Do it
Finally, I have my own desert boards underway.
I'm using 600mm x 600mm, green Styrofoam slabs, 40mm thick - which provides plenty of rigidity.
I'm building straight onto them. No reinforcement, no edging, none of that malarkey.
Experience shows that if you're careful when moving foam-slab terrain boards around, they're perfectly durable (famous last words!
)
Eventually, I'll expand this project to 8 boards providing a 1200mm x 2400mm (4ft x 8ft) table.
For now, however, I'm only making up the first four boards because for my game at BLAM in October - in the interests of turning the game around at least three times during the day - each player will only control a handful of AFV's and figures. So a 4ft x 4ft table will serve perfectly well.
I've put this build off for around 8 months - mainly because I kept trying to run complicated schematics in my head, working out where roads and hills need to be to provide for maximum modularity. In the end, I just gave up.
So these boards are not planned scientifically in the least. Instead, I decided that each 600mm x 600mm board will have a focus and character of its own, and they will all be able to slot together in pretty much any combination that makes visual sense and provides for an interesting and eye-candyful setting for the game... (So no roads - so far anyway... )
That said, I didn't want just a flat open desert. That might be how it was for much of the North African campaign in WW2, but it would make for a pretty dull and visually unappealing wargame. So, the first four boards will be:
The oasis
The wadi
The broken hills, and
The ruined house with a bund or berm.
If you've followed any of my previous terrain projects, you won't find anything too surprising here. I'm sticking to my tried and tested techniques and favoured materials.
However, in a slight departure I'm using a new material to create low hills and undulations - some very open textured plastic foam which came in sheets as packing around something or other - I forget what to be honest. But it's a super-lightweight yet tough material, and using a hot wire cutter I can produce slivers of the stuff to create very low profile rises and hills - which is what I need for this project.
Here you can see the boards with a selection of the white foam hills and banks ready to be positioned...
The texture of the white foam is very 'open celled' as you can see. It's slightly spongy - only semi rigid. However, since I'll be covering it with lightweight wall filler, and then a stiff top coat of patent 'gloop' (PVA, paint, sand mix) which forms a hard plasticised skin, I'm not worried about the slight flexibility of the substrata...
Some of the other materials that will be used...
In addition to the lightweight wall filler and the gloop - we have broken-up cork for large rock formations; assorted grades of 'talus' (model railway rubble and grit), plus various real pieces of slate and volcanic 'picon' grit scavenged from my last hols in Lanzarote (yes, I'm that said - I go round collecting small bags of interesting aggregates when I am on holiday...
The surface dressing of sand for this project is genuine Saharan sand, blown over to Fuerteventura where it piles up in big spectacular white dunes... )
To fasten the white foam slivers down to the green Styrofoam base, I'm using UHU 'Por' glue, and shoving broken bits of cocktail sticks down through the material into the foam by way of pegs for additional security.
First to the wadi board...
Using my trusty flatbed sander, I have scoured out a shallow depression in the foam. This will form the floor of the wadi. (One of the great things about using rigid styrofoam for terrain building is that you can carve down into the material as well as build on top of it, in order to create depth... )
I've then stuck various small pieces of the white foam onto the wadi and oasis boards to terraform the basic shapes of the underlying topographical features...
And once the UHU glue has dried, I've then 'iced' the foam superstructure using Polyfilla lightweight, aereated wall filler. This provides more subtle contours blending into the ground, as well as a good hard surface. I've also started adding some pieces of broken cork here and there - these will form the basis for various small rock outcrops, which will be titivated with much additional rockery in various grades...
The wadi...
You don't need to worry too much about the finish of the icing / plastering at this stage, because any rough bits can be knocked off once dry, and the whole thing is going to be covered in gloop and then sand in any case, so the wall filler won't be visible...
The oasis...
I've formed the waterhole itself by leaving a flat area of the base slab and creating the banks of the feature around that.
The flat surface will eventually take the 'water' perfectly...
The third board will feature a ruined adobe house situated on a rise, and with a bund or berm in front of it - providing a degree of cover for defenders, and a handy obstacle for attackers...
The ruin is knocked up from a few offcuts of foam-core board. Again, not a very scientific build - not measured at all, just done by eye. It's an adobe, and a ruined one at that, so perfectly straight lines and classical proportions didn't seem all that important
The impression will be fine, I promise you...
I have sat this edifice on a Styrofoam hillock - the white foam wouldn't be stable enough.
Eventually, the whole thing will be glued and pegged onto the green slab, and blended in to become a permanent fixture.
Yes, it's inflexible not being able to move your buildings around, but they look a darn sight better embedded in the landscape. And let's face it, I can move the board around, so...
And here's the ruin with its walls plastered, various bits of detail added, and the beginnings of groundwork, rubble and detritus added too...
More tomorrow, time and progress permitting...
01 June 2007, 05:20:20 PM