Monday, January 23, 2017

Robogear T-Rex, Battle Systems Urban Apocalypse Terrain, and resin urban barricades

Marines prepare to take out an enemy walker.

Gaming activities have taken a back seat in the past few weeks, but today I managed to paint up the Robogear T-Rex models I bought years ago, and posed it with some of my recent purchases.

The three buildings in the picture above are from the Battle Systems Urban Apocalypse range. These are punch-out cardboard buildings assembled with plastic clips. The surfaces are printed on both sides, and the windows and doors can also be punched out. I am sufficiently pleased with what I got (the Shanty Pack 2) that I will probably buy more of it. I have ordered some HDF terrain bits from Zen Terrain, which I hope I can paint to match this stuff so the buildings will have a more 3D, realistic look.

The Robogear T-Rex is of course a classic and a favourite of Imperial Guard players who want a proxy for the Sentinel.I have painted this as a support walker for my Warzone Imperial Regulars, which will be painted in the same colour. I only mounted one of the weapons provided (the hard-points for the other weapons are poorly filled in with epoxy) and the exhausts come from another of the Tehnolog kits which I bought for bits - I used them as I wanted a vaguely WW1 look to go with the Warzone figures.

The kit came with two versions of the canopy: a 'solid' version where the 'glass' is moulded, and an 'open' version where only the frame is represented. I didn't want to procure and paint a pilot/driver for the kit, so I decided to use a wire mesh to represent some sort of anti-grenade barrier so I coud hide the interior. It still needs some decals for tactical insignia and numbers and a base, but the basic paintwork and weathering are done.


Finally, we have the resin barricades I bought off ebay. I had expected them to come unpainted, so it was a bit of a surprise when I opened the package and saw what was a reasonable paint-job on these guys - the oil barrels are rusted and even showed oil slicks. I may spray some beige paint at the bottom parts of these sections to help them blend to the tabletop. Or I may not.


What I have also done in the past few weeks was to slowly assemble the forty Warzone Imperial Regulars I bought. This was not an easy task as the figures are made of hard plastic, have some significant mould lines, and have arms (to be more precise: forearms) that need to be glued onto the main torso in a three-point contact. But done they are, and now sitting in a box of sand waiting for the glue on their bases to dry. Hopefully in the next week or two I can get them sprayed in their base colours, and then over the next month finish painting them.

Still on the sci-fi/Blast Pistol front, yesterday I finally bit the bullet and took advantage of Kromlech's 17% sale and bought some resin bits to convert the plastic M1117 toy I bought to a sci-fi APC/IFV. That's spending US$20 on parts to convert a toy that came in a US$9 bag-of-toys. With that kind of money I could have bought a second-hand GW 40K Chimera... but then where's the fun in that?

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