Modelmaking Misadventures: The Ascenscion Island Chronicles.

[Sunjester]

That looks superb!

[Doug ex-em4]

That’s brilliant, I love it. Are you prepared to speculate on the effects on the customers of the Vacuum Evacuating Toilet division of the company in the event of a boiler explosion?

Doug

[Peithetairos]

Really nice scratch-built pieces. Steampunky in a way (the last one).

[Andy in Germany]

Many thanks for the encouraging comments.

...Are you prepared to speculate on the effects on the customers of the Vacuum Evacuating Toilet division of the company in the event of a boiler explosion?

Doug

I hope that even on Ascension, the Central Collection Depot will be kept well away from pretty much anyone (apart from the smell, think of the methane build-up). However...

Really nice scratch-built pieces. Steampunky in a way (the last one).

Thanks for that: I wanted to take things in a steampunk direction.

[Wirelizard]

That airplane is glorious, the 1920s and 1930s were enough of a random, janky, experimental time in aviation that a weirdly angular rivet-festooned sesquiplane* fits right in.

The coal power plant/mad scientist's lair is also excellent and inspired.

* sesquiplane is an entirely real word, "A biplane having one long wing and one short one above or below it."

[Andy in Germany]

Thanks, @wirelizard.

This week I forced myself to finally make the interior of the Casino.



"Forced" I appreciate is a relative term, but I hadn't been enthusiastic because I’ve never been inside such an establishment and don't really want to. As such I had to resort to a lot of online research, which is how I learned that there are more casinos in Las Vegas that the whole of Germany; how the odds in casinos are so carefully set to make sure that ultimately the house always wins, and the longer customers play, the higher their chance of losing, how casinos have no windows or clocks, so players lose track of time, and how casinos will ply successful players with ‘free’ alcohol to reduce their decision-making capabilities. Nothing is left to chance.



I have to admit, all this made me wonder why anyone would enter one of these places. In fact, it made me even less enthusiastic, which is why the interior looks a little ‘basic’. I may come back and add details at some point if this annoys me, but for now I want to do something else.

Of course behind the glitz, the Georgetown Casino is all this dialled up to ’11’ and a wealthy inebriated gambler will be lucky to wake up the next day still in possession of their cash, and indeed their wallet; ticket home; clothes; and possibly the deeds to their property.

Despite this, as usual, the management probably won’t have it all their own way; many people have strategies to beat the house, and of course, there are always some people who will take a more ‘direct’ approach to wealth accumulation…

[Steve F]

I've only been in a casino once, on a riverboat in St Louis. The group I was with saw it as a tourist experience, with the (small) stakes we had brought as the equivalent of a ticket price.

We agreed that anyone who won would pay for the drinks. I ended up ahead by less than $2, and let me tell you, the drinks were NOT free that night!

Anyway, nice modelling. They may be sparse, but the tables look right.

[Andy in Germany]

This week has been busy; I'm changing job and apartment and these things are wont to take a silly amount of time and energy.

However, the Aerodrome at Ascension needed a wind sock:



Beiung thoroughly indecisive, I've put a lits of potential future projects on my blog with a descripotion of each and an option to vote on them. If you'd like to join in follow this link:

https://korschtal.wordpress.com/2024/06/29/to-do-list/

Another gratuitous picture of the windsock in place with Sigma Airlines' biplane in the background...

[Andy in Germany]

I've only been in a casino once, on a riverboat in St Louis. The group I was with saw it as a tourist experience, with the (small) stakes we had brought as the equivalent of a ticket price.

We agreed that anyone who won would pay for the drinks. I ended up ahead by less than $2, and let me tell you, the drinks were NOT free that night!

Anyway, nice modelling. They may be sparse, but the tables look right.

Sounds about right; even if you win, you loose. I seem to recall the riverboats were originally to get around gambling laws.

[Andy in Germany]

I told you things would get sillier, and behold, they have…

The Great Depression may be in full swing, but for the extremely wealthy it is no more than background noise, a topic of conversation alongside Jacosta’s new outfit or Ronald’s sleepover with the Prince of Wales. But this class has found a new problem; boredom. Attending parties and buying thousand dollar dresses is all very well, but it eventually becomes stale, and thus began a new craze for the thrill seeking elites.

The First of “the races” was probably held in 1934 on a patch of waste ground outside London. Despite being illegal, it spread rapidly, especially as the participants had the finances to travel across Europe and to the USA, with their souped up machines.

The first incident of drivers shooting at each other was, of course, in the USA, but soon the already highly dangerous vehicles were being fitted out with everything from machine guns to the newfangled rocket launchers; others added hoppers for oil and caltrops to give anyone following a very nasty surprise indeed.



As Ascension is now a major crossroads for the rich and famous, it was only a matter of time before the circus came to town. “The Races” are of course illegal, but the local police force have been instructed, from very high up, not to interfere.

Mind you, Captain Bryant has probably decided that with general crime, smuggling, trafficking, vice, counterfeiting, and a civil war brewing back in the UK, his small team have quite enough to deal with. If some rich idiots want to try and shoot each other, that’s their problem.

With luck, they may even succeed.

[FifteensAway]

Being an American, the only silly thing I see is you've gone and put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car!   

