10mm-SF Modular Outpost Walls

2024-12-27 10mm-SF / Hobby / Terrain /

Part of the 'SST in 10mm' project. The outpost wall pieces are from Wake's Emporium Voidship Troopers set. The designer mostly just copy pasted one element, and it's a good basic element don't get me wrong, but a lot of the variations are real sloppy work. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

So this is the basic element, a short straight wall piece. The full size wall is just two of these printed together.

The elevated pieces have these legs on the outside that look incredibly dumb but are technically accurate to the movie.

The gate is obviously trying to duplicate the movie but really shouldn't have. It just dangles half open, folding in the wrong places like it doesn't fit.

Which is dead accurate. The gate in the movie is awful. I wish this model hadn't drawn my attention to it because now I can't unsee it. It's this major set failure that just stands out even amidst all the arachnid carnage.

And then the non-platform version is the same bad design scrunched up. It looks like it doesn't understand how hinges work, or physics for that matter. It's somehow worse than the movie, which seems a feat. But Wait, There's More!

The platform bottom edge is just the floor flipped and glued on, complete with now visible from the inside makers mark. Lazy craftsmanship. I could do this, and I'm terrible with CAD.

Except I can actually do better. The corner piece has these weird artefacts sticking out of them. Those are the edges of the platform sticking through the wall.

You can see where the floor mesh collides and someone said fuck it and left it.

I took the basic short wall piece, opened it up in MS 3D tools or whatever it's called, smooshed the two pieces together but correctly aligned and made a better corner wall. I did this in about 5 minutes of work, and 4 of that was figuring out the tools from scratch.

Anyways, printed up a bunch of the good bits scaled to 135% so they'd fit my models a bit better. It works out two to almost exactly two ararchnid warriors high, and fits a 15mm model on the inside platform perfectly. You can see some test basing ideas for the actual 10mm MI I'm working on here.

One of the batches of walls had a piece stick and misprinted so they've got a bulge in them but it's barely noticeable so whatever.

Painting

I decided to try chipping medium again. Last time I lost control of it and wound with extreme weathering, but I think that was mostly my mistake in trying to do two layers in a row. This time I started with a splotchy rusty iron underlayer in browns and oranges.

Then laid down a light grey with a hint of blue to it and attacked it with a stiff bristled damp brush.

Turned out better, I got spots instead of giant flakes coming off. Still having problems applying the medium via airbrush, it sputters something fierce on me.

Quick homemade ink wash, light drybrushing, and some pigment powder for accumulating dust and voila, a desert outpost. I've got about four and a half functional feet of wall to work with.

Still have to make a gate I guess. Or bribe a friend or something, a couple of them are AutoCAD jockies (I made it through that semester back in college, barely, hating every minute of it. My spatial reasoning is poor).