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I have never heard of this, until it popped up as a "Reccommended" story on the BBC:

The mysterious 'inverted tower' steeped in Templar myth

It would make quite a neat adventure setting...

Scale creep?



What on Earth do you mean?

This one reminds me of a time, way, way back, when I was a young teen: One summer, I had small booklet (don't know where I got it from), which showed how to make WWII aircraft hangers and other airfield paraphernalia out of things like matchboxes. The planes they had in the pictures were very small, but as far as I can remember, it never said where to get the planes from.

Now, I guess, they must have been 1/300th or even 1/600th scale, as even the large matchboxes of the time weren't that big, so to be a hanger that could hold even just one aeroplane, it must be quite a small scale.

At the time, I never though about paper models.

But I have several other projects on the go.

But it took me about twenty minutes to get this far:



Must re... sist...

Stabby thing, staight-liney thing and cutty things:



I also use a regular black Sharpie for edging and a Textmark 500 for getting into those fiddly little nooks and crannies you get around figures.

or

Battlefield in from a Box
About a year and a half ago, I bought the Flames of War Stalingrad starter set.

As well as some tanks, it comes with some "top-down" terrain card pieces: an Orthodox church, three farm houses and some fences/obstructions.

You can buy 3D model sets for both the Rural Farm Buildings and Rural Church.

Soon after, I decided to make some 3D farm houses myself, using card and wall paper. That didn't go too well. It wasn't that the idea was flawed, more the execution. The base card I used was too soft, the window shutters were too fiddly and I couldn't find any suitable wallpaper to use as the thatched roofs. The completed wall sections have remained that way for about a year now...

A couple of weeks ago, I came across Dave Graffam's Long House model.

Rather than try to replicate the FoW models, I decided just go for something similar. I also felt that the model kits seemed a little bit too small to be houses people would live and the Long House seemed just right,size wise.

I used the base texture (no wood, stones or bricks) for the plastered walls and the thatched roof option. I took a copy of the door and shuttered window and made a separate image file with many doors and windows, so that I could put the door where I needed it and have more windows all round.

I didn't bother to worry about accurate scaling and printed them up at 50% normal size onto A5 paper.

Although the roofs are a bit rough - I cambered the roof ends as well, to match the models, I'm quite happy with the results:






Even though I made some buildings for my 15 mm fantasy war games at 45% of full-size, the new additions will still match - I will make all new models at 50% from now on.

I'm making the long house wooden version next, because when I googled for wwii russian farm house, nearly all images showed wooden houses, not plaster-walled ones. After that, I may attempt the Orthodox church...

One request, for you chaps and chappesses who do these building models: I noticed in the models, the wood planks for walls always seem to run vertically |||. However, nearly every wooden house I have seen in real life has the wood panels running horizontally =. Could someone please, please, pretty please do a ye olde looking style house with horizontal beams. Did I say "please"?

So, basically, you just click everything 'till something works...
I'll give that try as well!

Last night, I started working on some 100th scale buildings for Flames of War. I created a wood-ish type texture to use for wooden items, like door frames and so on. I started off with a 500 px square canvas at 300 dpi, which look OK. When I scaled it down a bit (about 33% of original size), it looked, well, I think the Gaelic term is fookin' shoit.

When I look at the textures used by the likes of Dave and others, they seem to scale without significant loss of detail - the Dave Graffam buildings I have, I have scaled to about 15 mm - about 50% of the "default" print size and they still have decent detail.

Is it because the textures, such as wood and brick, are made in vector formats (for example, with Photoshop), or at much higher resolutions, or ...? I'm stuck using GIMP, which is bitmap/raster only. I know at 15 mm/100th scale, you wouldn't really see such details anyway, but exaggerated details make the models look better.

OK, so I'm probably going to get labelled a "miserable old git", but personally, I don't like showing the number of posts, or have ranks based on post count. I've seen forums where some folk are ranked as things like "Super enlightened love-guru", based on their post-count, but most of their posts don't actually contribute to anything, posts like "Wow, that's cool" and sarcastic jokes (much like mine...)

Some forums have things like "Kudos" buttons, where you can click if the post writer has given good advise or maybe posted something you really like, that sort of thing. Then ranks mean something.

And here's the feisty space chick's pussy:

*
(this should print up at 29 mm height at 300 dpi (figure height 11 mm))

After all, who doesn't like a nice warm pussy to stroke on those long, event-less voyages...

* The original was quickly drawn up with felt-tip pens just for the original photo:


I thought I'd scan it clean it up a bit so that I could a post a suitably double-entendred post...

I use either cardboard from food packaging, such as cereal boxes, or water-colour paper which is about 180 to 220 g/m². Now, because my current printer cannot seem to be to feed such thick paper, I print to normal paper and glue on the heavy card/paper. After printing the figures (either directly to the card or onto paper, then gluing to the card), I then score the middle line and fold and glue.

For me, it's a trade-off between durability and practicality to build. Too thin, and the figures bend to bend and get ruined to easily, but too thick and they are hard to cut out neatly.

I would suggest trying different cards/paper types and techniques - you find one that suits you best.

Yes, but I think the duration is much longer. We had a tank printer at work - it came to us when our office in Kostomuksha was closed down. It sat used for about six months. When I tried to use it, it was like the ink in the tubes had dried out. I tried flushing the ink-tubes with water and various cleaning liquids, but it didn't help. It ended up in at the local recycling centre.

I don't use my printer that often, but when I do, I usually find the first print-out is crap. I have to open up the printer, take out the ink cartridges and give the heads a wipe. That fixes the problem. I can't work out why the print-heads keep getting clogged with dust and stuff.

Here is a photo of the printer:

It's a good scale to use when the real battle might take place over large distances, for example tank battles in North Africa in the early part of WWII, or if you wanted a closer to 1:1 figure to man ratio for your battles, it is easier to use 6 mm figures than 15/20/28 mm.

My thoughts also. Or can it be play-by-mail?