Ghost's Necro Terrain

[Spectrar Ghost]

WIP Necro Terrain. A single segment of a support tower for a platform. 75mm x 75mm x 75mm. Soon: 25mm square pillars, walkways, platforms, and multi-story towers.

[Spectrar Ghost]

Alright, now for a completely different track. The other stuff wasn't quite what I wanted, so Chad and I had a talk on Thursday and here's the result. Keep in mind it's still at the 3D sketch phase - I haven't done any detailing.


Overview. I've chosen to go with 75mm/3" floors. The main structure is 150mm/6" square, with 35mm catwalks. The central area on the roof is 25mm high. In the center of the roof is a skech of a gangway. You can see I've drilled magnets into the gangway and at the corner of the building on the edge of the catwalk. A Cadian is included for scale.


And here is the reason for the magnets. Finished structures will have magnets at intervals (every 50mm for the most part) that gangways can clip to. I'll also be building armored panels that will utilize the same system. The finalized ganways will accept these panels as well; the side of the gangway you can see is not detachable, but is indicitave of how the panels will look.


Too much flash, but you can see that an advantage of the magnets is that the gangways are not restricted to being attached level; they will be able to go from a second floor catwalk to a first floor catwalk, for instance.


Another scale shot, showing the width of the catwalk.

[slartibartfast]

So the Cadian is not included in the kit? Really coming along. Wixh things would calm down here so I could get out and do something. Love to live vicariously through your pictures though.

[Spectrar Ghost]

More work. Added more magnets and some detail. The wall thickness still bothers me. I'd like to do walls 2mm or even 3mm thick, but the cost may turn out to be prohibitive; these use up a lot of card.



Some attachments. Corner panel, 100mm straight panel, 100mm gangway.




The attachments are, uh, attached.

[Spectrar Ghost]

More stuff.

Most of the first two stories of a ruined hab, and some crates.


All together.


New building.


Tom has good ideas. Another run of magnets to allow modularization by floor. If only I'd remembered to do it on the bottom floor...


A couple crates, destined to be dunked in silicone for duplication.

[Spectrar Ghost]

Done, mostly. I still need to add more supports under the catwalks, but for that I need to make more rails (they're the offcuts from the ends) and I'm almost out of plastic glue and completely out of .040" x .250" strip. This building used up two full packs - 14 x 14" lengths IIRC.

[Spectrar Ghost]

Quick update before I head out.


A catwalk landing, one story high. still need to put some strip on the back corners, but mostly done. Amazingly, the fit on the CoD ladder is entirely coincidental. All that was required for a good fit was to remove about half a mm from the top mm of rail. A pleasent surprise, though the skulls may have to go eventually. I may have to collect these ladders for wider use...


What is a design feature is the ability to accept up to four walkways or 50mm rails.

[Cptn_Snuggles]

I like it a lot. As for the skulls on the ladders, why not? Everything seems to have skulls in the GW universe so why wouldn't you get a ladder from the 40k Home Depot with some deathly decoration?



Cheers,
BC

[Spectrar Ghost]

I've never been a fan of the "Needs more skulls" school of thought. Plus, this is an urban-industrial landscape, and gothic details like skulls don't really add to the atmosphere the same way as they do on CoD buildings.

[Spectrar Ghost]

Amidst the werckage of my dining room table are the latest bits of terrain I've completed.


A split level landing for walkways. It's geometry took a bit more planning than the single level, but I think it turned out fine. The top level has three hardpoints - two at right angles to each other and one at 45 deg to both over the ladder. In use:

My current plan for the remainder of the table is to do 4-6 buildings about the footprint of the one I've finished, and fill the rest with a network of walkways, which are easy and fast to do. THen I can worry about more buildings.

Pumping station/water still. A pleasent surprise for me was that the bottom of Planter's nut canisters are steel, not aluminum. Thus I don't need to worry about whether to add magnets around the rim or not, since the entire top (the way I've got it) is magnetic. I may add some more detail to this piece, though I'm undecided what if anything it needs.

[Spectrar Ghost]

Not strictly Necromunda, but Chad let me borrow his Streets of Malifaux to have a play with.




That'll work.

However, It's clear to me that if it's not left set up in blocks, it should be preplanned on graph paper to make easier to assemble. It's really a terrain system I keep looking at from an RPG veiwpoint - you can make a very scenario driven terrain set pretty easily, or you can make modular or set peice terrain, but ad hoc setups are inconvenient at best.

[Shaggrudd Dethblasta]

How much of the set did you use?

[Spectrar Ghost]

75%? I used over half, and in particular almost all the 6" walls, but there were 4 or so 6" floor tiles and a dozen or so 3" tiles left over. I used most of the 6" rails but few of the 3". The usage would be more even with a slightly more complex (shorter wall length) setup that didn't try to create a villa out of component that aren't designed for it (see below).

As I look at the set, it does an excellent job of what it claims - it makes superb streets, walled compounds, etc. With a set or two of Houses, it would be easy to make a full 3' square from the streets that was on two or more levels, with bridges, walled courtyards, and possibly some basements. The houses could fill the remainder with at least two stories of dwellings.

It looks like the sewers could be used either as a complement to the streets in an open canal system, or on their own, possibly as a linked table with designated "entrances" that could be used in parallel to the above ground sections for larger scenarios. The second option in particular would benefit prom preplanning so that the entrances would properly line up - ideally one would be able to actually place the above ground table over the sewers and have the whole thing work, though in practice having two side by side would be better for game play.

Let me look closer at the houses online, and I'll try to work up a table that has open spots where one would place the houses.

Oh, I got the smaller components and clips in baggies for you.

[Spectrar Ghost]

From a simple count, there is 7 sqft of floors (including ramps), 18 feet of walls, and 9 feet of rail (again including ramp rails).

[Spectrar Ghost]

Alright I went a little more elaborate this time, and also made sure it was a standard 3'x3' surface.

I did not use:

1 T-Clip
1 Ramp
2 Stairs
1 Ladder
12 3" Tiles
12 3" Walls
7 3" rails
1 6" Wall

That's right, I had one clip left over. Total.


I have left spaces for three 12" x18" houses, one of which goes over the large basement in the upper left.


Courtyard with bridge to lower level, bridge removed.


The back end. You can see I made some sacrifices in stability (I would have liked to have a wall there) in order to save clips. You can also see some of the places I used T-clips instead of straight clips because it's all I had.

Conclusions: Neat stuff. You seem to need at least three boxes of clips for each two sets of cardboard. I'm not sure how useful it is for necromunda - even the houses don't seem to have removable windows, which makes targeting tough. I guess one could remove the windows by hand, but it would be long, hard, and probably cause more damage than it was worth.