One of the problems with being a one man operation is that there’s no boss looking over your shoulder to say, “You screwed up. Fix it.” So, in releasing Bel’s Kitty, the KV-12 supertank, I completely forgot the spare fuel tanks. No idea how, I just did. Thanks to Gothique for the catch. So, here is a new sheet that includes three tanks and the original main gun modeled on the Vietnam era American Shillelagh. The original gun was replaced with the rail gun because I wanted a more sci-fi appearance, but conventional guns (or gun/missiles in the Shillelagh) are much cheaper, and so would be a common option on export models intended to be sold to cash-strapped but aggressive worlds. The page size is 7.5”x10” (my actual standard page size—print centered on 8 1/2×11 or A4).
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This began life as an antenna then morphed into a protean structure that can be pretty much anything you need it to be in your games. There are no obvious scale features, so feel free to plop it down on a 6mm, 15mm, or 28mm tabletop. This was my submission for the July 2011 horde at cardboard warriors (the old OneMonk forum).
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Well, that title pretty much said it, didn’t it?
These are renders from a stage I created in DAZ Studio 4 then finished in Photoshop. There are several model sets in the scenes:
Slum City
Multi-Story Warehouse
Warehouse
Factory
Checkpoint Kilo
Slagtown II Watchtower
Bel’s Kitty, KV-12T
and MI-124 Strekoza
These brick-textured sets are obviously based on late nineteenth century to early twentieth century structures. However, bricks and concrete are inexpensive and relatively low-tech, so they might easily be the first domestic construction materials for newly colonized worlds whose industries are just getting started. Given the human proclivity to keep using buildings, they’d probably still be standing a hundred years later.
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I just released another terrain set for 28mm twentieth century to near-future. It’s based on a very specific style of construction I have photographed in Mexico, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt: concrete “frame” with brick walls. It is the defining form of urban slums, public housing gone horribly wrong; worse, local laws invariably tax only buildings whose construction is finished, so the roof lines of these slums are punctured by up-thrust cement supports, often with rebar twisting from them as if snakes trying to escape.
Here’s where the angst comes in. When I set down to actually design the textures, I spend hours poring over not only my own photos, but hundreds of Googled pictures. Usually I’m looking at things like panels on aircraft fuselages or tank hulls, studying tread design, camouflage patterns. I tell people that one of the things I like about this business is that every week I’m researching something new, every day I learn something. It’s all the things about grad school I loved. This time was different.
You cannot pore over pictures of slums without realizing there are people in those pictures whose average lifespan is perhaps thirty years years, that dysentery and cholera are not subjects for museum exhibits, that murder, rape, rage, and fury are things elementary school children experience. In Cairo the slums went on for maybe ten miles and stretched beyond the freeway to the horizon—enough to be an entire world. South of Cairo I watched a cow being slaughtered on a dirt street. Boys played with the entrails, and dived into the nearby canal next to a floating dead mule. Here are some of the less depressing sights of Cairo.
That last picture is to show you it’s not all grit. That’s a Nile canal, shaded, cool, ducks swimming—and a cholera warning sign you can’t see.
I’m pretty thick-skinned. Twenty-five years of Social Security and SSI claims will do that to you. I had actually had to ask grandmothers how often they scrounged through dumpsters for food (because it could affect their SSI checks—a policy requirement thankfully dropped). I’ve been through those slums, usually on an air-conditioned bus that never stopped. I believe that government usually is a substantial part of the problem because good intentions aren’t enough, and unexpected consequences shouldn’t be unexpected.
Then, as I was drawing a stove pipe, it hit me, all the human misery.
It passed, as it does for every one who needs to get on with their life, but maybe next time someone accosts me in the parking lot for “gas money” I won’t be quite so brusque.
OK, I had to get that off my chest.
