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.