A Poor Man's A Billion Suns - Fleet progress

 I have made progress with the fighters, bombers, recon craft and smaller capital ships. Pleased with this.

As it stands, these are the smallest of the capital ships. Frigates? Corvettes?

These are bigger. 

Front row are recon scouts. Behind are some fighters. They are made from tile separators. 

Three squadrons of bombers. I like these the best.

Because I mount them on little magnets, storage is pretty straight forward.

A Poor Man's A Billion Suns - Clothes Peg fleet complete.

 I have completed my first group of ships. My favourite are the small corvette type ships. I need to have a think about getting any ships in the size area between the big ships and the small ships. 

It is amazing to me, the difference a lick of paint makes. The blue and red dots just give them so much more life. 

These are my favourite and I have a few more on the way. Simple, small, cheap in game terms.

I need to work out how to make sure the card doesn't curl, but otherwise it is all fine. I like how these turned out. I imagine these will be unique ships, or I will have to come up with some in-universe handwavium about how large spacecraft are all built as single units and are all different.

The missile racks are from Brigade Models or GZG. They were meant to be on something, but I can't remember. 

I have already begun working on some more mid-sized ships, and am always on the hunt for medium/different pegs. 

 

 

 

A Poor Man's A Billion Suns - Clothes Peg Fleets.

Over on the Book of Faces I have curated my feed to consist almost entirely of hobby related groups, and a few friends who come out with regularly amusing things. I am a member of the Super Cheap Wargaming group, and over the past month or so there has been an explosion of people making space ships out of clothes pegs. They started out simple and became increasingly intricate and complex as the month has gone on. The entire time I bemoaned not having clothes pegs. I think I have some at work, but am on Easter break. So I went looking for them in shops. Tesco had this set, The Range had nothing normal, but did have a set of 200 mini pegs, useful for corvettes, Amazon has loads, but I wanted to hold off. 

The Tesco pegs are the most boring, vanilla shape you can get, but will be fine to experiment with. 

 Here are my first four attempts. The double purple on top is the size of two other experiments unpictured. I am not sure I like the double purple together. I will paint these over the weekend and see what happens. The flight stands are of course my nails, with magnets on top, but the ships are quite top heavy - I might need to rethink my bases and have longer ones.

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns pt. 4

That moment when creating something when you finish it is quite special. Today marks the end of the beginning - my three junk built, prototype, experimental spacecraft are complete. They are not combat ships. I do not want to have to handwave a bunch of in-universe lore as to why combat ships are not the same. Now I know that wouldn't be too difficult, thinking back to tank development and probably ship development, where new technologies and streamlining of things mean each has potential to be different and older models need to be sent back for refit. But I just want to buy miniatures and paint them, then fight them.

 

Here we have the transport ship with a full load. It turns out weathering spaceships is difficult. I mean scorch marks around the engine is easy. But rust? Dust? In space? Not sure. I went for it anyway.

I really want them to look beaten up. My flight stands aren't all that bad either. In total each ship has cost me pennies in terms of materials. 

The same class of freighter but unloaded. I really love this.

I went a bit too heavy with the drybrushing here. This is my least favourite ship, but it is still fine. I am just happy to have them done. Now to start sourcing up some money in order to buy some fleets.

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns pt. 3

 Progress has been made on this project. Firstly my internal maths keeps telling me that if I spend x on this bit of junk with which to build a spaceship, and y with which to build flight stands, then I may as well just fork out the cash on buying a Brigade Models fleet or two. 

The second progress is actually flight stands. I have a large box of assorted MDF bases and a stash of nails. I hammered a nail into a base to see what would happen and it sticks pretty well. 

The third part of progress was the arrival of these tiny little magnets. They stick nicely to the nail head and are small enough to just look like a greebly on my home made freighters.

Here are my freighters on flight stands. They do the job. I am actually quite pleased with myself and how this turned out.

These magnets are like 1mm x 3mm I think. Maybe 4mm. They are tiny but strong. I bought 25 on eBay for a few quid.

Excuse the poor focus but I wanted to highlight that the flight stand is literally just a nail, nailed into a 3mm MDF base. I will paint them black at some point.

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns

My search for inspiration has taken me all over. A picture I found was of scratch built ships that looked kind of like flying WW2 ships, but they were different enough that they looked non weird. I have decided that I might be able to do something similar. I had the idea that I would draw half a shape, fold the paper over and then cut out a template. Template goes on card, card stuck together. I have been looking at 2mm thick card. 

So each colour represents different layers. The red is boosters which will probably be Hama beads. Then I will stick some other stuff on it. This is all until I can afford to buy a bunch of Brigade Miniatures ships.
 

A poor man's fleet - A Billion Suns

 So I picked up A Billion Suns the other day. It is time to dive into space ship combat. I thought about it a few years ago and almost bought some fleets at Colours 2016. I am sure Tony at the Brigade Models stand was wondering who that weirdo was who kept casually walking by sneaking a peek.

So I have the rules and no miniatures. Great. I have a large collection of Star Wars Pocketmodels and had an idea to use those, but the capital ships have such a large footprint on the table that I don't think it would work very well. Still, I might give the rules a spin using only fighters and just claiming they are frigates and gunships. I also can't find flight stands for love nor money.

This past week has been spent researching things. I have a friend with a laser cutter so I reckon I can spend about £20 on materials and make myself over 100 clear flying stands. So that is mission semi accomplished.

I can't really justify dropping £70 on spaceship miniatures though. This has led me to my bits boxes and wondering if I have anything that can be transformed into spacecraft. Turns out I do, sort of. Last night was my second attempt to sit down and build, and it was only successful through hours of scrolling through Pintrest and Google image searches to find a way to make small sized capital ships. I have a few ideas, but last night I wanted to try out making some civilian cargo ships. This is what I came up with:

The longer two ships are made from a nail. A random white thing on the end for an engine, which I think was designed to hide screws in furniture. The front end is a bead with some random junk stuck to it. The central ship has no cargo load, the other one has two large interstellar containers, although the more I think about it, the more I have to ask how the containers became attached to the ship. 

The shorter ship is a similar design but the central pole is a plastic thing that pinned a toy into its box or something. I had to drill the holes to be bigger in the flat circular beads, and just stuck some random bit of crap on the front. I don't like this one as much.

I will paint them up over the half term holiday and see how they look. Come July I might have some money available to splash on some Brigade fleets. Or I might spend £30 on the PSC grab bag of 50 plastic spaceships meant for Red Alert...if they are ever in stock again.