Posted on by maenoferren22 · 13 Comments

BUUUGGGSSSS

Yep I am back into Starship trooper mode!

Today the postman brought me a very nice parcel…

I managed to get a good deal on EBay … sixteen miniatures for £48 with free postage. Yeah that is a lot of money for plastic, but the Starship Troopers miniatures are like rocking horse droppings. I though £3 a mini wasn’t too bad, having a look at other things up for sale I could get six for £45 or one for £11. So all in all not a bad price.

They are a whole lot smaller than the ones I printed… even my 60% sized one is big…

These two were pre assembled, the rest were still on the sprue. I need some flying ones and at least a Tanker bug, but once again these are going for silly money.

I would like some ST mobile infantry, there are less of them than there are bugs it would seem. There are more in the states than over here, £20 postage on top of £30 plus for the actual miniatures is putting me off – that and a poor track record of getting stuff actually to my house from the states.

So to proxy the troopers I ordered some EM4 plastic troopers five miniatures for £2.55…

https://em4miniatures.com/collections/science-fiction-near-future-miniatures/products/troopers

For that price you really can’t go wrong…

I got four sets so have a fair amount to play with. Sadly the command conversion and in fact most of the conversion bits were sold out which was a bit of a bummer to say the least. I will give him a shout to see if they are going to be restocked at any point. These have been sold out for ages so I really don’t see that they will be… but as they say …Shy Bairns get nowt. At the very least I might get a contact for who made them.

So off I go back to EBay to see if anything ST is going cheap… I have more chance of spotting a flying pig!

I have found a proxy drop ship on Thingiverse that I can print myself, as well as terrain and ground vehicles so that should keep me busy for a while.

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Desert House 5…Update

Well the shell is finished…

The roofs are on there temporarily. I will decide on which roofs to add later. The tower needs to have its top and roof added. So how did it get on…..

These bits were supposed to be attached. The window shutters were out too far I would guess and I forgot to extend the door into the doorway to secure that. But apart from that it seems fine.

Now I could give another one a bash, something a bit more complex again, they are cheap enough, bit as Dave pointed out I need to be able to paint everything = some of these bits are going to be tricky!

Problem with doing some more is that there are quite a few already!

I reckon I can squeeze another couple in before I have to stop printing and start painting. I also need to print half a dozen roofs as well as a whole pile of doors and window shutters.

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Desert House 5

More of a complex than a house to be honest.

Having had a busy day, what with watching a very interesting dinosaur talk in Lerwick. We booked it a while ago. Typically my youngest came down with chickenpox and couldn’t go. Lucy and I went and had a good time. After a bit of shopping we came home and she asked me to help her build a castle and village on Minecraft, I don’t know why as she is getting much better than me 😱.

So instead of printing anything off I decided to do something a bit different. Instead of a courtyarded building I went for more of a complex.

This is on the printer right now, but this is the view in Cura…

It needs roofs printing as well as the tower top. To save time I embedded a door in the base of the tower. This one is a bit more complex in that it has walls inside walls to make the distances fit, I also did some scaling to make sure doors and windows fitted snuggly as well as increasing the height of the tower. As can be seen the shutters are protruding a bit more than the last one so they should be more visible.

Whereas the last few were printed at a 0.2mm layer height I have decided to go for 0.1mm for this one. This should give me a better print, but also increases the time of printing.

The 0.2 mm version would take 4 hours plus this one is doubling it to just shy of 10 hours. So by 07.00 tomorrow it should be finished.

This is what it looked like earlier…

Not very much to see really.

Tomorrow I will show the fruits of my labour… aka scratch building 21st century style.. Thanks John👍

Update at 23.30….

After 3 hours and 3 minutes we are this far…maybe 10mm high at best 😱

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Desert Houses 4

More 3D Printing I am afraid…

Today I had half an hour and had a mess around with 3D builder. I had a go at adding a compound to a small house. I was really pleased with the result.

This took just over 2 hours to complete. The other thing I did was to add the window shutters and doors in the software rather than printing them separately and glueing them on. I had mixed success with this as some were too far forward, but as my wife pointed out it does look like they were sealed up.

The one on the right above was the original house.

The second one looks a bit more complex But in all honesty all I did was join a couple of houses together with a couple of walls. Again I added in the window shutters to the software, I forgot the doors. The bigger one took 3 hours 58 minutes (to be fair it is nearly twice the size of the other one).

I really enjoyed doing this. It also means that the compound walls are secure and won’t need glueing with visible joint lines.

I still need to print roofs for them both, but tomorrow I am going to have a go at something a bit bigger 😉.

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Friday’s Forgotten Forces

Another Friday and another box in the shed…

This time we have Goblins and Thorin Oakenshield and party from the GW Hobbit game.

These were bought to add some cannon fodder for Dragon Rampant

There is the full compliment of heroes and pretty much all of the goblins apart from the one on the sling.

The figures are nice and pretty much accurately portray the characters. It really is a great pity that the films were so crap.Goblins certainly improved genetically in the Misty Mountains from the hobbit to the LOTR.

