Yesterday I knocked together a little starfort for my 1/350 navy to shoot at. Well, forts don't just float in the sea by themselves so I started thinking about coastlines. But coastlines are pretty much endless while islands have a very limited amount of coast, so an island was the answer. But why would you build a fort on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.....thus the island needed to have a reason that people would want it, a nice harbor perhaps. From that point I made the leap from cogitation to cutting foam and this happened;
no point to walls if they don't have parapets
any harbor this nice would have been noticed by somebody long ago,
so it had to have an old Crusader castle
in Epicurea this is the island of Pinatella
a blown-out volcanic caldera whose volcanic soil traps the rainfall
meaning that it not only has a lovely harbor but it also has fresh water
I finally found a way to cheat and make bastions in a quick and easy way
two triangular strips glued back to back and then sliced to wall height
another couple of passes through Proxxie and they have a slope to the outer face
the modern fort guards the entrance to the harbor
a Monopoly game I got at a garage sale for a dollar provides the buildings for a town
I made a glacis as an experiment in figuring and cutting the angles
the Golden Hind in the harbor
and outside it
machiolations in 1/350th are a pain!
the Monopoly hotels are acting as barracks, they might not fit the bill
I'm very much of two minds about the glacis,
it takes up a LOT of space and seems rather unnecessary
That is how things stand right now. I have to decided to finish the whole thing or just keep the fort and bin the rest of it. I will see how I feel about things in the morning.
Well, true to form, I opted for the whole island . I gave the entire models a coat of thinned latex wallboard compound to soften the edges and hide the sanding scratches . Once that was dry I gave it a coat of deep brown as a base to work up from. While I was waiting for the first coat to dry I whipped up some water batteries to provide some low-level firepower at the entrance to the harbor.
after the intitial coat was dry I dry-brushed a light tan over the island
and painted the crusader castle and the fort with it's batteries
too dark for my taste, I think this needs a lot more work
the starfort needs at least eight guns
and the water batteries need at least eight more
where am I going to find 1/350 scale guns on fortress mounts
That is brilliant! I didn't think you could cut foam with such precision. Very clever.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't do it without my faithful friend Proxxie, I do have to admit that there was a LOT of failed experiments before the breakthrough that will now allow me to mass-produce these sort of things.
ReplyDeleteIt is a very pretty thing. All those years meandering around forts has certainly given you an eye for these beasties. But now you just need to make a ruined one after a fleet rolls in and blasts a wall to rubble, or an accidental magazine explosion, or what have you.
ReplyDeleteI’m getting used to posts where you set out to do X and end up with XYZ. 😀
ReplyDeleteSadly, so am I.......I think that I need someone to stand behind me with the original plan and a stick, they would smack my hand every time I stray from the plan (much like Catholic school when I was a child). On the upside I rarely operate with any plan more advanced than a vague idea so I would avoid most beatings!
DeleteI fear that, deep down inside, I'm just a megalomaniac.