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A recent post on TMP led me to think about my own design philosophy. I mostly design for 28mm (actually 1/60th) for a lot of reasons: it’s the most popular scale (at least for skirmish), it allows more detail, and the parts aren’t quite so fiddly. But there are two problems with design:
First, real buildings are actually a lot bigger than we appreciate. For example, my two-story house has a footprint of roughly 30’x30’. That’s 6”x6” in 28mm scale. There are twenty feet (4” in scale)between each house. That means a block of 12 houses in my tract would be roughly 120” or ten feet on the table. Since I love post-apocalyptic settings, that means a faithfully scaled suburb isn’t possible.
It’s also very hard to get card stock buildings and models that are sturdy beyond certain sizes. A floor or platform up to three inches across needs a lip (or a wall) for a brace, over three inches also needs an under brace; while a wall will get flimsy over ten inches in height. For both reasons models for the table actually are somewhat smaller than real world.
This is why I usually design large structures and models around box shapes that are glued together for a more complex structure: the shapes are actually providing strength. Properly designed paper and card stock can yield surprisingly strong models. That’s a principle I learned years ago from Victor Papanek’s “Nomadic Design.” He designed several pieces of furniture using card board boxes—the book was the ultimate college kid’s furniture book for off-campus apartments.
Second, most models have a pedestal base that throws vertical scaling off. Doors need to look taller than the figure, but a real door would look too short because the little guy’s standing on a pitcher’s mound. Generally my compromise is to scale everything correctly (or nearly so, aesthetically) EXCEPT walls, barricades, and ramparts—things that are waist high. I stick one of Jim Hartman’s Terra Force marines (flat base, no pedestal) next to the test build to see if it looks right, but for anything that would be half-cover, I use an old GW Adeptus Arbites figure and an EM-4 ganger. For fantasy, I use some old D&D collectible minis. (For action figure scale, I’ve got a Stars Wars figure I use for the same reason.) That means if you’ve got some figures that have scale creep (eg 32 or 35mm), they’re going to look off.
There’s also an issue of “tablevision,” the “two foot rule.” I got this from Mel Ebbles (Christopher Row in the real world of W-2s and mortgages). Miniatures and models don’t need to look perfect at the distance we hold them from our eyes to paint (or photograph). They need to look good at playing distance. That’s why so many miniatures photographs look like the painter had some degenerative eye disease —the models are beautifully painted . . . for two feet away.
That means that things you want to see in a display model are superfluous in a game model. For example, if you look at the Egyptian Palace set, there’s a brace of ducks hanging from the roof line on some of the buildings. I thought it looked really neat when I was designing, but then, I work in Photoshop with the image blown up so I can see what I’m doing and get alignments and proportions correct. That means those ducks look really neat—IF you print on photo quality paper, but I shouldn’t expect people to shell out that kind of money. On regular cardstock, they’re just a duck-shaped blob. But that’s OK, because they’re not meant to be seen up close; rather, they’re meant to provide some variations and interest in the texture.
Then there’s the difference between real world detail and model detail. If you look at an M-113, those slab sides have no detail. In a model, that would look boring, so I usually add some panels, rivets or other detail to break up the large flat surfaces. Buildings get pipes, meters, access panels, etc. Sometimes, life gives you the details. The Crash Truck is based on a series of Oshkosh crash trucks. I walked around the truck that was my inspiration at a local air museum (Blackbird Park—they’ve got an A-12 and a D-21 drone!). The big flat sides were covered with panels for equipment bins! For once I didn’t feel like I was tarting up the model to make it more visually appealing.
Designing for wargames models involves a lot of compromises. There are tough decisions as well. For instance, .50 cal machine guns and antennae are part of nearly every model vehicle, but they simply cannot be done well in card stock. That’s why my machine guns and antennae are flats. They’re included really for the modeller who wants to get going right away.
There are also shapes that don’t work well, compound curves among them. There are ways to make gentle compound curve surfaces, but they involve patience and steady fingers to carefully deform the card stock. Then there are barrels. Small bore barrels are possible if printed on regular paper, but you need a set of rolling rods of various diameters.
