maanantai 15. elokuuta 2016

The Fort, Part I

As you most likely already know, collecting miniatures and painting them before throwing them to the field of battle is only one part of the hobby. Another, often under-appreciated, aspect of the hobby is terrain building. It's also an aspect that I don't enjoy that much, although my wife would probably at this point shout a disagreeing "HAH!" at me given the amount of terrain lying around in our house. This is why I've moved on to mostly cardboard terrain because it's cheap, looks nice enough and is quick to build.

My Thirty Years War campaign has progressed to a finale and what better way to end a nice 3-game campaign than a siege? Of course, a proper siege game would require something for the troops to hide behind. A castle would have been one option, but I don't have one ready (although there are couple of nice cardboard plans available) and wasn't interested in building one at this stage. I wanted to try field fortifications and decided on a gabion structure that was in use during the TYW period.

I began by creating gabions. I made both a gabion basket and a gabion fence from cocktail sticks, string, sand and PVA glue.

I then created latex rubber molds of them (make at least two sets if you're planning on making your own), as I calculated that I needed at least 40 each of the buggers. For casting I've used cheap plaster that I've bought from the local book shop/crafts store. I've used dental plaster before, but it's a) more difficult to find, b) more expensive, c) tends to come in huge packages and d) is much more difficult to process after casting due to its hardness. The molds I used do have undercuts and the latex somewhat compensates for them, but they do gather air bubbles rather easily that can only partly be avoided by tapping the moulds after pouring. For terrain purposes, I don't really mind the small ones and don't bother to correct them by putty later on.

In the good time-proven tradition of cooking shows everywhere: Here's the piece that I produced earlier. It's made from 2 cm thick polystyrene sheets that were included as packaging material - probably from some IKEA furniture. I've cut 12"x3" section to the bottom and 12"x2" section to the top and sanded the slope and added filler to fill up the remaining gap. I've then added the abattis stakes (from cocktail sticks) and the plaster-cast gabions, the floor is from wooden coffee stirrers and the whole thing is mounted on a cardboard sheet. The rest is sand, glue and wooden sticks cut to size.

Here's the barebones version of the upcoming fort. Total width is 5'10" which is 175 cm to us that prefer the metric system. Given that my table is 6'x8', this will fill up the long edge nicely enough. Now all I've gotta do is cast more gabions (I've done a bit more than half so far), construct and paint the little bugger and figure out a way to store the whole thing so my wife doesn't kill me.

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