The Space Cockroach's Three-Month Plan

So much unpainted lead, so little time to paint it. As you might have recalled, I have decided to stop buying new miniatures and terrain until I'll finish painting and basing my current high mountain of unpainted lead. Not only am I in a lean time, financially speaking (between jobs and living from savings and freelance translation contracts), as well as almost out of storage space, but there is little point in spending money on miniatures while I have tens, if not hundreds, of unpainted miniatures still waiting to be painted.

But miniatures are not enough; what I need right now is terrain to game in. I do have a good number of (mostly unassembled) buildings from Proxie Models, enough to assemble a semi-ruined town of good size. I also have an ample supply of Plasticard to use for basing and roofs. With the addition of assorted junk, I could build myself Novi Pripyat in all its blasted-out glory.

Here are some buildings I have already erected, but not yet finished or painted:

Here are three storage tanks to go along with this:

So my plans for the April-June 2013 period are:

1) Finish the Ruined City 15mm-scale terrain set. This could be used for:

• Sicarii (AKA Sikrik), a bombed-out world in my Alkonost Sector where the Laanese (Rebel Minis Sahadeen with Combat Wombat tanks) will be fighting the Incunablis Machines (Khurasan Mekanoids), in solo wargaming.
• Pripyat, the abandoned city in the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, used for STALKER solo fights.
• Neo-Stalingrad, for my Stalingrad 2072 solo game.

2) Finish up my Mars gaming board for introducing 15mm gaming to the Nexus gaming club in Rishon Lezion (about 20 minutes by bus from where I live in Rehovot). They already have a gaming mat, Easter island heads and some domes; it needs a few more domes, an alien "face" and a pyramid.

Everything else - tanks, miniatures and WH40K - will come later.

What do you think?

Bunkers

I've finished up two 15mm-scale bunkers sculpted from a locally-available air-hardening clay called Ceramix. So here they are:

15mm Terrain Work-in-Progress

I'm working on my own set of 15mm terrain features to make my 50cm x 100cm table more interesting to play FAD (and Traveller!) on. Right now I'm at the initial stages of making the terrain, and most features are not even primed, let alone fully detailed or painted.

Here is a Celiran ("Lizard") prefab base-camp I'm composing:


There will be three prefab modules (or tents) made from these plastic bottle bottoms, as well as three water/fuel tanks (two made from old toothpick containers and one from an old aloe-vera gel canister and an old electric wire) and two barrels (I don't recall from where they came).

Here is an urban neighborhood I'm building:


The tanks are the same tanks I'm using for the base camp above. I'll build the buildings out of these three washing-powder cartons, either simply cutting windows and doors into them and painting the window frames around them when I paint the models, and/or gluing additional cardboard stripes to them to make rows of windows with actual frames.

I might also be buying a few barrels and crates from GZG to make terrain even more varied.