Re: Space Hulk board and beyond - updated April 7th

[Willypold]

I've been working on a Space Hulk board using Hirst Arts blocks for quite a while now - the project in its present form was begun a little more than a year ago, but I've been experimenting with different layout variants for the past several years.

My goal is to build all 50 board sections needed for the 2nd Edition of the game, as that version has the greatest number of scenarios. At the moment 45 of the sections are completed, although not all of them have been painted.

Just to give you an idea about the scope of this beast...



Closing in...



Corridors are great for Space Hulk, but I want to use the set for other games as well, particularly HeroClix/HorrorClix, which plays better in larger rooms. The latest additions consist of separate wall and floor sections.

Assembled:



Split up:



The basic components:



Wall and floor variants, as yet unpainted:



All together now:

[Argonor]

Cool, how do you plan to store it?

Always a good thing to keep terrain as versatile as possible, so the 'building block' section approach is very nice.

[Willypold]

I use semi-transparent plastic storage boxes from Muji, a Japanese company.

[Amalric]

WOW
That looks incredible!
Very useful too from the way you've made it.
I like the green color of the walls.

I have been interested in the Hirst molds for awhile.
Which molds did you use here?
What are you casting with? Plaster?

Thanks for the inspirational pics.
Amalric

[Argonor]

I use semi-transparent plastic storage boxes from Muji, a Japanese company.

Do you use some kind of soft padding between the parts, then, like foam or something? Personally I'd hate if the paint rubbed off, or some chipping should occur. I usually use bubble-wrap or pieces of foam when storing resin pieces or even die-cast toys bought for gaming purposes.

[Willypold]

Molds used:

The short answer is: practically all of the Sci-fi molds... The most important, though, are the various 1.5 inch floor molds, the Industrial Edge mold, and the Machinery molds. The walls basically consist of floor tiles, with other pieces thrown in to get variety. And of course the narrow pipe mold!

Storage:

The sections are sitting tight and snug in the boxes and there is little risk of chipping as long as I don't take the boxes out of my home. If that's the case I do wrap the sections in soft, thin fabric.

[fastolfrus]

Do you use some kind of soft padding between the parts, then, like foam or something? Personally I'd hate if the paint rubbed off, or some chipping should occur. I usually use bubble-wrap or pieces of foam when storing resin pieces or even die-cast toys bought for gaming purposes.

You can mix a little powder paint (the cheap stuff sold in large tubs for young children) into the casting mix before you cast, then any chips or rubbing don't show quite so badly.

[Gun bunny]

  I just love the effect!well done,are your sections magnatized? 

[carrma]

Wow--that is an amazing board! Great color pallet and beautifully painted!  Nice clean casting work there, too.  Plaster can be a bit tricky to work with--bonus points if you did it without clogging your home plumbing!

[zizi666]

Very nice !
visualy much better than my 3D Space Hulk gameboard, but then again, I don't have to worry about damage and transport is a piece of cake since it's entirely built up of paper (and foamboard) :



least appealing are my doors, not the originals as in the pic, but the ones I created afterwards.
due to 3 possible sizes (as you can see I used bulky pylons on crossings and some rooms whereas the standard corridors are much wider) I had to create 3 models 

tip : Galeforce 9 fire markers as a substitute for the flamer markers. 

[Willypold]

I dug up some of the older pictures...

@Gun bunny: No magnets, but the pieces are heavy enough to stay in place.

@zizi666: Paper layouts really has a lot going for them, and I do have some of World Works modern day pdf sets. One of these days I'll see what can be done using them.

@carma: No clogging yet... :-)

@Argonor: The Muji boxes are the exact same interior height as the various sections, which I discovered when I added one detail piece to one of the crossing corners, which made it just 1 mm too tall. The box in the image holds 4 T-crossings and 2 fourway crossings.



A really old image showing the doors in place (at this point I only had about 15 sections completed).



The doors are made up of two large hatches glued back to back, with the plaster ramp supported by a 40 mm square GW base. The doors do not cover the entire gap in the corridors, but this way they are easy to remove and they can be placed anywhere with no special arrangements needed.

[Willypold]

The complete list of molds used:

As I have almost all of the sci-fi molds I've used blocks from most of them - in fact I've used more than a dozen different molds for this project, although only occasional blocks from some of these - for example I've only used two copies of a single block from the station builder mold (#300) as corner trim on one of the 3-way rooms. (The problem with the station builder mold is that the blocks are slightly larger than all of Bruce Hirst's later offerings - otherwise I would have used it a lot more.)

Floors: primarily #277 and #278, with a few drain tiles from the large grate mold (#279). Diamond plate and drains are used for the corridors, with plain and carpet tiles for the rooms. The larger rooms also use the Egyptian large tile floor mold (#295) to simulate old stone or really bad old concrete.

Edging between the walls and the floors: a combination of the industrial edge (#325), narrow pipes (#321), machinery builder (#327) and industrial accessory (#326) molds.

Basic walls: floor tiles from #277 and #278 - grate tiles from #277 and hatches and drains from #278 on the outside, and the plain tiles from #277 on the inside in combination with primarily the 1 x 1.5 inch wall panels from the starship wall mold (#301), augmented by various flat blocks from #302 and #303 (cargo bay and med lab), plus the 1 inch square floor tiles from #271, also used as wall panels. Since Bruce released the large concrete floor mold (#280) recently I've used that one extensively as wall panels.

Corners: mostly various blocks from the above molds, the "light column" from #302 and details from the machinery builder (#327) mold.

Wall details and top trim: primarily the machinery builder and industrial accessory molds, with the occasional plastic detail from my bits box (consisting mostly of the left-overs from a number of GW tank kits... there's the battery from an Imperial Guard lascannon on one wall, for example). The room sections all use narrow pipes on top of the walls.

Doors: hatches from #278 or the sliding door pieces and frame from #279, with the decorative trim and ladders from #271 and #303, including a 0.5 x 0.5 inch block on top. The bases for the doors are GW 40 mm square plastic bases for protection, as the ramp from #279 is way too fragile for frequent handling when cast in plaster.

[phreedh]

Olle, the board is bloody marvelous! Hope to play on it some day! You're bringing it to SLAM, right?

[Willypold]

@phreedh: That's the plan!

[Argonor]

The Muji boxes are the exact same interior height as the various sections,

That is one of those coincidental 'gifts' you get sometimes. I bet that if I found something I would like to use for storage, it would turn out to be just one or two mm too narrow, low, or whatever 

Q: Do you spray on the green paint as a basecoat, and the add the other colours afterwards?