Strike Dog: Russian Quad Mech

   

Not every model I make ends up on the cover of my novels, or at least not yet. Pokhodnaya Boyevaya Platforma or Object 295 appears in Strike Dog, Chapter 9, Assault: as the "big bad" that ruins the day for CASDA 5136.

In the past I've played WW2 wargames with Soviet forces. Despite reading a bunch of books about the history of the Eastern Front, my Russian language skills leave a lot to be desired. I know a handful of words and the odd phrase.

The usual yes, no, thank you, good-bye platitudes etc., but it's all Greek to me (pun intended).

Also, when I was doing the research I found that there's no one way of transliterating Cyrillic into Roman letters.

Worse still, the number of letters in each alphabet don't even match. So, if you take the phrase, "I can't read Russian," it looks like this when written in Cyrillic script:

Я не могу читать по-русски.

Transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet into our Roman one, it comes out like this:

Ya ne mogu chitat' po-russki.

To my Western eyes this looks a lot like squiggly maths.

 

This model was nearly finished two years ago, when I planned on using Dream Pod 9 Heavy Gears for my Bad Dog games. But, now I've gone up from 12mm to 15mm, this model is not that big when compared to the RAFM Gears.

So I may have to make another, larger model. We shall see.
   

Surprise: The Other Fleet

 

At last the other fleet, after months... on checking back to my last spaceship fleet pot, nay four years... I finally got around to finishing these. I took the opportunity to varnish them whilst doing some other spraying.

 

 I like to call this my Chris Foss Fleet, because how Chris Foss used to do multi-coloured spaceships that use to adorn so many SF book covers when I was young.

  

I originally painted these to portray merchant ships. At one time I had plans to run convoy games with the Green fleet as escorts. The reality is if I use them now it will be as privateers.

As per usual, clicking on the pictures to enlarge. And finally, the odd one out. A Galoob B5 Star Fury, which I had lying around and decided to tart up back four years ago because I could.

 

Ah well, at least they're done.  

First Six Combat Armour Suits Completed

All the combat armor suits that have or will appear in my Gate Walker novels.

I started this project back at the end of January, five months ago, now we're at the end of June. How time flies by? As I've recorded here, there has been a lot of fiddling and modifying to get these looking the way I want.

But now they're done. As always, click to embiggen the pictures.

This started out as Espera's suit from my novel Strike Dog, but will now represent a variant of the CAS-1-Mod 3.

I now have another eight RAFM Gears to convert, and fortunately enough spare parts to be able to do variant weapon loadouts with magnetized arm joints.

A CASE-2X suit variant based on the support platoons in my novel Bad Dog.

And below there's a triptych of Tachikoma's new boss suit that will appear in future novels.

CASE-2XC-Mod 2E variant.

And finally some close ups of Ferretti's Buster suit. The right arm isn't magnetized because the ammo feed restricts the arm movement, but the right arm is, but that's purely for the ability to be able to pose the model when taking reference shots for cover art.

CAS-4CP variant.

So, the next stage will be to wash these in preparation for painting.  

More RAFM Gears Acquired

Two Azure Devils Jagers, A Grizzly, and Support Cobra.

Thanks to the kindness of Jeff Racel I received a some more DP9 RAFM Gears. These additions will plug a couple of holes in my collection.

Also, expanded my weapon selection and accessories, which was a total bonus win when it comes to my conversions, because you can never have too many choices to choose from.

A bunch more weapons and spares for stowage.

And there's more... Moooaar I tell you!

Jeff very kindly sent me two Jaguars that I will strip and rebuild, which was a totally unexpected bonus.

 

The green Gear with an axe might be the Predator Jaguar variant.

Finally, a Matchbox HEMTT PLS, which was super kind of him to part with. Now I have plans. Cunning plans to turn this into a representation of the trucks that appear in both my Strike Dog and Ghost Dog novels.

M1120A4 HEMTT LHS precursor to 10 wheel PLS version.

Muwuhahahaha! Catch you all on the bounce.

Mech Suit Progess: More Fettling

I added a roll bar to protect the head from the crane arm, and changed the weapon because I could.

Just when I thought I was getting nearer to slapping some paint on these, I had an idea. It's all Wouter's fault too! Only kidding, Wouter, you got me thinking.

 

You can see the magnets nestled inside the torso, and the extra stowage I added to the back of the mech.

I have a bunch of old RAFM Gears, but a lot of them are missing parts, like heads or backpacks. However, this means I have a bunch of spare arms to play with.

I had to rework the arm, as my first attempt to sculpting didn't work out.

So the thought occurred to me that if I magnetized the shoulder joints I could swap arms on the models, and change out the weapon loadouts to suit my fancy. How hard could it be?

Jolly hockey sticks, not so much hard, just more time consuming than I imagined.

You can see clear through the torso that I've drilled to mount the magnets, and close-ups of the sculpting on the knee joints.

So that's what I've been doing, and it's taking a bit longer than I anticipated to convert all the models, so yet another work in progress report. But soon I shall start painting them.

Soon I say, my voice lost in time and space.

Guest on SciFi Shenanigans

  

This is late news because I became distracted by world events. I remembered to put it up on Facebook, but forgot to do so here. I can only blame myself for not posting this news here sooner. Doh!

I was recently invited to be a guest on the SciFi Shenanigans podcast.

So now you can hear me speak in Episode 155 – MilSciFi Panel 3 – British Edition, hosted by JR Handley with my fellow Mil-SF authors Tim C Taylor, and Ralph Kern.

In other news, after a long hiatus I've started writing, refreshed after a long, much needed break to sort out my shit.