Gaming Under the Baleful Sun

2024-08-21 infinity / triplanetary / 15mm-SF /

It's been over a hundred the whole damned month, school started back up, and there's been a few interesting gaming occurrences that none of which feel like a full post, so here's a round up.

Triplanetary

DocTree picked up a copy of this classic a while back and we've been meaning to get it on the table for a while. We just did a quick game of the Grand Tour basic movement scenario. I miscalculated my first pass of Jupiter necessitating some hard burns and a resupply at Venus with no margin for error, while Tree keyholed the asteroid belt for a series of smooth grav-assisted turns. Launching back at the inner planets with a fresh tank, I made up for some lost ground with profligate thrusting but then miscalculated my fuel by a single point yet again. I had a choice of being permanently stuck in orbit of Mars or crashing on to the surface, so went out with a bang. At the same time, Tree was having to dog leg back from Earth to the sun at a velocity of 1 with no fuel to spare lest he too screw the landing, but it meant an extra month or more of silent space travel on the same initial supplies, so we called it basically a draw between explosion and starvation.

We've got a bit of a track record with turning space games into elaborate astronaut suicide missions. The less said of High Frontier (the first edition even) the better.

Infinity Classic

After seeing some of the local club playing infinity, I quite literally dusted off my box of figures. A mix of mostly N1 and a few N2 Combined Army and Ariadnans. I knew they'd retired models, but I didn't expect to find everything save one model was entirely OoP, and the entire aesthetic had changed.

I remember being disappointed with how dark my CA turned out, but to look at them now, they're not half as bad as I recalled. Conversely, I thought I had painted a lot more of the Ariadnans, or perhaps there's a few gone missing (probably stuffed in a box somewhere after being used with another game).

The force org is so wildly different than I remember, having not played since N1, that I'm struggling to figure out what I'm missing to field let alone how to make an effective group. Going to work out some trades, to at least have something I could bring to a short notice pickup, or to fill in for an absence.

15mm SF

A slapdash color test on one of the Rebel Mini marines

I got lucky and caught a local person unloading a large collection of random 15mm SF figures. They didn't even know what most of them were, just boxes of bagged figures everywhere between new-on-sprue to a couple colors and based. For a grand total of a mere hundred dollars, I've now burdened myself with:

• Nearly the full line of both the Khanate Legion and Retained Knights for The Ion Age
• Two platoon packs with extras of RebelMinis Earth Force Marines
• Multiple force packs from Ravenstar's LandCore Horrids range
• Both sets of GZG 'Alien Mercs' SG15-X05 & SG15-X08
• Khurasan's Alien Crime Wave
• 'Space Dorkz' Kickstarter set of classic 40k style orkz in 15mm
• One platoon bag I've still not positively identified but is probably either Critical Mass ZAS or one of the pic-less sets from GZG.

Ground Zero Games 'Alien Mercs', one of those sets with absolutely horrible blurry tiny pictures on GZG's store page

This has me looking over some platoon scale SF wargaming notes I made a while ago, systems to try, tweaks to test. In particular The Earth Force Marines and Horrids have me looking at my notes for playing Mongoose's Starship Troopers miniatures game in 15mm with multibased fireteams and equivalents.

28mm reference wizard, 15mm Ion Age knight, and ~12mm Heavy Gear Blitz soldier next to a pair of Ravenstar Horrid mass tanks

The tricky part would be reconciling the wonderfully unique hand sculpted textures of the Horrid tanks with basically anything else. You can really see the tool marks in them, the deliberate rough slight asymmetries. They look like nothing else I've seen in ages and I adore them. Sadly the smaller pieces are all monocast and rather brittle. The tanks though are proper chonky beasts.

Works in Progress

I'm finishing up more terrain for the Millennium Con table. Should have a post up with the scatter vehicles, and then also just doubling my flora with another plates worth printed.

Project Heavy Metal Jager Gang has stalled out once I got to the edge highlighting phase. I might just do a very light drybrush and call it a day from here, slap some decals on and print some base labels. I think I bit off more than I wanted to chew with that batch.

Also looking back over my Dropfleet Commander stuff and prepping it for some games later this year when it hopefully relaunches. I don't really have any faith in TTCombat managing to promote the game given their track record, and frankly I'll be surprised if they don't utterly ruin the rules and kill it deader than ever. But still, it's not impossible.