"Sci Fi structures" Topic

Which sci fi structures would be most useful to see made for 15mm wargaming? Sorry, not interested in making 28mm. Please describe them in some detail. Examples might be prefab colonist huts, futuristic bunkers, etc.

Pre-fab colonial huts and communal buildings (clinic, security building, meeting hall, etc.) would be good, especially if they were followed on by more permanent looking structures that incorporated some of the prefab structures for use in more established settlements where the prefab buildings were expanded by their occupants.

Other useful scenic items might be warehouses, landing pads, control towers, and other accouterments for a VTOL landing port.

Prefab barracks, as well as Bug Holes and Space Demon Eggs, clustered, single, maybe some built into the ground, and cave walls. In fact, some sort of cave system would be neat, do floors and walls.

I'll second the request for prefabs, but something that looks a little less like a trailer park!

Military:
A command post, complete with satellite-dish/antenna farm.

a couple VTOL pads, one quick&dirty with WW2-style pressed metal sheeting, one a little more permanent, raised structure with hidey-holes for the groundcrew to duck into if someone comes in hot with a broken bird (kinda like the deck edge of an aircraft carrier).

A control tower, with phased-array antennas on the sides of the building.

Revetments for ready-5 aircraft and/or hangars (probably 6-8" across).

Civilian:
Warehouses and cranes for a dockyard or railyard (no railroad scale is close enough).

Subway access tunnel entrances.

Elevated mass transit trainstations. Several different sets of tracks, so that the builder can choose between multirail, monorail, and maglev.

Some farm houses and rural clpped-together looking buildings, and some modules for industrila facilities of a small nature – water treatment plants, small mining/extraction/processing plants – would be good; Basically, anything that would be worth capturing or seeing that the opposition *doesn't* get would be needed ( it certainly is in 6mm! )

Offshore oil rig platforms or a more sci-fi equivalent.

Raised monorail sections, platform, and monorail cars.

Multiple dwelling pods that are stackable with a walkway attachment and stairs when adding levels.

Underground villa dwellings (mound or hill with entrances inset around or within a crater or central opening), like say uncle Owen's moisture farm.

Large circular dimensional or off world portals/gates

Mine entrances

Mountain bunker blast doors

Covered and open door missile silo pads

Underground city exhaust vents

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot one really important detail: make sure any balconies are at least 20mm wide across the inside, so that figures based on pennies can use the balcony.

Definitely need some 'objective' type buildings, although every building I suggested would work as an objective.

Let's see here: Desalination plant. (No water = no people)

old-school vertical mineshaft entrances.

Maybe a baby Weyland-Yutani atmosphere processor?

Offshore oil rig platforms or a more sci-fi equivalent.

Just curious, how would such a thing feature in gaming?

Tunnels/interiors? If the surface isn't somewhere you really want to be, for instance. Some doors, airlocks, platforms & so on. It would be best if they were fairly clean & generic, without too much detail, because it's a lot easier to damage and mangle something clean and simple, or add gubbins to it for a more worn, well-used look.

Oil rig platforms would be handy for scenarios like "the space-president has been kidnapped by space-ninjas, are you space-bad enough space-dudes to save the space-president?", and the components would overlap heavily with… well, tunnels & interiors, my suggestion. Basically, skirmish games, and as objective scenery in larger games?

I also like the pre-fab colony components idea.

something that looks futuristic and not gothic, and not just modern/historical buildings 'adapted'. Clean lines, curves – something more like sprawling metropolis' EG Coruscant from SW, Blade Runner, Mega City one – not the full things obviously but along those lines.

Not gothic, no worries in that department!

Offshore oil rig platforms or a more sci-fi equivalent.

Just curious, how would such a thing feature in gaming?

What Fullerena said. Also, I envisioned them as being usable over water or other liquid planet surfaces, for resource mining. If designed right they could also be used on solid surfaces as underground gas collection sites. They'd be an objective that can be defended from various interconnected platform levels.

I'm primarily a 28mm Sci-fi gamer, but when I dabble in 15mm there is more often a bigger game objective such as liberating a colony, securing objectives of strategic and/or cultural importance- landing areas, mines, power facilities, communication sites, supply centers, government buildings, temples, etc.

I can't offer many particular additions myself, but can add a few votes and additions to those that have already been put up.

First of all, I'd like to put in another vote for prefabs. These are likely one of the most versatile pieces of sci-fi terrain. They can stand in for anything from colonist homes, military field barracks, research camps, smugglers camps, etc.

Field gear wouldn't be bad. By this I mean, rigs for drilling, fueling, repairing that are not on vehicle mounts. Think repair yard or mining gear. Also atmosphere processors, fencing, moisture vaporators, power generators, wind farms, and their like would work well here too.