Well, those are my thoughts on the basics of design: to paraphrase the French, “compromise, toujours compromise.”
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These are all the rage, from Wells’ three-legged Martians to Falling Skies’ “mechs.” Except for those explicitly based on insects, they all seem to follow the bi-pedal “chicken leg” model. In what follows, I’m mostly considering the size walkers we would encounter in a skirmish game—light mechs used for scouting and fire support.
There are a lot of arguments against the bipeds. Stability is perhaps the most important—notice we have big feet compared to the quadrapeds. In fact, they’re so big, they actually require part of the leg. Stand on your toes and you’ll see what I mean. But you and I took years to get walking right, and that was only after months of desperately hanging onto coffee tables. So a substantial piece of equipment every walker needs is some sort of stabilizer—a gyroscope, which in turn requires mass and power just to keep the beast upright.
Because the walker isn’t inherently stable, recoil is problematic, so if we put a Rheinmetal 120mm tank gun on the chassis, the first round will knock us on our proverbial. That limits us to weapons that don’t have any significant recoil (missiles and energy weapons) or small recoil easily absorbed by the mass of the vehicle. Recoilless rifles won’t work because one shot and they need reloading, which is why the Marines’ Ontos of Vietnam fame had several. When all had fired, some poor schmuck had to get out and reload—tricky under fire.
So why not those really cool looking lasers? Well, look at a diagram of the Air Force’s Airborne Laser. The entire fuselage of a 747 is taken up with power generation and management. Lasers are energy hogs that also generate heat (that’s why Battletech mechs have those radiators).
Basically, we’re left with missile packs and rapid fire weapons of small caliber.
But, to be competitive on the battlefield, the walker will need stabilization (as we’ve noted), as well as a host of other things: power for the legs, for the weapons, a full sensor and comm array, and a life support system. Everybody’s favorite, the pocket-sized fusion reactor, would work, of course, but, have you noticed that fusion power is always “just twenty years away”? “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today.”
Internal combustion is possible, but look at a bulldozer’s engine for an idea of what you’d need (it’s got to have a turbine attached as well to generate all the electrical power we’d need). Then it needs a fuel tank.
So now it works, then some cigarette-smoking redneck on the other side puts several fifty caliber slugs down range at us. Oops, now we need armor—which means weight, which means more power. (Weight also means less range because the heavier mech will suck up more fuel.) But how do you armor the joints? Look at mechs in sci-fi movies—their legs are walking shot traps.
Now, we’ve solved those problems, what about the crew? Well, a skirmish-level mech is going to have one or two. The data load on the crew is enormous: piloting, threat assessment, energy management, targeting, communications, managing the weapons. To quote Mel Brooks as the Governor in “Blazing Saddles,” “work, work, work, work.”
There are two possible examples of successful accommodations: the Renault FT-17 light tank of WWI with a driver and a commander/gunner, and the modern single seat fighter. The fighter doesn’t really work because the pilot actually has more slack (until he begins a dogfight) than a mech driver because of the distances (in time) involved. The mech has buildings, a tree line, etc from which enemies can pop out. The Renault light tank needed two: one to keep the little beast moving and one to scan for enemies and engage them. This is obviously a case where the mech pilot needs an AI to handle threat assessment, energy management, etc—all the niggly little details that distract the mech from its mission: seek out the enemy, evaluate, and engage if able (or unavoidable). But . . . the AI draws power.
So, probably mechs really aren’t the solution to tomorrow’s tactical problems, but, since this is a trope, like FTL, assume someone tackled the tough problems, assume non-linear technological advancement, and stride into the future of combat—just don’t blame me if you get a leg shot off by a militiaman from Becausistan.
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After the release of Bel’s Kitty I received a cleverly written (and funny) email telling me the customer wasn’t going to buy Bel’s Kitty because it was too big, too unwieldy, unable to fight in cities’ narrow streets, and too easy a target.
