Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Carmakian Empire - My first Scratchbuilt Fleet

Here I present you the Carmakian Armada!




The mighty Carmakian Battlecruisers, along with a fighter squadron



The even mightier Carmakian Battleship

Side view

And now, the Legendary Carmakian Mothership: The Invader


side view

The underside detail. Here is where their engines are located, as well as some heavy duty batteries.


The Invader engines. This model came out very heavy (about 1,5-2kg), but the omni-stands are holding it just fine.

You can check the designs here and see if these conversions are decent enough.

And here is how I made them:


The first thing I learned about scrathbuilding is that anything you can use as a basic shape for your model is going to save you the trouble of having to come up with that shape with bare hands. 

So, the Carmakian dome-shaped hull, for instance. Instead of having to mold that free-handed, I could use some support to help me define that shape. Luckly, I found a sconse that provided me with exactly what I needed.


I disassembled the piece, and used the cone end as a support where to shape the battleship's hull with epoxy. 
To make the details, I simply "stamped" some Battlefleet Gothic bits on the epoxy.


I greased the support before applying the epoxy, but it wasn't enough to prevent it from sticking to the metal. Upon taking it out, it came apart, unfortunately. So I figured out I'd need to use a medium to keep the epoxy from sticking to the sconse.

Considering that the battleship's hull is kind of, well... phallic, what a better solution then...

Condoms...

Well, problem duly addressed, and now my hulls came off just fine, so bear with me here...

Anyway, moving on. The battlecruiser needed different solutions:

Basically, a lamp support and this plastic piece which I don't remember right now how to call it.

I positioned the pieces togheter as shown above, and then pressed epoxy into it from the underside, first applying oil on the plastic to prevent the epoxy from sticking there.

 After leaving the epoxy aside for a while to cure, I removed the plastic upperside and stamped the epoxy with BFG bits to apply details.

The underside got a few washers to represent the engines. They were stamped there while the epoxy was still soft.

The Battleships also got those lamp supports to work as the underside part of their hulls, except that for them I needed narrower ones.

For the battlecruiser, I then applied epoxy on the sides of the metal support, and again, stamped it to create the details. But this time I used a Borg Cube as stamp, for it holds a whole lot of detail, perfect for the job.



As for the battleships, I basically glued lots of BFG bits to the low hull, representing its weapons' array.

Now, the Invader needed an even more oddly solution. For the basic shape, I got a pet post.




I cut the post and rearranged the parts so to make its shape less straight, as the Invader tends to have the upper side much broader than the low side.

Next, I covered it with epoxy, and stamped it with a Borg Cube all over, to apply the details.


The fighters ade Agents of Gaming Fleet Action Centauri fighters, which I had bought in excess for my Centauri Fleet. 

And that was pretty much it. Here it is, the finished fleet:


Now, painting it white was a nightmare, mostly considering the spherical tendency of their structure, which makes washing them really tricky, but that is a subject for another day.

*End of Transmission*

4 comments:

  1. Great work! That's a lot of models built in one go. There's nothing more fun (I think) than playing a game using a fleet you've built by your own hand.

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  2. Very good scratchbuilding. Great to see some of your imaginings ready for action.

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  3. Very impressive work! And very inspiring!

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  4. Very cool idea and exacution.

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