Club entrance

Scenery making has been a little wayward recently. The photos below show roughly what I want to achieve, in this case being the entrance to the 'Samurai 7' niterie. Its just an anime wallpaper off google earth with a door made from the bottom of a yoghurt pot and is probably far from the finished article but hopefully it hints at what I am trying to do.

Old crow vehicles

Seems that the only prerequisite to start a company specializing in high quality 28mm sci-fi vehicles and accessories is that your name begins with a 'J'. I cannot enthuse enough about the creations of Jed (Antenociti) and Jez (Old Crow) each and every model of theirs I have bought genuinely exceeds my expectations.

Below are 3 vehicles from Old Crows 25mm vehicle range plus a grav-bike from Antenociti (still have to add a few bits and pieces to all of them)

Grav bike:
Rebel Light utility vehicle:

Provider transport:


Trojan APC :

Cars, trucks and things that fly

A Rebel cart from the plastic Star Wars range. Not sure what to turn this into at the moment.

Not subscribing to the 'Cheese eating surrender monkey' brigade, I actually do like France and the French so I can say with utter conviction that the only positive outcome from the total destruction of said country in the Dredd verse would be the subseqent lack of any plastiky, shoddily made, government subsidized French cars.

Except this one. A Peugeot concept car, bought of ebay for £7. Looks very similar in profile to the Antenociti one.

A Ground Zero Games (I believe) hover vehicle. Bought for £5. Needs a repaint – might make it a med vehicle.

More toy goodness from my son's toybox... Some kind of Power Ranger truck – I've seen pictures of a much larger vehicle that would make a good Mopad. This will do as a small roadliner.

Ads & a large plastic burger.

Small (totally self inflicted) problem with the scenery building, should be back on track soon, just been learning some lessons in cardstock...

Been playing around with Google images and have been trying to build some very MC1 images to decorate the block interior - looking to incorporate theses into the aforementioned cardstock and Ziterdes bases. Its surprisingly easy and quick to do these - I did them at work on a laptop just using Word and have 20 or so so far I'll be using. Tried to get clever and printed out a 'holograph' news screen but haven't been able to get that to work yet.

An update on the dog chew - presenting the 'Munce Munch.' Still very much a wip, not sure whether I'll cut the roof off to be able to model the interior, or just put plastic windows in. As an aside, much to the amusement of my wife, I got chatted up by an old dear in 'Pets at Home' whilst looking for any other suitable dog chews. Didn't have the heart to tell her I didn't have a dog and was actually looking to use it for the nefarious activity of cutting it up to play toy soldiers with, so Si Pegg has its first canine resident, a lovely little 2 year old black and white Jack Russell called 'Sam'.....

Droids

A selection of Clix and Star wars plastic droids. Still playing about with alternate basing - have been experimenting with pasting World Works games graphics on bases - really need to decide and get started.

'Golden Gordon' personal security droid alongside a Mk VII Medium lifter droid.

Erectoet Mk 6 heavy construction droid.

'Sam the soak' firemek

Selection of General Purpose and Domodroids.

'Fred' Mk 57 Jacktrade, EP200 Litter droid, Robodoc

Have made a start on the new World Works Megamall, should have pics up soon.

More vehicles

Its funny (considering how painfully kitsch the TV and film adaptations have been) but looking on ebay for suitable vehicles I keep on coming up with cars and motorbikes from 'Batman'. The 2 below are 1:43 scale diecasts and are readily available, the red one in particular looks great and won't need any repainting to make it usable.


This is a resin model from Grendel I picked up years ago. I think it was called a security something or other and it had a gun I had to remove from its front. Will be painting this soon.

Inspiration

Mentioned to a friend of mine who blogs for a living (!) that I had joined him online and within 10 minutes of putting the phone down he'd forwarded me this picture:

asking 'you mean you're going to build a block like that?' 'That' being a prop from the 1995 Judge Dredd movie.

To be honest I had thought of doing something a teeny bit more abstract but how inspiring is that? Began to wonder if I could convince she who must be obeyed that its a suitable focal point for the living room before I realized it wouldn't be in scale anyway....

Then, in one of those strange geeky eureka moments, remembered the 1st thing that drew me into Dredd miniatures, an article in the 1st White Dwraf I bought (number 79 I think) with an article on a convention game set in Mega City 1 using Citadel miniatures. Will have to dig the mag out - will have been put away when I 'grew out' of wargames when I went to university and not seen the light of day since.

Patwagon

Mega-City 1 seems to be filled with VERY big vehicles and having searched across the ether for a suitable Patwagon I keep on coming back to these:


I bought 2 of these plastic APCs from Aliens off ebay a few years ago - apparently they had been used in a participation game at Salute with 1/35 scale figure and fit in very well with what I would envisage a Patwagon to look like. I'm trying to source some suitable Justice Department logos to put on them (anyway know where there are any relevant jpegs?) but apart from that they are ready to roll.

