OT: Scratchbuilding a fleet

[Starhawk]

Hey folks I know I said I'd keep posting more chapters to my Icaran story but I decided to give it a little bit of a break so I can work on my mechanics.
(i.e punctuation, spelling and grammar)

I will restart in November most likely but maybe as late as December.


I am also scratchbuilding a fleet of warships for a game called "Full Thrust" so I may not be posting much (between that a job and school I might not have a lot of free time).

You may be thinking "uh what is scratchbuilding a fleet?" well in other words instead of buying bunches of models for it I went and bought myself Lentis, Balsa wood, and used some of my ma's old beads and I'm creating warships.

Check here if you want to see what a "pro" ship can look like after finished: http://www.tonsha.uklinux.net/ftships.html

Mine might not look so good but meh

Anyway it's cool because I've already got eight frigates done except for the paint job, and that would have cost me about $3.50 cents if I bought it from the company but since I scratchbuilt I can build something like 20-30 ships for a grand total of $6 bucks.


Well anyway more Icaraverse is to come and I will be back once I get my fleet done and my sentince mechanics worked on.

[Ed Kolis]

Cool!

[Iron Giant]

That is nice work.

Just totally OT, I work for Bostik. The company that makes Blu-tack.

[Starhawk]

I didn't make those models but I'll maybe post up some pics of my fleet when it's done if I can get my buddy to let me use his digital camera.

[Atrocities]

A lost art form.

[Hunpecked]

The miniatures on the Tonsha site are quite impressive. It looks like a lot of work went into them.

My own daydream is for a bargain service that takes 3-D computer models of Space Empires ships and turns them into resin miniatures.

[Starhawk]

Yeah mine unfortunately probobly don't look as individually "Detailed" however I also went for a more "artistic" approach where all the ships are slightly unique to one another.

This will fit with the race Fluff for my friend and my game so that isn't a problem for me.

Also one of the things that I am planning on doing is creating a slightly more uniform appearance the larger the ships get representing the fact that bigger ships are obviously harder to make unique and yet the same "class".

The largest ship I plan on making depending on available wood will be 6 inches long and 3 wide with a top deck 5 inches long and 1 1/2 wide though the official max ship size for the models given there is 4 by 2.

I only plan on making one or two of these to represent the flagships of my navy for my campaign with my buddy and if I can get access to his Digital camera I'll show you a pic of my current fleet.

Oh BTW if your wondering the cost so far it has cost me 4 dollars to get the necessary wood and other materials and I ALREADY have 26 frigates, 18 destroyers and 9 merchantmen (though only the frigates and 3 merchies are finished) and I'm only half way through my FIRST block of wood.

My planned fleet will be as big as I have free time and a few spare dollars because so far it's relaxing and entertaining and after I coat my ships they feel just like plastic so they're pretty tough.

[JAFisher44]

Full Thrust rocks. I love that game. I wish I could get involved in it around here. I have really been toying with creating my own fleet, but I don't really have the time. Where do you guys play?

[zircher]

Fun stuff, Starhawk. I had a friend that tried the balsa thing from a different angle. He's pre-fabricate a slew of parts and then build up the ship designs from that. Almost like DoGA CGA done in balsa... :-)

Some of the results were pretty good, but he could not make them economical as large kits of parts to sell to others so he dropped the project. One interesting effect of the process was that ships tended to be more 3d and less naval inspired. Most of his designs were mounted on pins attached to a hex base. I imagine they were significantly more fragile than your design technique.
--
TAZ

[Starhawk]

Hey JaFisher well he and i are both scratchbuilding fleets and if he can convince his brother he'll be scratchbuilding one as well.

Our first game is actually going to be when we all have fleets enough for at least a small battle but we are also in effect creating our own game out of this using some of the FT rules.

We are adding a LOT of stuff to the stock rules plus modifying some of the existing ones.

I've actually never played FT yet as it was discontinued in the area where I live , by time I went to a hobby shop and asked about it they no longer sold it or allowed it on their tables. All they had was BFG which though I love the ship designs cost 35 dollars for a 4 inch battleship.


So anyway after over a year of questing for information I found out about the scratchbuilding site and thought it was awsome and that it would be a great idea for me and my buddy to scratchbuild not only fleets but an entire GAME around this