The dwarves have shrunk in size over the 60years too…😂

I don’t know what to do with these as they have been sat there for so many years they are no longer required. I will see if anyone wants them up here and if not they will probably end up on EBay

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Das Boot

We played the game again today. We had good fun even though we got rammed by a destroyer!

Yesterday we had rain, today we had a storm…

We had a go at the deck gun too…

We didn’t half get a shock when the convoy escort fired a gun at us, A Big explosion and a sudden warning klaxon. Our first necessary crash dive, luckily everyone was at the correct station. We avoided him and held our breath as we heard the depth charges warning.

We went deep as he charged off, but came back up to take a shot at the convoy. Sadly we forgot to pause the game as we looked up a certain rule and we got rammed by the escort.

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Desert Houses 3

Today I printed off my conversion of a house with stairs with an added tower.

It worked ok, but I reckon the tower needs to be a bit bigger. I dropped it down by 50% too. I do reckon it needs to be bigger.

When you compare it with the two story house with domed roof you will see what I mean…

The door is tiny for a start. This can be easily rectified with a bit of card and a printed door but the height seems a bit naff too.

The other issue I have is the lack of texture on it. Not a problem on its own but it looks a bit weird stuck onto a textured building.

As I was printing off some more walls tonight it suddenly dawned on me that I could actually stick them in situ on the buildings in the software and print them as one.

I shall give it a go tomorrow.

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 5 Comments

Torpedo Los

My German is crap…. but tonight we managed a bit of Submarine warfare…

I played the Navigator and the Captain and my daughter, the First Officer and Chief Engineer.

We had a bash at the training mission and managed to sink a merchantman…

We fired all 4 tubes in our excitement! All four exploded so down she went.

The app shows the weather and time of day…

The observers were pleased when the watch changed as they would have been very wet.

We headed to another quadrant to find another lone merchant and somehow lost him! Then off we went to hunt a small convoy.

We managed to get to a nice firing solution even with a major electrical fault and the crew somewhat fatigued.

We were set up like this, we paused the game to take this photo the the app took us right back to the start.

We probably did loads wrong but we did have a good time.

We are off into Middle Earth tomorrow night, but will probably have another bash at this on Friday.

On a totally different note, I printed off a domed two story house today. It took 5 hours 6 minutes to finish. I also managed to add the tower to a building and will print it off tomorrow.

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Desert Houses 2

Another couple of houses printed today…

One with a domed roof and the other with stairs mirrored on the left.

On the post it notes are the time it took to print them. Today’s printing time a little under 6 hours. I forgot to check how long the walls took but let’s say 2 hours, so for 10 hours print time I have enough for a village. I have some already printed so half way there to my three villages.

Someone said to me the other day that the printers take too long. I can’t argue with the fact that a small domed house took two and a half hours to complete. But if I had purchased them online, it would be at least a week to get here. So my 2.33 doesn’t actually seem that long as I set it going, made sure the first layer was sticking well and voila off I went for some lunch and a bit if diggering.

Tonight the domed house with stairs was printing as I made tea, ate tea and watched some Allo Allo with the kids.

Tomorrow I am going to do a test print to see how they look painted up.

Regarding Allo Allo, I had forgotten how funny the first couple of series were. I have them on DVD. My eldest got some of the jokes but the other two saw funny things but didn’t necessarily understand the humour. Luckily I was able to side swipe the question about the egg whisk and celery!

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 5 Comments

Desert Houses

Technically this type of house is found throughout the Middle East, but as they are going to be for a desert war campaign I shall use the term.

With the laptop replaced I managed to slice a pile more buildings. I printed off the domed one as well as a pile of walls. These are from Terrain4Print. I liked the free one so purchased the rest.

It was the second attempt at the particular dwelling however, it would seem that about 5 minutes after I left it to it, the Bowden tube coupler (the bit that feeds the filament from the extruder to the hot end) had decided to unscrew itself so the filament ended up as a nice coil all over the back of the printer. I had to dump a metre at least as it had fractured and I didn’t want to take the risk of it shearing off in the tube. The rest went back on the spool and back through the machine.

The walls come in two lengths with one of the longer ones having an arched gateway in it. The little diddly wall in the middle is just one of the shorter ones reduced in size the slicer program.

The weird gate is actually the infill to help the printer, I could probably have got away with it (the house doorway and windows weren’t supported) but I decided to be careful as there were a number on the raft. This is it in situ and removed. It has left a bit of a mess when I ripped it out, but nothing 10 seconds with a knife won’t shift.

I will build some compounds like the following as well as individual buildings. These are just placed in situ, but it kind of gives the idea.

I will print off some more houses tomorrow and see where I get up to. I have got a tower from another designer. It is a bugger as I really don’t think it will work without support. My plan is to split it at the upper floor level and print it in two pieces then glue them back together again. Another idea is to combine it with larger building above. I will have a play around tomorrow to see what I can come up with.