Fuggit Khan:
Great! More spaceships :cheers!!!
I like that kind of models and pledged for a dropfleet commander Kickstarter a few months ago (kickstarter shipping is planned for August).
TheHoodedMan
Dropfleet Commander looks really good, very nice models and Andy Chambers working on the rules too...I'm really looking forward to it :hat off
Will you do a whole fleet photo for us?
Abecedar
Well, most of my fleet is in the ol' spacedocks, awaiting completion.
But here are the ships that I use the most when I'm playing Starfleet Wars and Full Thrust:
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These are all Star Blazers Yamato 2199 ships, about 6 inches long, a bit bigger in scale than what is usually used with for Full Thrust, but we just adjust accordingly for range, etc. You can use any size model you want actually. These are mostly space carriers, which Starfleet Wars has great rules for
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And what is Starfleet Wars you ask? Well, a small trip down memory road:
It was 1977, Star Wars was just out new in the theaters and me and my friends were on the Star Wars craze bandwagon. And then we spotted this advertisement shortly after in a Tactics magazine:
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Spaceship models! No internet in those days, so we quickly sent in our $1 by mail and waited for our catalog. Once received, we bought tons of the metal spaceships, which were made by a company called Superior Models (and surprise! the Earth Terran ships all looked like Imperial Star Destroyers! What a coincidence! ;) )
And included with the metal ships were rules to play tabletop battles with them, the rules were simply called Starfleet Wars. Those original models (and updated/modified rules) are still in production today, an impressive run after nearly 40 years! Some of the cool metal ships:
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So the next ship in works for my gaming fleet...the Garmilas (Gamilon) Kripteras class destroyer. One of my favorite ships, it's such a sleek and aggressive design
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Bandai makes a nice 1/1000 scale kit of it
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It's another snap together kit (mostly)...
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By mostly I mean that these small 'shark fins' need to be glued on. I lost count of how many times they broke off from my clumsy handling of the model :(
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So, I'm going to go on another small tangent here...please bear with me, there is a method to my madness here, you'll see ;P
Being a military history nerd, I have always loved the 'Razzle Dazzle' camouflage of warships. First introduced in WWI by the British, it was not a camo to hide a ship, but rather a camo to confuse submarines. Torpedoes have to be fired into the forward path of a traveling ship, so the idea of this camo was to confuse a submarine peering through a periscope, so that they could not quickly ascertain which end of the ship is the front. Basically it gave the ship a 50% survival rate, if the torpedoes were fired at the wrong end. This is a great example:
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So successful was this camo that it was adopted into lots of styles:
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Even in today's modern era, warships still employ these camo patterns to confuse the enemies submarines. Here are modern examples from Sweden and the US:
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So what does my military history nerdism have to do with Yamato 2199 models?
Well, in the Yamato universe, electronic counter measures and jamming requires the ships to use visual 'lock on' to target...and the Garmilas fleets often use this same camo principle to confuse their enemies to flight direction:
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To make this camo pattern, I'm trying out something I have never done before...masking with tape and spray painting the model
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Pulled the tape off...and it worked! :)
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So on to the other ship half and detailing the forward missile batteries
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:hat off
