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Mobile Infantry III

Well I got a bit more done on these little chaps…

It was mainly highlighting on the grey uniforms – not that you can tell from the photo…

The other bit of news is…

They now have a way to get down to a planet 😁

This took a very long time to print, but I got there in the end!

I have also had a mess around with 3D Builder and have made an extended 16 seater. According to Cura it will take 18 + hours to print. I added all the bits together in one ship apart from the roof and the rear hatch.

I also had a mess around making a lighter recon craft using the two engine pods and the nose cone. If I remember tomorrow I will get some shots of the STL files.

Back to work tomorrow…

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Mobile Infantry II

I managed a bit more on these chaps today…

Still a fair way to go but getting there.

I also carried on printing their ride:

This is in various bits that are glued together. The sides will have panels, the left hand side being printed now. Something went wrong with the interior bit, it separated. It could be a printer glitch or a slicer glitch. The nose didn’t have the same problem so I am in the dark.

This is the interior of the craft. You can see the flaw line on the right hand side. It is just about noticeable on the left hand side.

This is more work by Terrain4Print, again from Thingiverse, so cost at zero to purchase it. I will see what his Patreon costs are as I think he deserves something for his hard work.

I haven’t downloaded it yet, but there is a crashed version of this too. Once this is built I may do a second one and use 3D builder to splice on some weapon pods.

Happy with the way it is going so far. I am running out of this spool, hopefully I will have enough to get the wings and rear hatch done.

Tomorrow I am off gallivanting again. This time to have a look at the WW2 defences of Lerwick. We have some of the best preserved outside of France. This includes a bunker design that is only ever found in France…

I will endeavour to take photographs…

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Off Galivanting

Today was the last day of our Easter Holidays…

for some reason Shetland has the school Easter holidays at a set time this means we go back on Monday, w3 are back a week then off for Easter Monday…🤨

My little boy is over the chicken pox and my good lady is over her lurgy and off work so off we went on a mini road trip, involving two ferries.

First stop was the reconstructed Viking Longhouse on the Island if Unst…

There is also a full size reconstruction of the Gockstadt longship. A bit of a long story, but basically it sailed from Norway, got as far as Shetland and never got any further…

A bit more Viking Shenanigans took place with a visit to an original Viking longhouse. This one is a bit of a do-upper. It was built before 1100ad

This appeared due to coastal erosion. Over the last 900 years the sea has worked its way inland and something that was on good farmland is now nearly in the sea.

We then went decidedly modern by visiting Muness Castle. This was built in 1598

It is more of a tower house really, but it was involved in a bit of a fracas with Earl Stewart who built Scalloway Castle (both had the same architect!)

Holes for firearms are everywhere…

The kids enjoyed exploring with the supplied torches…

All in all a good day.

On the hobby front I started printing off the dropship as well as meeting a Facebook Challenge of 30 minutes painting a day for 50 days… we will see how that pans out…

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Mobile Infantry….Sort Of!

Well believe it or not my order from EM4 arrived today, which for the isles is very speedy indeed. Ordered on Monday night at 21.45..dispatched on Tuesday and with me by Thursday… So well done EM4

So what did I get for my money….

The boxes came flat packed which is a nice touch, I never even considered getting any boxes at all. The back shows what you get..

Now bear in mind that these cost me £10.20 plus VAT and postage so they are really good for the money. There is a mould line but to be honest most plastic stuff does anyway, some worse than others.

I made a one up as a test subject:

20 seconds had him built. He isn’t glued yet but that can wait. He is a shiny grey plastic that is quite hard . I will get him prepped and sprayed and see how he paints up.

Compared to a bug….

He is quite small but bugs are meant to be scary so he will do. I ordered 4 boxes of these to allow me to have a whole squad with the long arms, and some fleet types with pistols. I might raid my Catachan Troopers box to see if there is anything useful in there, but as these are smaller then I doubt it.

So what do I think…

Are they Mobile Infantry… nope – they are proxies and for the money I paid for them then to be honest I don’t really care. This lot plus postage and VAT is cheaper than some of the postage alone on EBay.

If I get some actual MI miniatures will I still use these, yes I probably will as they will be ideal as security guards or non Federation Forces.

Were they worth the money… yes indeed, I challenge anyone to find a set of brand new 25mm miniatures cheaper. There might indeed be somewhere out there but I certainly haven’t found them yet.

These will be painted up as the ‘light’ mobile infantry on the films rather than the CAP troopers from the animated series or indeed the newer CGI films.

I also downloaded a ‘suitable’ drop ship on Thingiverse for these to land in, not to mention sci fi buildings, bunkers and various vehicles and scatter pieces.

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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.