Here’s Tim Martyn’s email:
Sorry but although Bel’s Kitty looks a superb model, the Empire cannot place an order. As with the Warhorse, also rejected, its size is its undoing- as the sarge said, it is just a big target. Its size makes it easy to see against the sky – it needs a lower profile, its width makes it difficult to turn or fit in to the narrow streets the rebels choose to fight in. Sadly the Wolverine light fast tank the Empire is using is not a match for the heavy tank Kirchner the rebels are using, though the extra speed does help to keep it out of trouble. We will continue to look for a heavy tank, but a smaller (about 1/3 width and half the length) we would re-valuate how it may fit in to our armoury.
the emperors arms minister Tim
That got me thinking about the various tropes we have in sci-fi gaming. The big supertanks ultimately trace their origin back to HG Wells’ “The Land Ironclad,” basically a big train-like iron box on tracks. The more modern version goes back to a Keith Laumer Bolo short story in Analog in the 1960s. More recently, Metagaming’s Ogre (and its rerelease by the designer Steve Jackson) takes the idea to its logical (and excessive) conclusion: a tank so big it couldn’t even be transported across continents. Of course, if you play Warhammer 40K, you’re familiar with Games Workshop’s big tanks, the Shadowsword and others.
I, too, have problems with the various things we take for granted in sci-fi, FTL being the biggest. But . . . part of the problem we all have is linear thinking. Back in the 1890s the head of the US Patent Office recommended his agency be closed because all that could be invented had been invented. Take the pride of the Roman fleet at Actium, then pit it against a Nimitz class carrier. The Romans have nothing that can even get the Nimitz’s attention. The technology to create a supercarrier could not even be imagined. But you don’t need a gap that wide: consider a squadron of Custer’s US cavalry in the American Civil War pitted against a squadron of British WWI female tanks. That’s less than a half century of technological change. The smart money goes on the tanks (If you’ve read Poul Anderson’s High Crusade, you might see a way around this problem).
Setting aside for a moment the possibility of orbital high ground (and as an ex-Air Force officer trained in Air/Space doctrine, this is a big leap for me), the spread of hypervelocity rail guns and directed energy weapons makes tac air a very problematic resource. Their presence on the battlefield might be a tactical game changer.
Now, design a tank around the energy requirements of such weapons. It’s got to be big (you can’t see it, but inside the model I conceived secondary power generators—possibly cold fusion—in chambers inside the hull) to carry the weapon. Add two hundred years of armor and defensive protection (and programmable matter)research, and the KV-12 might be feasible.
Those who’ve been to Salt Lake City know the story of it’s wide streets. The worlds the Kitty was designed for have enormous, fertile steppes and plains, and the cities are designed to match the transports that carried enormous grain loads. We already build monstrous vehicles for mining, so I hypothesized cities and vehicles to match. Wide boulevards flanked by green belts creating an urban pastoral vista, flanked by stick-built subdivisions.
In a European city center, the Kitty would simply knock the buildings down as it moved—and only the lawyers would think of opposing it. Mostly, however, a smart commander wouldn’t use the KV-12Ts that way. He’d use them to secure the perimeter (think of Caesar’s circumvallations at Alesia), then call in the KV-12Rs and blow down the obstacles. KV-12Ps would take out whatever the collapsing buildings flushed out.
In operations research we learned about hammer syndrome: if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. The KV-12T is a very big hammer, and politicians might easily think every problem is a nail. In that respect, the criticism is entirely valid.
The real reason for the success of the trope, however, is NOT scientific, engineering, and military reasoning, it’s that they’re big, bloody fun—nightmares that rumble through placid, peaceful dreams of bunnies and unicorns.
And, the Minister of Arms should know that Novgorod produces the excellent T-107 range of modular heavy tanks designed for mixing it up with knuckledraggers.
