detail: working gears. I assumed that this meant that the cannon's elevation controls were actually working.

Behind the gun's breech block, in the end of the massive carriage a hydraulic rammer was to be built, for no one was going to ram the 272kg shells nor 385kg nuclear shells by hand. Nineteen long years later, I could almost hear the rattle of Giatsint-B's dragon's tongue when looking at this thing. Clearly time hasn't healed all wounds.

This was the subassembly that occupied the rear deck of the carriage. I didn't have the time to glue it into the righthand frame yet, or more accurately: I didn't want to glue it accidentally at an awful angle and realize it the next time I got to build. So I left it to wait for the next session when I was going to complete the frame itself.

Project IV/20

M65 Atomic Annie

Again, after a good amount of pondering I chose the M-65 Atomic Cannon as my next project. According to the claims a weapon of this sort has been fired only one time, ever. Or at least its namesake special ordnance has been fired once, but one would assume that before that one shot at least one normal grenade has been propelled through the barrel.

The box

The Atomic Cannon's box was ridiculously large. Its cover art was somewhat different from what the typical ones have been during my years looking at them. This appeared to be Renwal's style before it got bought out by Revell, based on a quick image search.

Papers, please

Decals were pretty simple, I thought I could even use the 'murican stars but the caution stripes would be so much better if just painted on the vehicles. Maybe this was partially my own disgust towards the decals as a medium, mixed in with my fear of those damn things going all spaghetti when applying them on anything. A huge effect has come from the fact that I have enjoyed painting and weathering a painted on detail has worked better than a brighter, higher-contrast decal.

The instructions themselves were pretty nicely sectioned so I didn't need to guess what I was working on at any given point. In the second pic you could see an interesting detail that I couldn't recall seeing anywhere before: it named each subcomponent. This was exactly what I had wished to see in the airplanes, for example, and some more random projects than plain old tanks.

Bits and pieces

There were, like the box said, a couple of hundred pieces to enjoy. To my great joy I found that a decent amount of said pieces were loose inside the box, torn out of their sprues over the years and kilometers. So an amount of the project time was going to be dedicated to finding out loose pieces. The numerous tire halves were at least pretty self-evident, but the rest...

The six-person crew consisted of single-piece humanoid males from the sixties. Maybe I'd paint them for a photo, but one couldn't do much dynamic things with these.

From this next set I had some difficulties in guessing which may have belonged to the carriage and which maybe to the vehicles, if the most obvious ones were ignored. These pieces were numbered, which was technically nice, but in practice reading the tiny numbers (where they hadn't fallen off) was a bit challenging sometimes - or my eyes were awful (also true).

The cannon's carriage was ridiculously large, but I guess it had to be, if the barrel's diameter was 280mm. At this point I was just guessing which set of sprues were prodiving which part of the build, more or less, so my comments may have also been totally off.

Rapture

Easily influenced

I observed earlier while the Project Assistants were watching cartoons. Between some episodes of Phineas and Ferb an episode of the new Duck Tales was scheduled and while half listening and seeing it I got a strong urge to play through the Bioshocks again. In this Season 2 episode 2 the ducklings found cousin Ferthy (whom I could not recall encountering anywhere outside the comics) in a lighthouse in the middle of the sea. The thing inside the lighthouse was a bathyshpere that took them to an undersea research facility, with the whole episode being a bit weird.

Man chooses, slave obeys

The episode drove such a strong urge into my head that I actually did install Bioshock. At some mystical point in history my Steam library had received some Remastered versions of both, so I'd just check those then.

Walls and floors updated with bloody messages were more numerous than on the Citadel itself.

Little sisters

I had completed both Bioshocks back in the day and of course I harvested each and every single Little Sister I encountered, because it just felt like the handiest approach. My then colleague had taken the opposite approach, as was his habit, and he tried to convince me that saving them was more beneficial in the long run and therefore the best choice. This being my second run I thought I'd give it a shot, so I'd see how the game went if you were "good".

Dunno. Every time you saved one of the girls you got some Adam, then a few times as the game progressed (I thought it happened after every n saved Little Sister) a gift teddy bear was put in front of a nearby Gatherer's Garden and it contained some Adam and ammo, typically. Upgrading the plasmids got much slower and tedious compared to straightforward harvesting.

