Dropfleet Commander - Scourge Forces Finished

2025-03-25 dropfleet commander / spaceships / dfc scourge / hobby / showcase /

I laid the base coat's down on these ages ago, and they've been languishing for a while. A recent renewal in interest in spaceship wargaming has me eager to complete the set.

Daemon class Battleship

Don't look too hard at the underneath. I made a mistake with the wings/arms/tentacles whatever you want to call them, and had to break and re-glue the substantial joints. The chipping is only really visible from directly below.

Akuma class Battlecruiser

Ifrit class Cruiser

The cruisers were the first of these models I painted years ago as test pieces. The engines are slightly different because I lost my notes, but you can't really tell without careful scrutiny.

Hydra class Carrier

I tried a number of glow effects on the recessed fighter bays, but ultimately just went with matte black.

Yokai class Light Beam Cruiser

Succubus class Destroyers

The tentacle wings on these resin models were terribly twisted and distorted. I did my best with boiling water and ice baths to fix them, but the next day they'd be back to slightly askew. So I decided to accept the twisting look, which suits the organic design pretty well actually. It makes me wish I'd done it to some of the other vessels. Almost.

Lamassu class System Monitor

This is a two-piece model with an enormous joint running across the middle. Every one of my models had a large gap that I had to fill in and clamp to hold the edges aligned. I wound up pinning the model to get it to hold while the glue cured. A really poorly designed and executed casting job.

Gargoyle class Dropship Carrier

I should have many more frigates than the requisite 4 Gargoyles and that's because I thought I had a clever way to magnetize them but I in fact did not. I should have just glued them all. I was trying to cram too many magnets into too small an area with too little surface to glue to. It left the pieces droopy, the magnets constantly snapping off, and the gap between the center and sides looked bad. It was not easily fixed after the modifications I'd made. I wound up tossing all the pieces in a bag and just buying a new sprue of frigates. If any expansion of this force happens it will almost certainly be in the frigate classes.

Nickar class Atmospheric Corvette

The scale in Dropfleet is a little loose. Many of the smaller ships are scaled up presumably to preserve detail, but I think a truer scale would have looked better. Corvettes also fill an essential role in every fleet, hunting strike carriers that have dropped to atmo, and I do like to stay WYSIWYG. I'd like these a lot more if they were maybe 50% the size they are.

Hiruko class Boarding Cutter

Same scaling problem, these are more like a heavy boarding shuttle than a spacefaring vessel. I love the design, but am disappointed in TTCombat for only having one sculpt. It's a 6 pack of identical models which works for almost every other vessel in the game, but the chaos of the reaching tubes in the front SHOULD NOT be identical. At the same time, it's easy to overlook. Just another example of TT's lack of effort in all things.

BONUS: Paths Not Taken

The base coat on all these models is one of the many colorshifting paints. But it needs an underlayer of black, preferably high gloss. I tested different underlayers, color and finish both, and it really does function best with high gloss black. Which is annoying to airbrush because the shine looks the exact same as if you sprayed too much paint in one spot and it's going to run.

But also, high gloss black looks wonderfully Geigeresque with the swooping lines of the model. If I ever do an alternative fleet of Scourge, I want to try using the underlayer and maybe molotow chrome for the dots or something.