Cits

A few of Si Peggs inhabitants. I use mainly Mongoose's own GoMC1 miniatures of which the plastic gang set is excellent but for various reasons (chief amongst which - I'm pretty lazy when it comes to painting and most are with a miniature painter getting repainted whilst I continually change my mind over colour schemes...) here are some of EM4's excellent prepainted gang members. These are pretty fantastic for pre-paints and they have 2 sets (each of 5 miniatures) that are suitable for gangs as well as one that is useful for citi-def/pri-sec members.

For extra 'cover' and just to add scope to scenarios we use rebased Heroclix and Star Wars miniatures for civilians and robots. All these figures, along with the rest, will be rebased to 23mm washers. Having flirted with the 30mm display type bases I've found even the standard 25mm plastic bases too big for use inside buildings as well as adding a little too much height to the figure.

Most of the Heroclix figures are pretty.... 'imaginatively' dressed and there is a definate gender imbalance in favour of the ladies. To demonstrate, this particular figure:

was the one that prompted my wife, upon viewing it, to label wargamers as perverse stating 'no-one would wear THAT.' Actually the exact term she used was pervert wierdo freaks (hey shes known me a long time) but as I have experienced Sunderland on a Saturday night I would probably beg to differ on the availability of women to dress in such a way.

Anyway, they work well with most 28mm figures and their clothing on the whole suits the Mega-City style.

Buildings and Burgers

Presenting the first of the Ziterdes tiles. They're 2' by 2' made from plastic by Ziterdes (funnily enough) and there are 2 different types. More to come about these.


Now, bear with me with this one.... Yes you might believe this to look like a plastic dog chew shaped like a hamburger but you'd be enormously mistaken. Actually what you're looking at is a 'Burgostop' eaterie in early stages of construction. No, I'm not convinced either.... will have to see how it turns out.

Walls & floors - the plan

I’m going to be using a combination of terrain tiles from Ziterdes and cardstock walls from Worldworks games who coincidentally have just announced a cardstock shopping mall that seems perfect for the Mega City 1 universe.

This should be released sometime in mid October which should coincide with me receiving the Ziterdes tiles (I have only 1 at present). As an aside I’ve also been collating images to use to try and ‘mega city up’ the Worldworks graphics and, perhaps less realistically, am also looking at utilizing some Electro-Luminescent wires to try and go for a neon effect. Whether that is possible remains to be seen.

Will have some pics up soon.

Vehicles

A few suitable Mega-city vehicles with an EM4 miniatures gang member for scale.

Refuse Truck: Don't laugh - its a desk hoover bought off Amazon for a few pounds. With a paintjob (disguising the out of scale doors) I think it will look ok.

Hovertaxi; A converted mouse - still need to add markings to it, does kinda look like a mouse painted yellow at the moment.

Slab bike; Batman Hero cycles or something similar - bought off ebay. Will paint the one with the bat symbols on but might leave the others as is.

Ground Car; An excellent Resin vehicle from Antcenociti's Workshop - see here
They have a number of suitable vehicles and are adding to them steadily. Will have a few more of their models to show soon.

Groundcar; Stolen (borrowed) from my 3 year old. Can't remember the brand - something like RPM Overload or something similarly silly. Will leave it as it is.

Intro

Many years ago I was being shown round a central London flat by the atypical estate agent type - expensive shoes, cheap suit - when I remarked on its size (or lack of). 'Yeah' muttered this polished property professional in genuine agreement, 'its smaller than a hab in the big MC.'

My partner missed the connotation of this remark, but I did not. The bouffant haired fool was indeed a Dreddhead, a reader of 2000AD, the seminal British Sci-fi comic. I had not read it since school but had remained occasionally interested in the world of Judge Dredd, the rather fascist lawman of Mega City One - a vast conurbation built along the east coast of the US - despite the best efforts of Hollywood and Stallone to defer further interest (see Judge Dredd the movie for explanation)

A few years later I rediscovered my childhood hobby of wargaming, coincidentally through the Judge Dredd world, when I saw an advert for 'Gangs of Mega City 1' a miniatures game developed by Mongoose Publishing. Having dabbled on and off with painting and playing with miniatures for these last few years I decided that as a suitable break from real life I needed a project.

Rather than having a grandiose plan with any particular timeline the following will be irregular ramblings charting particular events inside Si Pegg Block, a community of 70,000 malcontents stuffed into a building over half a mile high. A community certain London urban planners seem desperate to emulate....

Playing