Sunday, January 17, 2021
Projects for 2021 and completed projects from 2020
Monday, August 31, 2020
August Projects
During August I worked on completing the remaining 25mm Science Fiction items that had not been done. These included assembling the buildings I got from PaperTerrain. I also purchased some aliens as noted in the previous blog post and found a tank and an infantry carrier at Wargame Vault. I needed different vehicles for the forces opposing the Federation.
The vehicles are made by Tomoko's paper miniatures. He also has 2d 28mm soldiers. However, the vehicles are definitely not 28mm. Fortunately I was able to use Paintshop Pro to enlarge them to 143% of their original size which made them compatible with my 25/28mm figures. The PDF file has several different camo schemes. All of them in shades of grey except for the one I chose to use. The infantry carrier appears to be an M113 APC. I haven't checked it against the actual vehicle to verify if it is an exact copy or not. I added the original sized turret from the tank model to convert it into an IFV. Instead of using the paper tube mounting system for the turrets I again went with thumbtacks glued to the inside of the turret with a strip of cardstock glued across the top of the thumbtack and to the turret floor to keep the thumbtack in place. The only other modification was to cut the bottom of the track assembly as a wider straight edge instead of the jagged pattern making them easier to assemble. The files include detailed assembly diagrams unlike the free ones that I made for the Federation.
The buildings from PaperTerrain were also PDF files and include detailed assembly instructions and diagrams. The number of buttresses, bays, windows, and door openings can be customized as desired.
The following photos show the buildings and vehicles. The miniatures are from Grenadier Models, Inc. They are the licensed Traveler Imperial Marines Imperial Marines. They are being used as the Pantharii Impeium Marines. I believe Magister Militum has the molds, but has not recast them as of this time. In addition to the marines I also bought a set of the adventurer figures back when they were released. In addition to the sets of marines, I recently purchased some additional figures that were not part of a complete set that I found on Ebay. |Fortunately no one else bid against me and I was able to get them for about $2 per figure. Otherwise, there were a few complete boxed sets being offered at $120 to $160 per set. I now have about three dozen of them for a complete platoon.
Again these will be used for Wiley Games Galactic Heroes and Bigger Battles.
The four IFV's, one of the tanks, and some of the Pantharii Imperium Marines.
Monday, August 10, 2020
Alien Invaders
I had been looking for some figures to use for the aliens who are harassing the rift frontiers (right edge of the map of human space in an earlier post) of the Pantharii, Domain, and Federation. I had looked at the Ralnai and Klackon ranges for Starguard, but decided against them. Last week, I was browsing through Khurasan Miniatures 15mm sci fi range and found what I was looking for. These were the Soriog.
They are slightly shorter than the 28mm sci fi figures. I placed the order on Monday and they arrived on the Saturday. Kudos to Khurasan for speedy delivery. For their environmental suits, I painted them light khaki, and used a medium brown for their weapons. They were given a bright blue skin color for their faces and other parts of their warlock (a psionic). The humans refer to them as the "blue meenees". They have a prehensile tail, hands with a thumb and two fingers, and a raptor talon on their legs.
Wiley games printed a book of various sci fi races and I chose the Aeldarin for their characteristics. These are based on not-space elves.
The figures are organized into four squads of ten. Consisting of a squad leader, seven other laser rifle armed infantry, a heavy laser, and a flamer. There is four figure command team consisting of the commander, a warlock, and two junior officers.
Monday, July 13, 2020
Repair Bots, buildings, and scatter terrain
I added five more buildings to the previous two that I made. They come in three different sidings - brick, planks, and panels and a variety of colors. The panels consist of six with windows, two with ventilators/chimneys, and six solid that can be arranged in any order desired of twelve panels. They also have a doorway and up to three dormers that can be added. I made the two buildings with panels into a combined structure by adding the extra part provided for joining buildings together. I left the bottom of the buildings open so that I can stack them and save storage space.
Now I am waiting for an order of business signs from Iliada Game Studio that I will be adding to various buildings that I have already made and some additional ones that I will be making that I just purchased from PaperTerrain. These were announced back in March and are available already printed or in PDF format. One of the sets includes three buildings that can be joined together or used separately. He also has a wall and gate set and a set of storage containers. The picture is from his website. I purchased the tower, the two story building next to it, the three stall market building next that and the three building combination in the lower ;right, along with the gate and wall set. The tower and the individual buildings occupy about a six in square area as to the three modules in the combination set. Except for the tower, each set includes exterior wall panels, buttresses, doors and bays that can be placed as desired or left off. It appears that one of the wall sections has been shortened next to the gate in the lower right of the picture. The sets look to be easy and quick to assemble.
The last picture is of the repair vehicles and bots, a pair of forklifts, and a couple of accumulators. The vehicles and bots can be printed in different color sets if desired. I chose to use the yellow set. The repair vehicles consist of a control vehicle, two tool chests and an open trailer.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Federation armed forces.
For the past week and a half I have been assembling some tanks and IFV's for my 28mm science fiction figures. These are from the free website that I previously mentioned. free items I had to use Paintshop Pro and import the camo scheme from ones that I previously made. This took a couple of days to complete.
