[BFG] Chios' Dockyard - Scratchbuilds

[marell le fou]

Hey nice one ! The BFG range really explode with those 3D printers. It's a good thing. I long to see the same with the Man O'War range...

[Chios]

Thanks!
I never used 3D printing because I like the physical act of building, but the stuff people on here are printing is some great inspiration.

[Chios]

For quite a while, the dockyard stayed pretty silent. Recently however, we started our campaign for real!
Better yet, the whole affair got some of my fellow admirals secretly plotting to assemble their own scratchbuilds!

I went ahead and started bringing my Iconoclasts up to squadron strength, using the templates I made for my prototype (pic shows WIP).
In addition, I comissioned 100 small and 20 big baseplates out of steel to properly hold aloft what fleets are to grace our tables in the future.
The small bases are just 30mm in diameter (instead of the 32 of GW's small flight-bases), but none of the guys seems to break a sweat about that. A 3mm brass rod gets inserted and hammered flush into the baseplate.
The bases are so heavy, a small one can comfortably keep an Ork Slamblasta made out of a PC mainboard erect.

I will start collecting pictures of my friend's creations, the Ork and Space Marine players went ahead and did some stunning pieces!

[Chios]

Finally I have collected some pictures, let's start with the Ork player and his capital ships!
For now he's got a Kill Kroozer, a Terror ship and a really mean-looking Slamblasta. The thing really screams "space pirate" at you, complete with a 600 meter high eyepatch!

[marell le fou]

Very funny idea but i fear that even painted, it will looks like computer parts. You should add some citadel items to melt everything.

[Chios]

The almost unthinkable happened - I painted something!

It is the first time in at least 4 years (excepting a basecoat on some of my chaos cruisers)... Imagine how my paints look... They range from "fossilized remnants", to "crusty" to "slightly tinted water with rich pigment bed".

Fortunately, I had two models that benefitted from not getting much more than a mere drybrush.

The Scythe Harvester will in all probability the only one of its kind, seeing as the guy I built it for promptly switched to Dark Eldar   

The orbital lance battery has a subdued grey colour to make sure it is not tied to a particular fleet, but rather fitting for whoever controls the planet at the time. I painted some yellowish windowlights on to give it a sense of bigger scale and even did two little runway-strips for incoming shuttles. I'm not sure you can see any of that properly with my prehistoric camera, but then again it surely is for the best that way^^

[marell le fou]

Nice ! Perfect for scenarios.

[Chios]

I started an ambitious project: I want to gift an Eldar fleet (or, far more likely, as many capital ships from his campaign army list as I can pump out in the time) to a friend of mine.
So I got until end of January to do lots of Eldar scratchbuilds.
His whole list would be one battlecruiser, one cruiser, two light cruisers and a hefty sum of 12 Escorts. Let's see how far I get!

I'm gonna show you guys my Prototype first. I always get a prototype built after the first drawings in CAD, to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. In case of the Eldar fleet, my Aurora Class Light cruiser has gone through some iterations, after each of which she got shelved for an indefinite amount of time until i felt like SpaceElves(TM) again.

The initial build featured a prow made from modelling clay, filled into a small spoon to get the shape. Then, two pieces of toothpick were added and the teardrop-shaped gun turrets were modeled on with green stuff. It was about that point that my nagging suspicion turned into grim reality: I had become guilty of infringing on the copyrights of a certain sockpuppet frog.  So shelve it for a year or so.

At some later point I redid the front, using a sawed-off pen as the prow and most importantly, mounting the pulsars VERTICALLY. Ain't seen no frog with those features yet, no sir! Mightily pleased with the decided un-amphibiousness of it all, I redid the Pulsars to represent what they are in my mind's eye: Gatlin-lasers! Oe thing led to another, and now I felt I had to improve the plain wings to fit the overall detail on the prow. Inspired by the Void Stalker, I bought a sheet of aluminium with lots of holes in it, cut out the old wing and set to work on a new one.

I t will be quite a while before I finish upgrading the Aurora, as it is not on the campaign list of my friend's.

At the moment I'm working on two Solaris light cruisers, I attached a very early picture where I laid the first parts roughly where they're gonna go.

[Rowlybot]

Dual-link resolution images? 
Hard to see the blown-ups there mate.

[Chios]

I have no idea what dual-link resolution images are, but  if you enlighten me I will try to do better. What should I do differnet?

[Rowlybot]

Your 2nd and onwards thumbnails are 2560x1920 resolution. Your average monitor is 1920x1080 - you have SUPER sized images and a fantastically good camera is all. What to do differently? No idea, depends on your camera I guess

[Chios]

That bit about my fantastic camera made me chuckle. It's actually a hand-me down through my family, me being the third owner, the thing gives you picture quality like a brick with a biult-in flash.
But I can make the pictures smaller on my pc before uploading, no problem! Also, I struck a deal with my girlfriend yesterday: from now on, she will take the pictures with her smartphone-camera, which is way better. Next time I'm gonna have some pictures you can actually look at... I hope.

[Chios]

I painted the first Iconoclast, the one which had the comically huge guns attached. It looks a little less ridiculous painted I find.

Also I painted the first of my 15 Transports. I wanted to have a really subdued grey to accentuate that piloting a hundreds-year old rustbucket full of promethium and foodstuffs for warfronts is probably not at all a glorious profession... But the result is even too drab. I might revisit the little hauler at some point.

[Gun_wun]

Very cool, creative builds.  I'm enjoying what you do.  thanks for sharing!

[marell le fou]

I really like those round shaped tank looking cargo.