Much coolness in this thread.

Casinos: my wife, from the Philippines, has some family members that seem to 'live' in local casinos - far too many in California, Native American land so skirting the state laws.  So, when she said she wanted to visit the very first such Indian casino (near us), I told her you tell me how much you are willing to lose and then we'll go.  Oh, she didn't like that - bad vibes, negative waves.  Stuck to my guns, hard.  She finally gave an amount that was 'affordable' and off we went and when that amount was gone we left - and never bothered to go back.  Smoke filled and foul smelling places.  I limit my gambling to lottery tickets, no more than a few bucks at a time.  Still mostly lose but if ever hit it big, the payoff can be enormous.  Oh, and that first casino cleared a half billion dollars its first six months.  We only contributed a minute fraction of that amount. 

[Mad Guru]

AMAZING modeling work on this thread, Andy in Germany!!!

So happy I found it as I don't think I'd seen any of your creations before now.  As others have said above, I look forward to seeing more of this project as it grows!  Also I must say the idea of a 1937 version of "CAR WARS" sounds super cool to me.  I'm not a big pulp or historical RPG gamer, so I wouldn't necessarily know if such a thing already exists as a commercially available, "game world," but it sounds very original to me.

RE: casinos... I feel compelled to contribute an anecdote.  I apologize in advance for it being too long and potentially distracting from your brilliant modeling work, BUT your personal take on casinos leads me to think you may appreciate it...

When our middle child who is also our older daughter played youth basketball, her "Club" team attended a prominent South-Western regional tournament in Las Vegas.  The host organization laid down flooring, rolled in hoops & scoreboards and turned the largest banquet hall at the Casino Hotel in question into an indoor arena filled with dozens of full-size basketball courts.

Like every team attending, our entire team of 12 to 14 years old girls and their families was required to stay at the host hotel.  In keeping with Rule #1 of hotel casino design, the only way to get from our rooms to the banquet hall where all the games were played was by WALKING STRAIGHT THROUGH THE CASINO FLOOR.

Of course it's illegal for anyone under age 21 to step foot on a casino floor in Las Vegas -- but the hotel had booked HUNDREDS OF YOUTH BASKETBALL PLAYERS for the weekend.  Hey, each girl was accompanied by at least one adult who might end up having a great time in a more traditional casino "gaming" sense!

I remember being caught between anger and laughter.  Escorting a bunch of the girls through the Casino floor filled with scantily clad cocktail waitresses and degenerates of every type in order to reach the courts was infuriating -- but it was also absurd to the point of almost being surreal.

After our first trek through the cigarette smoke and alcohol infused atmosphere I found a better route from the elevator bank to the banquet hall that hugged the outer walls and only required a very short sprint across a short section of the casino floor.  That became the go-to route for our entire team for the rest of the weekend.  It took a little longer but was worth it to avoid some of the stuff otherwise on view up close and personal.

My daughter, who has since grown up and become an army officer, remembers that Tournament -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- with a special fondness.

"Circling back" to your fantastic modeling work... maybe there's a plot-thread for a game involving a youth being stuck in your casino and having to be rescued or rescue themselves.

[Andy in Germany]

Being an American, the only silly thing I see is you've gone and put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car!

Given that I've lived in Germany for 25 years, and even learned to drive here, you'd think I'd have noticed that. I guess my childhood in the UK went deeper than I thought...

AMAZING modeling work on this thread, Andy in Germany!!!

So happy I found it as I don't think I'd seen any of your creations before now.  As others have said above, I look forward to seeing more of this project as it grows!  Also I must say the idea of a 1937 version of "CAR WARS" sounds super cool to me.  I'm not a big pulp or historical RPG gamer, so I wouldn't necessarily know if such a thing already exists as a commercially available, "game world," but it sounds very original to me.

Hi, and many thanks. I can't take any credit for the original idea though: it's based on the wonderfully bonkers rules for "Maximilian 1934" from Mana press; I just changed the background story to fit into my story arc which is based on an alternative Ascension Island that found itself an international crossroads in the British Empire.

And I like the Casino anecdote as well: that certainly wouldn't happen here in Germany...

[Andy in Germany]

When I was a child, one of my bugbears with toy cars was the lack of detail on the underside, so if a car was turned over, instead of a vaguely realistic chassis, you got a flat plate with “Matchbox” written across it. It used to annoy me no end.

I was that kind of child.

Naturally, now I’m making a card model of a vehicle, I wanted to make it like the real thing with a chassis and undergubbins to show in the inevitable event of it crashing…



…this then got out of hand and I ended up building a complete chassis from card and bits of scraps. As usual, I worked from pictures and made extremely rough copies of what I saw, adding various round bits and lumpy bits as I felt like it, entirely unhindered by any understanding of motor vehicles, mechanics or even physics.

This is as near as I get to “scale model making”.



However, in one case of very nearly engineering, if you squint, this chassis does genuinely roll; the wheels do turn, generally in the same direction. It took a certain amount of swearing to achieve this, not to mention a complete rebuild of one end after I glued the axles solid, but we’ll gloss over that.

[marianas_gamer]

Very impressive Andy. Were your parents frightened of you as a child?