Sunday, June 3, 2012

Landing pad for 28mm

I must say that this project actually started for the AT-43 game, which even if officially dead and with questionable rules I still like. Unfortunately I do not have too much time to play now nor to design or build thing for it.
Usually I try to make things which are not very difficult to assemble and with the materials I find around me. As a friend of mine put it once while holding a piece or random plastic "imagine this painted in black..."
So, I am always looking to what I have at hand and trying to see how it would look once is out of context, glued to something else and painted frist, of course, in black and then in the new context.
In AT-43 there are some maps which include a landing pad of a spaceport and in the now disband AT-43 forum there was a nice 3D home made version which made me wonder about trying my own version.
In the mean time Dust Warfare was released and even if we still did not play it, the game sounds great and in the next expansion "Zverograd" they are going to introduce the SSU faction which will include some aircraft units, so a landing pad could also be a nice addition to the terrain elements for that game ;)
It happend I was having some picture frames still in their styrofoam (polystyrene) covers and some pieces of isolation for the floor (the one you put below the laminate or other "wooden" floor) which I cut to fit inside as you can see in the picture.
The thickness of the isolation piece just an exact fit for the height of the styrofoam cover which was a bit bigger than the thickness of the picture frame.
Once they are assembled, they look like that.
The styrofoam will be painted as concrete and the isolation piece as red-white landing signals. For this I just cut a template in piece of thick paper, actually part of a cardboard carton from a package of something for the household, nothing fancy. Obviously the colours of the template are inverted, I mean the white would be red in this case and the holes is where I intended to paint with white, but this picture represents more or less the final idea seen from above :)
 I painted in dark red the inside "corners" of the landing pad in the isolation piece.
And using the template I applied the white colour.
Probably I will need to retouch a bit the border of the white lines but I will wait until see how it looks once the styrofoam cover is painted and on top of this piece. And the part which is supposed to be like arrows pointing towards the centre does not look like I have it in mind but, we will see...

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