Another trope is the walker, generally bipedal, but in its original incarnation may have been the three-legged Martian walker of HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” I prefer to trace them back to Talos, the bronze statue that patrolled the coast of Minoan Crete. Let’s think about him next week.
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This is the AFV version. I estimate it should hold thirty-two unarmored infantry.
The last thing an enemy grunt sees. The camouflage schemes are all derived from real world camouflage, except for the urban gray, which you see on the AFV.
This one shows the dual missile packs and the coaxially mounted tri-barrel Gatling guns.
This shows the rear and is in Chinese camouflage. You can see the rear ramps which each have a hatch. In the MBT versions, the ramp is used to load ammunition (no, you may not put troops in there; they’d get in the way).
Release should be the end of this week.
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A customer emailed me about higher walls for the Action Figure set Outlands, so I put together a single wall segment three inches high and four wide. It has tabs that can be trimmed away: 
Have fun with it.
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Not having any of Lock n Load’s other games, I had no experience with the company and ordered their solitaire Space Infantry blind after the release announcement on The Miniatures Page. At roughly $55, I was expecting quite a bit (OK, I’m cheap and have high expectations). I was more than pleasantly surprised.
The components are high quality. The numerous counters are thick and the die cut job job is excellent. I’m not quite so happy with the graphics as I would have liked a greater variety (and full color—but the faux-scanner images are nice). The encounter maps and enemy forces cards are quite nicely done, with plenty of room for you to plop counters on them to track injuries without getting disorganized.
The game system is odd (since I haven’t any experience with the company, I don’t know if they’ve simply transferred a game system to this environment). First, there’s the sampling without replacement system of generating random numbers (called RNs): you assign chits drawn blindly to each of the activated units on a turn. That means if a unit gets a six, following units are less likely to get one. For those of us used to dice, it’s a weird feeling (dice, as one of my statistics profs in grad school said, “have no memory”).
The game is essentially a D&D style series of a squad’s encounters at nodes on a map. You attempt to successfully advance to the node by drawing RNs, accumulating successes (using different traits such as climb, advance, or computer). Radom encounters can occur as you travel to nodes—but once a node has an “event,” that node is basically safe for the rest of the game.
There are several missions to play (maps on large card with nodes and paths) and several types of enemies (including the fan-favorite bugs and robots), so there’s a huge potential for repeatability. In addition, there’s a random encounter system using cards to generate the nodes of an insect hive. Because of the design of the game system, it blends indoor and outdoor encounters handily (the first mission takes place entirely within two buildings).
There’s an engaging campaign system which allows your troops to improve and gain additional skills.
Play is quick, easy . . . and bloody. Take plenty of medi-kits and grenades.
Here are the negatives:
1) While we all complain about fluff and game systems that restrict the players to a particular vision of a particular universe, Space Infantry is so generic there’s no real feeling for the terrain and opposing forces as real places and real “people.” I would much prefer a more extensive mission briefing and greater description of the nodes. As it stands, a node is just a series of numbers setting how hard it is to move to and the probability of an encounter. The opposing forces are equally generic.
2) Because the game system relies on chits for its random number generator, if you love one to spilled coffee or a puppy, you’ve changed the probabilities of the entire game. For reasons having to do with statistical modeling, I don’t like the “sampling without replacement” method. My success rolling against my command skill affects how many wounds my shotgunner’s grenade inflicts? I’d replace it with an eight-sided die: 1-6 roll as normal. 7 gets you two rerolls that add together, and an 8 is a 0.
Here are the positives:
1) The system is so flexible you can adapt it to any situation of travel/exploration/encounter—it’s incredibly easy to generate your own alternate maps for missions. Similarly, it’s easy to generate your own opfor (fleshed out, I hope).
2) It sets up and plays quickly.
3) It’s readily expandable.
In spite of the drawbacks, I highly recommend this game. Get it and have fun. After all, with no dice, it’s quiet and you can play while your significant other watches yet another decorating show.
“See, honey, I’m here with you.”
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