Martian Frontier Settlement

Still no actual games to report on I’m afraid! I really need to organise some stuff at the club, if I’ve not missed that bandwagon then I should be finishing up some Infinity soon and might get a game of that, and once the weather is a bit warmer I will be ploughing through my Age of Sigmar stuff (I can’t face anything but the most minimal brushwork on that many minis so I will be aerosol and airbrushing basically everything except a few details like washes and weathering for all but character models) and there are always some people playing GW (booo hisss).

I’ve mainly been getting on with my second terrain project, the one for my working title 15mm sci fi project, ‘Free Mars’. The terrain I have been constructing has been for the ‘Second Martian Revolution’ which occurs when Mars has been terraformed to a breathable but not comfortable state and humans have made contact with aliens/created uplifts/genetically modified themselves into diverse forms (haven’t settled yet). I already have boards to do 2”x2”, 2”x4” and 4”x4” setups and a cloth matt (an ancient out of production GW flocked desert one I got during the storage clear out the local GW did before relocating) that I have sprayed to be Martian hued. On this I’m putting some Illiada buildings and MDF roads from a seller called JB Wargaming Scenery (on FB and ebay), with rocks and outcroppings and patches of hardy vegetation planned. It’s the buildings and roads I have been making.

The Illiada kits are great, if you are funny about fine powders or sensitive to dust and the burnt smell you get from laser cutters then you will probably want gloves or at least to give the kits a bit of a wipe down first. They are a good sturdy card stock and cut and assemble easily enough. You need to be a little careful as even though its thick cardstock it is still cardstock and can get bent up if pressure is put on them in the wrong way. Once assembled and glued to a base they are considerably sturdier, however. You get a lot detail in these kits, they are great just as they are but it only takes a little greeble to really start to set them off. My aim is to construct something like a believable functioning settlement of a few families. I don’t have everything I need for that yet but I think I have a pretty good start, including a school, communications tower/drone controller, lots of storage and some Hydroponics (not enough to feed everyone yet but as said its a start).

 Here everything is contucted and layouts being tried out. some in progress construction crew and vehicles for scale.

As far as painting goes I hit the bases (scrap perspex tiles) and the roads with Rust-oleum concrete texture paint (nice stuff, they have lots of different texture sprays that look great for scenery uses), and the buildings with molotow premium dark grey and then, once that dried, flat white. After that I used white spirit and various hues of oxide pigments (red predominantly of course) to give everything a wash that I hope does a good job of mimicking the sort of very fine desert dust that coats and sticks to everything. My first go was far too heavy and looked more like heavy rust so I gave those a scrub down with tissue with improved it a lot and was more sparing and careful with the rest.

  Too much!

Starting to look a bit better, panic over.

I also used some felt tip pens to add a bit of colour to the buildings and especially the school. I also used some hex paving card intended for model train scenery around the school and the houses (is it sci-fi scenery if it doesn’t have hexes?).

 The fact this is meant to be a mural made by children craftily dsguises my terrible freehand. On the left: Mars, on the right: Earth

 a seesaw and a swing are under construction for the playground as well as a low wall.

 Good but needs more life supporting greeble.

As things stand I think it is gameable as is right now but I have lots that I want to add, water tanks, a bit of fencing, playground and street furniture, a few plants (not least for the hydroponics) and a little shading on the buildings won’t hurt either. I may also add a little bit of moss wash to the hydroponic building to represent that it is comparably much wetter. It has also been suggested that I supplement the concrete roads with dirt tracks to help with making the settlement look lived in and I think that would look great and soften the transition at the road terminations so that is planned too.

That is it for now I will hopefully have more to show off soon!

Thanks for looking.