Cardboard Condos

   So here we go, a quick explanation into how the cardboard buildings go together. This time i decided to make a pair of shops to give the building set some more flavour. I also managed to get some green and red paint to I was freed from my monochrome palette.
 
   To begin, the first step was to plan out the basic geometry of the building and get a picture of it in my head. This is quite important as it allows for scaling to be sorted out before anything permanent is done.

    Following this I marked up most of the pieces to be cut from the cardboard. There are actually very few pieces to cut out, mainly the lain walls (which I did in one piece), the roof, any additional bits and some long strips for window/door frames.

The main pieces marked out, with windows doors and shop front on the main wall section, for scale I assumed about
2.5cm per floor

Mid-cutting, with the rear section wall in the foreground and a holey main wall in the background.

    Now for the secret weapon, extra detail for little effort. By this of course I mean the windows with their frames which are dead easy to put together and really give the building some realism. To add them I simple cut a little further than needed on the two horizontal window holes and at the top of the door holes. I then glued a small rectangle of cardboard into each slot.

The rectangles

The frames in place, looking pro.

    For the window shutters and doors I simple took the cardboard cut from the  hole and reused it, creased to look like wood for the doors and cut in half for the windows. having done all the fiddly work I now glued the building a cardboard base to give it some rigidity:

Windows in base on, by this point I had also done the shop windows which were a bit experimental so I won't really look at them...

   Next was painting which works really well on the cardboard as you tend to get mini clumps of cardboard forming and adding some really nice texture.

All painted up, with the shop windows - the red one indicated that my method wasn't really right as it fell apart under the paint.

   For the walls I used a 1:1 mix of tan and white, followed by a quick drybrush of white followed by some splodges of tan at the base of the wall. The frames were all done in a very basic manner by directly painting on the colours wanted.

   The next item, the roof was really easy, I simple scored in a rough grid to indicate roof tiles and mate sure the borders of the grid squares were obvious. I drowned it all in a coat of black paint which I followed up with a quick dab of paint in the middle of each tile. When that was dry I gave it all a quick overbrush of grey and then a very faint one of white.

The roof, the chimney was painted in the same way as the main walls with a black line painted around the top like soot.

All done! - actually I quickly painted any bits of the base that were showing brown.

The shop front about to be ruined by an exploding tank

Column heading through the Cardboard village

       So there we go. All in all I think this has been a cool thing to do, and it has certainly given me some good terrain to use!

Painting Progress (lots of pics)

    Oooohhhhh, painting!!
 
    This is really just going to be a picture dump, with commentary. Let us begin...

    First up are some German armoured vehicles, these have been painted for a while now but are still worth a mention as they were an evolution from the desert tank's painting ( I just added a brown wash and some green stripey bits).

 
    Next we have a nice SdKfz 222, the reason for my four colour palette at the moment...

    Had to get the sci fi tag somehow, and here we go. These were acquired from the Colours wargames show last year and have already seen some pretty good games of Full Thrust Light. Someday I would like to try full Full Thrust, the whole vector mechanic is incredibly appealing and there is a new edition due soon!

    And finally, a masterpiece of the four colour palette, and freebie from Salute:

    Now this is the real reason I said that my paint situation has improved my skills. with only a limited range of hues I had to give this dude detail in other ways, stripey bits, markings e.c.t.
It has also forced me to mix the paints a bit more rather than taking them straight from the pot. I am really pleased with how he and his buddy (also freebie but not shown) turned out, I much prefer the sleek black armour to the grey overall they had depicted. I have a feeling they may have a run in with some bio-chem troopers at some point in the future.

Anyway, splurge done and balance of posts returned back to wargaming.

Attack of the Wonder Material!!

ARGGG, the hand is back! keep a lookout...

    So that answers my last question, cardboard buildings it is! Having idly drawn some designs on the backing of some old exercise books (made of cardboard), within short order I had put together some rather nice 15mm dwellings.

My first attempt, nice and simple. The windows and doors were stuck on and each wall was cut individually

    The results are astounding.  The white thing was the work of one, maybe two, hours. Maximum. Really I used it to test out the idea, experimenting with the roof (which wasn't so great) and the details like windows (which worked out well I think). I also needed to test out the painting system as I currently only have four pots of paint, black, white, brown and beige (or brown and brown).

    Pleased with a simple model I then proceeded with something more ambitious....

Mk 2

    A vast improvement for which I added open windows, a nicer beige finish and a properly painted roof.

Some added intrest out the back

The inherent advantage of using the cardboard this way is that you get a nice hollow middle for putting models in....

    I also experimented with cutting the walls out in one long piece which meant I could get all or the windows at the same height and was incredibly convenient. I decided on adding a shed-dy bit around the back to make the building more interesting.

   A good experiment I think, and one that has left me with some nice terrain to use in the future. I will do another post later on the actual method but it is not that tricky.

