6mm table,disaster strikes P.5

[YPU]

I puddle along working on various 6mm sci-fi projects for years, but hardly ever get round to putting it all on the table. Finally did so today as I completed a big set of roads and details to go along with it, and I figured I'd share it with you lot.

[6milPhil]

That's coming together, sweet!

All those roads look brill, I don't know what you were fussing about. Left side driving too! 

[YPU]

Ofcourse I've found plenty of things to change since taking these pictures. I've given all the water features a new coat of gloss varnish, they are almost a decade old after all and were going a bit dull.

Further to do list:
-finish that darn overpass, new on ramp, curved version of that, splitting sections. But liking how the overpass looks looks currently at least, not too tall, nice swoops etc.
-Need bridges, and maybe smaller river.
-bottom layer for the urban areas, this is just bare pp plastic.
-want more ridges/hills to get the feeling of valleys, this still feels like hills on a flat plane, not rivers and towns running through valleys

That's coming together, sweet!

All those roads look brill, I don't know what you were fussing about. Left side driving too! 

Cheers! Well it took some thinking to get them here. And yeah I figured if I was going to take japan as prototype for my scenery in 6mm, I might as well take that aspect as well. It makes more sense anyway.

[LouieN]

That is a great looking map.  The elevated highway is impressive. 

[YPU]

That is a great looking map.  The elevated highway is impressive.

Thanks! Yes the highway can use some paint, but I'm really happy about the look of it shape wise.

[Pattus Magnus]

That looks brilliant, I want to play on it! It would be great for a variety of hard sci-fi settings, too.

[fred]

Thats a good looking setup. An overpass always helps!

Regarding the hills - I get what you mean about the way wargame style hills look, they don’t really work to represent real terrain at all, which is much larger. I tend to go for various pieces of expanded foam under a cloth to give larger scale terrain - but this gives a very different style of game - as players love the traditional hills to hide behind!

Also with your fairly large terrain pieces they will struggle if placed on bigger rolling hills.

[hubbabubba]

looking very impressive.

Bring on the big stompy robots.

[YPU]

Cheers people!

That looks brilliant, I want to play on it! It would be great for a variety of hard sci-fi settings, too.

Yes absolutely my plan. Heck I enjoy mechs stomping trough something like this more than a dystopian cyclopian megacity. This gives a better sense of their scale.

Thats a good looking setup. An overpass always helps!

Regarding the hills - I get what you mean about the way wargame style hills look, they don’t really work to represent real terrain at all, which is much larger. I tend to go for various pieces of expanded foam under a cloth to give larger scale terrain - but this gives a very different style of game - as players love the traditional hills to hide behind!

Also with your fairly large terrain pieces they will struggle if placed on bigger rolling hills.

Yeah it's an ongoing thought process. There is the option of doing a dedicated set table, just go whole hogg railroad table modelling on it and get something extra special, but that fixes you into one setup.
 A more modular system like Hexon can give options, but it always look so artificial. I've in the past done games in 28mm where we tilted the table a bit and said the entire thing was on the slope of a hill. (fun in car combat games where that changes speed!) Since that actually fits the size of real hills!

I'm currently starting some smaller ridges, stuff that breaks the table up a bit and maybe helps with the valley feel, 2-3 inch wide and nearly that tall to make them good and impassible terrain. I should note at least that the biggest hill is large enough to have a town on top of it, which is always fun.

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Oh, this looks really, really nice.

[Seal]

Yes, this is awesome!

[OSHIROmodels]

Looks great mate 

[YPU]

Thanks peeps!

Looking at it more I think I want to do some more stand alone buildings to put next to roads, just 1-3 houses with sheds etc. so the urban area can transfer to rural a bit smoother. I think I have buildings a plenty, but I'd love some suggestions of how to arrange them to get that look right.

Also re-considering an old idea to make really steep hills/mountains that go on table edges, to enforce that valley feeling without blocking too much table space. This being a japan inspired table I could make sections with fancy tunnel entrances to keep some mobility points trough the otherwise blocked table edge.

[Pattus Magnus]

I don’t know about rural Japan, but in the rural area where I grew up in the 1980s and early ‘90s, it was customary to have derelict farm equipment and vehicles parked around a lot of the farms and rusting back into soil. (Nothing derogatory meant toward the farmers - they ran the equipment until it didn’t make financial sense to repair it. At that point no other farmer would be interested in buying it, and the price of scrap metal wasn’t high enough to justify trucking the old gear away to sell for scrap…)

Based on my experience in western Canada, usually rural lots have a main house, a building used as a repair bay for equipment, one or more barns for livestock and storing feed, plus a few cylindrical bins/ silos for storing grain or other dry crops. Adjust as needed, depending on what they are growing/ raising (farms vary quite a bit depending on what they specialize in producing).

[YPU]

I don’t know about rural Japan, but in the rural area where I grew up in the 1980s and early ‘90s, it was customary to have derelict farm equipment and vehicles parked around a lot of the farms and rusting back into soil. (Nothing derogatory meant toward the farmers - they ran the equipment until it didn’t make financial sense to repair it. At that point no other farmer would be interested in buying it, and the price of scrap metal wasn’t high enough to justify trucking the old gear away to sell for scrap…)

Based on my experience in western Canada, usually rural lots have a main house, a building used as a repair bay for equipment, one or more barns for livestock and storing feed, plus a few cylindrical bins/ silos for storing grain or other dry crops. Adjust as needed, depending on what they are growing/ raising (farms vary quite a bit depending on what they specialize in producing).

From spending too much time on google maps/street view, it seems that large scale farming is much rarer. its more small fields worked with (powered) hand tools still? I'm making assumptions here but I cant seem to spot many machine sheds like the ones you describe. I'm dutch and around here the farming definitely has taken a more and more industrial scale, one farm would easily take up an entire table (and be perfectly flat) but that doesn't seem to be the case in japan, I think I could actually get away with just a house with 2-3 small paddy fields.