The models are better than the other one I had made, but the directions could use a couple of additional diagrams to help with assembling them. They include a variety of detail parts and choice of weapons for the IFV and secondary armament for the tank. I chose to use the smaller remote controlled turret for the IFV and chose the auto-cannon for it. The tank also has a remote controlled turret, but I decided to not use it due to its large size. I also added thumbtacks to the turrets to allow them to be rotated. and also made some other minor modifications to the locations of items on the tank turret and the IFV turret location.
I did post a picture of some of the figures in a previous post. See previous post They are from Anvil Industries. These were available in a set called the Martian Orbital Fusiliers under their regiments range. I purchased three of the 10 figure sets along with a six man heavy weapons set and a five man command set in order to get the free shipping. Purchasing the two additional sets of 10 figures reduced the cost per set by four UK pounds.
This set of figures is no longer listed,, but all the parts to make the figures are still listed on their site. These include the Gothic Void helmet, and torsos (the specialist weapon guy has the plain back and the rest have the standard back), armored legs and arms, and the Tesla disintegrator under the rifles with stocks range.
After priming them with white spray primer, I painted the figures with a rough wash of a bluish grey color to give them a similar camo pattern to the vehicles. The wash left different parts of the figures with dark, medium, and light patches.
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
28mm Science Fiction Buildings and Vehicles

The trucks are one of the vehicles available. They can be printed in four different colors and each has a choice of four different loads - Water, Fuel, Open, and Covered. The chassis are all the same consisting of the main frame, cab cover, four re-enforcements, six interior wheel parts, and two additional parts. The different payloads can be the same color as the chassis or can be different. The open truck is carrying most of the boxes.
There are a lot of other vehicles, including drop ships, and a freight hauling spaceship. The buildings I have assembled so far are the water tower, wind powered generator, solar panel, a pair of storage tanks, a landing pad, a greenhouse, a storage shed, and two of the habitats. The habitats have three different types of sidings and each type is available in four or five colors with a total of seven different colors. The farm set has an additional habitat in one of the siding types with a different color pattern. This gives a total of fourteen different color and siding combinations. I left the bottoms off of the habitats so that they can be stacked. Each habitat is assembled with twelve panels has six solid side panels, six window side panels, and two chimney panels to choose from. These can be arranged in any order. Additional items that can be added are the door, up to three dormers, and if desired a part to connect multiple habitats together.



I still have five of the habitats to assemble, ten service droids with four small parts vehicles, and a few additional items from the farm set. There are some other vehicles I am thinking of printing and assembling and am still undecided about making the cargo spaceship. There are eleven different versions of the spaceship to choose from and the model has a total of 42 pages of parts to print.
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Projects for 2020 and a review of projects for 2019
Finish Late Roman/ Byzantine army Still to be done
Finish Sassanid Persian Army Still to be done
Finish Warbands Still to be done
Finish lace wars armies Completed
Finish Napoleonic armies. Completed
Purchase and paint modern engineering equipment after GHQ finishes releasing the vehicles for early this year. Completed
Make 2mm towns and villages. (counted about 40 for one scenario) Dropped plans for 2mm army
Make some more 6mm towns, villages, and farms. Made some, more to do
Finish painting 2mm armies. Replaced with 6mm Franco-Prussian and completed
Paint about a dozen 25mm sci-fi figures I dug out of storage. (yes, they are actually 25mm figures from 35 years ago) Completed
Make jungle. Got some left over palm trees and bamboo to place on Litko hexes. Completed
Make pine forest. Bump chenille on Litko hexes. Started
Items that were added and completed
purchased and painted some 1:285 Leopard 2 Revolutions
Finished painting some 28mm fantasy figures.
Finished the 28mm castle
Purchased and painted some 28mm science fiction figures
Printed and assembled a 28mm spaceship using World Works Games First Light, expansion, and other sets.
Printed and Assembled the 28mm Desert Village and Desert Fort sets from Wargames Vault.
Printed and assembled a 28mm Science Fiction town using World Works Games Mars Station set.
While most of the above were not reported on the blog, they can be seen in several of the blog posts.
Projects for 2020 are as follows:
All are 6mm unless noted otherwise.
Complete Late Roman/Byzantine army
Complete Sassanid army
Add cavalry to Achaemenid army
Finish Warbands
Make additional built up areas
Make pine Forest
I have a dozen two foot square interlocking mats that have been painted a light brown to finish
I have a bunch of 28mm Fantasy figures in various stages of painting to finish.
Add a few more 28mm science fiction buillding paper buildings.
Sunday, September 1, 2019
Pacificon
My first game may have been too early in the day as no one signed up to play. Fortunately the same set up was being used for the second game which had a full complement of players. There were several other early games that had one or maybe two players where the gamemaster had to step in and play.
Below are some pictures of other games at the convention. I was not able to get pictures of all of them.

Retreat From Moscow 1812 with 54mm figures.
This was the smuggler scenario with four factions. The smugglers whose objective was to meet with a local gang at the tavern and deliver the contraband to them. The third group was a rival gang who were trying to intercept the contraband for their own purposes. The fourth group was the local law enforcement. I used teams from the Galactic Heroes companion book. The smugglers were the Kreng, the Ornks were the gang they were making the delivery to, the rebels were the other group and empire were the local law.