Risky, 24 hour radio telescope

    I am about to make a risk move, writing about a seeming unrelated topic. First, a photo...

The Mighty 'Salad Bowl'...

    So I present my (actually 'our', it was a team project) latest eye candy. It is supposed to be a radio telescope, in the final build our physicist team mate calculated it had a resolution of ~1° (depressingly the moon is 0.5° big when you look at it), and due to the antenna used it can see radio waves remarkable similar to TV signals...

    Before I continue I will point out that this was group project for a 24 hour competition a while ago. I am posting now as it is incredibly likely that the dish will actually be used in the next couple of weeks (I'll get to that).

   The project split very nicely down into several sections, I am going to focus on the actual physical dish as I think this ascpect is going to bleed into terrain building.

Humble beginnings, some handy calculation sheets too.

Parabolas and other design diagrams

    Our aim was to make a reflective surface that would bounce as much incoming light as possible onto the antenna, the simplest option, and hence our chosen one, is to use a paraboloid (a 3D parabola) and place the antenna receiver at the focus. Given we only had 24 hours to produce a rather large something to a fairly fine tolerance the dish team, Mr Physicist and I, opted for cardboard as the main structural material, primarily originating as pizza boxes (we're students...). This allowed us to cut out all our shapes quickly and precisely, and also bonded well with our adhesive of choice, hot glue.

The dish after 6 hours, and finished to the original design

    I was absolutely astounded by how effectively the plan worked, not only did we complete the originally planned dish structure within 6 hours, we were then able to more than double the diameter of the dish and the structure itself has survived for another 3 months with comparatively little damage.

The dish after 12 hours!

    Cardboard is not particularly effective at reflecting radio waves so we then had to add a aluminium foil surface to the dish, then it was a clear run to the end with a simple pivot to allow us to point it at things. Of course as Mr Physicist and I had been playing with our craft project, the rest of the team had been throwing to together various devices and software to read the signal being picked up by our receiver (which was just a satellite TV receiver).

   Having put it together, the weather proved to be our greatest challenge - with wind tearing at the foil and clouds stopping us from seeing where the sun (a nice initial target) was. With the end of the academic year and nicer weather coming up we will probably finish this project off very shortly...

   From a wargamer's perspective, the project was eye opening. We were able to design, build and finish a complicated object in less than a day, all the while knowing how big each component was to less than 1% of its size. Not only this but the end product has proven to be durable to an extent, and most of the construction material was effectively free. Contrast this with my previous experience building terrain from polystyrene or even foamcore where your knife seems to do funny dances and the end product is slightly squishy, and I think I can see how my future 'man-made' terrain will be put together.

    What next? Possibly a nice post detailing the dish being pointed at something, or maybe a suspicious smelling 15mm building...

Inspiration everywhere...

First Wargame in the northern hemishpere!!!

     Having moved a fairly long way for university, I faced a rather tricky problem - how to find, play, and supply a wargame on a suitcase load of figures.
    Luckily one of my friends made the fatal mistake of saying 'I'd be happy to try it out'... No sooner had the words left his mouth than I was preparing miniatures, planning potential rule sets and looking into some cheap scenery.
   A long anticipated trip to Salute solved a lot of problems, I managed to pick up a copy of the well reviewed 'Iron Cross' rule book - recommended by its lack of historical complexity that may have bamboozled my fledgling opponents. It also fitted nicely with my (space saving) 15mm WW2 Normandy models.
   Terrain was a bit of a poser, if you have seen the previous posts you will see that I spent quite a bit of time building up a good collection, with a good deal of time and resources sunk into the terrain boards. To my surprise (and ironic/despairing laughter) I was able to throw together some fantastic terrain with very little.

    The board consisted of green fabric thrown over some magazine hills. Trees and hedges/bocage consisted of some hastily sourced reindeer moss and some twigs from the nearest tree I could find. By happy accident I had bought some rather large MDF bases at salute and voila!

   The game went down really well, I was really impressed by the Iron Cross rules, by turn two three complete beginners had started strategising and needed very little help to play.
   I threw them a rough scenario of some British trying to push up the center of the board, with some Germans sent to intercept and stop them.

    The Brits, having made some good progress to begin with got stuck on the wrong end of a very lucky Panzer III/Panzer IV combo, and the game really did reward good tactical choices in a way that felt satisfying. My previous experience of WW2 gaming had been the Battlegroup rules (primarily Kursk/Overlord) and I had my doubts about a ruleset that allowed a Panzer IV to move at the same rate as a T-34. I think that to an extent this reflects Battlegroup's status as a Historical wargame, wheras Iron Cross is a Historical Wargame, which implies a different focus for the rules and a different attraction to the players.

    Even as an umpire I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and really appreciated how well it worked for newcomers. I reckon it will get several more runs in the near-mid future.