Generic mumbling

It made no sense for me to specifically tell details of a game this old. Cohen's hub with the artists was pretty disturbing, more so than I somehow remembered, and the guy himself was... well, strange to say the least. In the end I just left him alone to admire his stupid masterpiece, which was pretty bad with the photos of the victims being so very unrecognizeable. He was happy so who was I to judge?

Details such as these local traffic map and schedules prints I stopped to admire a few times during my adventures. In a way they were pointless for the gameplay itself, but supervaluable for the world building. I enjoyed these.

A new victim in the corridors of Hephaestus

Would'ya kindly?

My absolute favourite plasmid was the swarm of angry bees, had been since I saw the teaser video a good while before the game was out. Who wouldn't want to launch a massive swarm of mad bees against their numerous adversaries? Truth be told, it didn't feel quite as handy as I had hoped for, but it was hysterically fun to use!

Final fumbling

In the very end of the game you had to find the pieces of a Big Daddy setup (I spent a small eternity looking for the last part and was about to give up in frustration) and that's how the end went, stomping around in a diving suit, now accompanied by Little Sisters. Somehow I had this idea in my head that the helmet overlay disappeared quickly in the original version but here in the Remaster it stayed as long as it made sense.

A final boss moment

I really couldn't remember what was the thing with the end battle, so I was just as lost as 10+ years ago. Somehow my mixed memory was very confused, as I had an amount of details from the KOTOR final battle. And that was a bothersome fight.

All that this Silver Surfer -cosplayer needed was to be attacked and avoided until he got damaged enough and jumped into his recharger. While the chap was locked in you could punch him into the liver with the harvester. Repeat four times and he fell for good. In a way pretty damn straightforward, but in practice somewhat more bothersome with all the extra slicers swarming around.

Creepy beasts, those Little Sisters.

Of the sequel and ancestor

As my Steam library had a set of games from the series I thought I'd go through a few of them. Bioshock Infinite didn't interest me enough, as I gave up on it on an endless airship battle on a flying boat, most likely near the very end of the game. Playing up to that point again, just to get frustrated with the same damn multistage fight didn't sound like a good use of my time. Or nerves.

Bioshock 2

Straight after finishing Bioshock I jumped on to Bs2 Remaster, but that one died on its tracks pretty quickly after getting the fire plasmid, in the second Big Sister fight. After about n minutes of fighting her the game crashed seriously, no matter what I did or didn't do.

Though, every time I started the game it complained about my hw not being perfectly compatible with it, so maybe that's why it crashed so spectacularly. And here I was, so very happy about the remastered version doing away with the braindead GFWL garbage that took ages per session to go around, in the original game.

A funny detail: I uninstalled the Remastered version and installed the old Bioshock 2, but that said the same about my hardware, so I didn't bother using any more time on it anymore. Bleh.

System Shock (1994)

After the disappointment of the much more modern game I played through (with the walkthru and a pretty low difficulty setting combination, I admit) their predecessor, System Shock, as that one also had gotten a n Enhanced Edition before the Kickstarted remake was to be released. I'd taken a bunch of screenshots, but as the Steam overlay didn't work straight out of the box, I didn't bother. In fact, getting the thing to start in the first place required some DOS-era "install one of these, then a driver for that, and a patch for the other thing", but at least it didn't want me to dive back into the autoexec.bat and config.sys editing. That was something I didn't want to get back to anymore, not in 2020.

The UI was really strange compared to a comfy person like me who's way too used to these modern and simple ones, but it didn't take that long to get used to. Still, way too often I switched weapons (or threw them away) instead of doing what I intended to do. Also after the first couple of sessions my eyes felt like I had been doing something very unusual, but then that went away - or I got used to it.

The game itself with the story and Shodan was familiar to everyone, so I wasn't going to be able to bring any new viewpoints about it. The new version I was looking forward to, to get the same story but in a new packaging (truth be told, I'd keep the original musics). That's assuming that my a few years old compy was up to running it, that is...

(Before anyone asks, I had finished System Shock 2 a couple of silly years ago, about the same time I did my incomplete run of Bs:Infinite, so it wasn't on the list, either.)