August | 2013 | Sirrob01

Archive for August, 2013

Lego – Basing Minifigs for Wargaming (Part 2)

Published August 18, 2013 Lego , Wargaming 1 Comment
Tags: lego, minifig

In my never ending hunt for different basing options for Lego Minifigs. I stumbled onto these nice hex bases by catspaw customs, now I’m a bit slow to the party as the bases have been around for a while.

I couldn’t make the Catspaw website work or at least there shop (I think they might have closed) so I picked my bases up from Gi Brick, but you can also grab them from Brick Arsenal and Minifigforlife.

Front and Back Clear Trans 4 stud

These bases are still not what you call cheap at around the $1 USD each. This makes these bases more expensive than my home made washer ones (this previous post). However they are superior to my home made bases in a few ways and only one minor negative apart from cost:

They come in clear, I know for wargaming armies quite often you have themed armies and bases. For myself I like my mini’s to appear to be mounted on the right terrain that they are currently marching over. Clear bases let you see the terrain the miniature is moving over creating the illusion froma distance they are based the same as the terrain.
They stack and clip together like normal Lego. Storing my washer bases is quiet annoying and due to the weight I have to be careful to store them separate to the minifigs and vehicles.
They are hexagonal, I prefer Hex bases to Round ones. This mainly stems from a few rulesets I’ve tried using facing more heavily.
The bases are not as heavy as washers so minifigs are easier to knock over, but I don’t think this will cause any major problems as it still requires a fair knock to push a Minifig over.

Hero’s vs the Undead

For me the above advantages more than out weigh the added cost. The bases themselves come in a broad range of colours and either a 2 stud or 4 stud design. For myself I’ll stick with the Clear bases with a 4 stud design so I can add markers if needed to the bases. I’m unsure if this was happy accident or not but inscribed on the bottom of each base between the 2 marker studs is a number between 1-9 on my clear bases it’s a little hard to read and I’d imagine on opaque ones you would need to flip the base over to read the number, I ordered 10 bases initially and received 1 of each 1-9 and a second 4. The bases are sized to be 1 inch square, however mine measure as just a hair over an inch on the long side (point to point) and just under an inch (flat to flat). I can’t see it causing myself any major problems and troops can still be ranked up if needed and it makes the bases fit in better with normal Lego plate stud sizing.

My base plate is a little short

I’m going to pickup a few more of these clear bases and eventually use them for all my Lego gaming.

As always have fun 🙂

“Always desire to learn something useful.” – Sophocles

Lego Clone Army – SR-01 Clone Loader

Published August 7, 2013 Clone Army , Instructions , Lego 5 Comments
Tags: clone army, lego, Star Wars, starwars

Been a while since I pulled together a Lego MOC. I decided to build a small Clone walker, however it’s not in the traditional Star Wars walker theme but more of a battlesuit or small mecha.

I see it as having started as a simple power loader with a couple of large overpowered hands. Then in frustration a clone commander having been pinned down by Droidekas, quickly bolted a combination anti-vehicle heavy blaster and light blaster to the right arm and equipped the hand on the left with a nasty set of claws. With this heavy armament it can punch through a Droideka’s shield easily while remaining small enough to provide support for a unit of Clone troopers in very close quarters. Due to the short legs they are relatively slow but this doesn’t cause major problems as they can easily move twice as fast as a running clone trooper.

Most of the bits I used to assemble the Clone Loader I grabbed from my bits box although I didn’t have any bendy tubes and had to buy a few from bricklink to finish the model up. I did borrow the middle of the leg design from other small lego mecha models (the 4 way light holder). Not much revolutionary in the rest, I did stick a little bit of blue tack behind the small turntables just to make them a little stiffer so they don’t turn so easily. I had enough parts to build two Clone Loaders although not all the light greys match.

Mockup Image Background:Miss_Ohara CC 2.0, Planets NASA

I used Mlcad and Ldview to create the instruction images and laid them out in a word document. I wanted to try producing a render of the model, unfortunately I find Mlcad a little annoying to perfectly align parts (gaps in renders look terrible). However I did find a handy sketchup plugin which let me import the Ldraw parts to Sketchup and I assembled the loader in sketchup and then used the free maxwell render plugin to generate a simple render.

I didn’t play around with the settings much in the render tool but I’m fairly happy with how the render turned out for a first try. I was contemplating generating a simple short walking render animation but that’s going to take a little more time, one for a later post (maybe 🙂 ). I’ll be adding these as an alternate walker to the AT-PT for my clone army, I’ll probably have a few different load outs.

Instructions are below if your curious about any of the construction steps or methods. I used a 2×4 plate on the base of my feet for added stability but this was excessive nothing more annoying than a model that falls over on the table :).

SR-01 Clone Loader Instructions

Have fun gaming and building

Sirrob01

Archive for August, 2013