The law enforcement team was plagued with faulty ammunition. Throughout the game they would take shots at the Kreng, rebels and Ornks with almost half their shots resulting in out of ammo rolls.
While this was happening the Kreng were able to deliver the contraband to the Ornk specialist behind the tavern. The Ornks then headed for the outskirts of town with the contraband and the Kreng returned to their ship to join the one team ember who had fled to it earlier following a failed shock recovery attempt.
Final results were victories for the Kreng and Ornks. A total loss for the rebels with all of their team members dead with bits and pieces of most of them scattered about. The law enforcement team claimed a political victory with one gang wiped out and the leader of the Ornks killed and all of their team members surviving.
The third game was set in a different location. R. E. Howard, Inc and H. Beam Piper, Ltd. had established a joint mining operation n a barren moon. Eventually they had a falling out and H. Beam Piper, Ltd had taken control of the mining operation. R. E. Howard, Inc hired a group of mercenaries, Conan's Barbarians, to sized the mining facility. The mercenaries had two squads of two four man fire teams each riding in an Infantry fighting vehicle equipped with a rail gun. This was treated as a heavy laser in the rules. The IFV's had heavy armor. Both the mercenaries and the security force defending the mining base had light armor.
The security force had five four man teams. Two of the teams had an Anti-tank rocket launcher and three riflemen, one team had a heavy blaster and three rifle men, and the other two teams only had four riflemen. Both sides were armed with blaster rifles.
The mercenaries would win by eliminating the security force and/or capturing the power plant. There was a road going through the mining base from the spaceport to the mines. Vehicles could drive along it with no problem, but if the attempted to move off road there was a chance they could break through the ground surface and become stuck. Infantry could move cross country without any problems.
The mercenaries dismounted outside of town and advanced on foot supported by the IFV's They soon came under fire from the security force. One IFV was disabled immediately after it put a round through the nearest building in an attempt to take out the guy who had fired on it. It was eventually knocked out The other used its railgun to support its team killing a couple of men on the security team. Though several mercenaries were wounded or shaken, they eventually overcame the security force. With half the security force dead and several others incapacitated due to wounds and shock hits the surviving members of the security team surrendered.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Galactic Heroes at Conquest Sacramento part two
Friday, March 29, 2019
Fistful of Lead: Galactic Heroes at Conquest Sacramento
The rival groups were all taken from the compendium supplement. The smugglers were the Kreng who had to deliver the contraband to the Ornks. The Rebels were out to intercept it for their own use and the local law enforcement, Imperial Storm troopers, were out to stop everyone. The game was played on a 4x6 foot table.
almost as soon as they got outside the port facilities the Kreng became engaged in a firefight with the rebels. One of the Kreng climbed to the top of the second story of a space port building to get better shots at the rebels. As the Kreng werr getting the better of the firefight, one rebel climbed to the top of the first story of the port building. Seeing this the Kreng warrior on the second floor jumped down on him and proceeded to slice and dice the unfortunate rebel.
Meanwhile the police had advanced along the south edge of the town heading towards the spaceport and the Ornks were moving towards the center of town. The two groups also became engaged in a long range firefight, but with little effect. About this point the person who had signed up for the game finally arrived and took over from my friend who had volunteered to take his place until he arrived. From this point the police became very passive hiding behind the buildings and trees in the south part of the town.
While some of the Ornks were trading shots with the police, the others were headed towards the town plaza to try and make contact with the Kreng. The came across a couple of the rebels and engaged them with one of the Ornks killing both. At this point the two wounded rebels who were still alive decided to retreat after loss of their leader and his second in command.
With the rebels retreating and the police in hiding, the Kreng were able to make contact with the Ornks next to the tavern and turn over the contraband.
Monday, March 25, 2019
The past couple of monts gaming with Fistful of Lead Galactic Heroes.
After taking part in a game and having a lot of fun, I dusted off my old 25mm SciFi figures, printed out and assembled some cardstock buildings and started playing. I still have some additional cardstock structures to print and assemble.
I purchased up some additional Grenadier Models Traveler Imperial Marines for $18.including shipping off of eBay to round out the troops I had. The set had 10 of the 12 figures. I saw a couple of listings for complete sets asking $130 and $165 plus shipping. Way more than what I originally paid for the two plus sets that I bought back in the 1980's.
I also replaced some figures that I purchased back then with figures from another company. I ran a game of Galactic Heroes at the San Jose club's March meeting and one of the players needed some figures. The new guys are the Martian Orbital Fusiliers from Anvil Industry. They are multi-part figures. The offer a 10 figure pre-packaged set and I added some additional heavy weapons and a few extra figures to three of the sets to get an extra discount and free shipping. this gave me a 41 figure platoon of three squads. I painted them in a faded blue color to match the camouflage scheme on some cardstock scifi tanks I printed.
The San Jose Club was also having an estate sale for a member who had recently passed away at the meeting. His estate had thousands of figures in multiple scales and multiple periods along with buildings, scenery, planes, and ships.
























































