A tired joke for sure but hey, it’s early in the week.
A friend of mine graciously donated this Old Glory ship to me when he moved back to the West Coast. I hung on to it as I have a scenario for the French and Indian War involving a docked French ship, and as Sharp Practice has rekindled my interest in the period, I decided to slap some paint on her. I do have the ship’s cannon, but as they aren’t needed for the scenario I put them away for the time being.
After reading these posts on the Too Fat Lardies blog here and here, I decided to take some inspiration (steal ideas) and build my Sarissa Radar Station. Here’s what I came up with.
The Lardies mounted their station on a hexagonal base that was made of carved foam. Knowing how bad I am with foam work, I decided to design my base using Tinkercad and print it using my Printrbot Play. It’s hard to see in this picture, but this print has some very bad horizontal banding (for those that know anything about 3D printing it was caused by a sinusoidal heat fluctuation in the hot end) however it ended up being a happy accident as it kinda gives the effect of marks left by a concrete form.
I mounted the hex to a rectangular base and covered the horizontal surfaces with sand.
Prior to assembly, I traced the outer ring of the dish and the roof of the shack onto some card stock to use to cover the seams where some of the parts join.
Construction of the building was straight forward. Before adding the roof, I painted the interior and added a map, propaganda poster and a calendar to the walls. In hindsight this was a waste as you really can’t see into the building.
After the framework of the dish was built I added some mesh using some sort of nylon that probably came from a bag of mints from a wedding. I don’t know what it’s called, but the material is pretty common.
To complete the dish I glued some styrene strips along the interior frames and capped the outside with the trimmed card stock ring.
Before mounting the building I wanted to finish the base so I added a few things from the parts bin – a box, drum and a bicycle from Dixon.
Here are a few shots of the finished base.
And here’s the finished piece. The voltage warning signs are printed images from online, mounted on the scrap pieces that came out of the window panes and the railing is a bent paperclip (both ideas stolen from the Lardies). The steps are from Grandt Line.
This was a fun little build of a unique subject and I’m really happy with the results. I’d highly recommend the Sarissa kit if you’re in the market for an interesting objective.
I happened to have a bunch of pulpiness on the workbench that got completed around the same time, so here’s a gallery of my efforts.
Total impulse buy at Historicon, but when I saw this thing from Pulp Figures I “had” to have it. It’s already been put to use as a moveable deployment point in Sharp Practice. It’s a great sculpt. Everyone should have one, even if you don’t have a use for it.
Well, carts really but I couldn’t think of any catchy cart reference.
While at Historicon I participated in an interesting game titled “My Fair Demon Barber of the Opera: A Musical Celebration of Victorian Horror” (side note – the quote referenced in the linked blog from the Sweeney Todd player was from yours truly). Brigade Games sponsored the event and was kind enough to give all the players a coupon for 10% off at their booth.
As part of my usual convention haul from Brigade, I picked up these cart kits from 4Ground. The second edition of Sharp Practice has a few carts that can be taken as support elements, and these fit the bill nicely.
Nothing revolutionary here. Some quick assembly, paint jobs and basing and they’re ready to go.
Herr Brush 