On the note of the "oil rig" idea. Done right, this rig could be done more as a platform sold seperately onto which various other components could be added to make it stand in for a number of purposes. Example below -

a) Add shelters, prefabs, command centers, you get an elevated colony platform for water worlds or planets where being close to the ground may not be the best idea. Also make for great shanty town for post-apocalyptic settings.

b) Add towers, dishes, command post, you have a great central building for a more developed colony.

c) Leave mostly clear, paint with field marking and add a few bits for fuelling, repair, resupply, maybe a few cargo crates and you have an elevated landing pad.

d) Ad heavy equipment or industrial buildings and you have a mining, processing or manufacturing rig.

So, I can see a raised platform being versatile, if it were just the platform and it's legs, railings, stairs, etc. However, the question comes in whether or not this is something worth manufacturing and what the cost would be to do so. Is it something that will sell or are gamers more inclined to build their own platforms and populate it with smaller components purchased from you.

-Eli

Large-scale industria, particularly tanks, pipes, and towers, are well-covered by the effectively scale-less Armorcast line.

Add a few control shacks, security stations for wall/fence lines, a line of portable toilets, dumpsters, vending machines, and other minor items that can set the scale for otherwise generic terrain.

Khurasan,

Geodesic dome tents would be a great start!

Here are some links, to links, to more links:

TMP link
TMP link
TMP link

CC

"Which sci fi structures would be most useful to see made for 15mm wargaming?"

You might try this place for a few ideas. It was designed for 28mm but I'm sure the ideas they offer could be scaled down.

skankgame.com/Rustech.html
link
link
link
link

I steal ideas from there on a constant bases.

All very interesting guys, please feel free to keep it up! Still trying to wrap my head around the oilrig though -- I suspect something like that would be huge and cost hundreds of dollars ….

Concept for a converted oil rig: link

The original conversion, now rather sad: link

The key here, perhaps, is not to make and sell the entire thing, but to make the surface bits, or, in the case of indoors skirmish, the interior fittings.

So some sort of over-water built-up area. Not sure how much demand there would be for that.

For other 'equipment', I'm thinking of objectives. Food, water, power.

Food (and other loot) is covered by warehouses.
Water, already mentioned a desalination plant, and Armorcast makes storage tanks.
Power: either small generators or larger structures, but may already be covered by railroad accessories (ie, transformer substations).

I second power.

Fancy substations and the like would be neat.

Also, some sort of futuristic "farm equipment", like a really really big harvester of sorts, would be neat.

In a similar vein, strip mining equipment would be fun.

Khurasan,

As I pointed out in my earlier post, a rig of that sort needn't just be used for over the water. Sci-fi settings allow for a lot of leeway in the use of such a platform. An elevated platforms could be just the things for your space colony, factory, jungle or whatever settings.

Farstar, I think you and I are on the same page here. Make the platform itself and maybe the legs but let the individuals decide what's on the platform.

-Eli

But a platform like that would be quite hefty, very expensive to have made, and would probably end up being very expensive to the gamer. I'm wondering how many gamers would want to pay $150 USD (probably more if it's supposed to be big enough to game on as your "table") for a raised platform representing an oil rig?

Wouldn't gamers instead simply make a gaming surface of that size using posterboard or some such, then add features (which would be generic industrial or perhaps residential based on what the platform is being used for)?

atb
khurasanminiatures.tripod.com

Let's perhaps look at what to fight over out in the colonies of the near/far future.
* Mining operations ("oil", "ore" , "crop")
* Strategic installations (command, deep space detectors, planetary defence, space port)

Ie things along the lines of "you have what I want" and probably quite small facilities at each planet.

And then "barracks, housing" etc to get reinforcements from when attacked.

Monorail is also a must! :D
(Even if there's probably a very basic two rails track between locations.)

Khurasan,

Good point there. Though I wasn't imagining a rig big enough to be the table, it is not the sort of thing that is all that difficult to make. Though I can see the fun of such a structure, best to make more affordable items that could be used to populate individual players' own homemade rigs.

-Eli

Well, that's why I was putting sizes on things. Hangars, warehouses, and other big-industry structures can get unfeasibly big if you're not careful.

6-8" square is right at the limit between easy to make commercially, cost to bring to market, and simple enough to build yourself.

Look at the Forgeworld 'Anphelion Base' link , link , and link . It's actually a set of individual 'domes', hallways, and intersections. With careful construction, you could actually make something even more modular: outside walls (potentially double as bunkers), inside walls (double as tunnel sections), roofs, etc. Lots of individual castings, but lots of flexibility, too. Only the intersection pieces could be challenging to cast, all the others could be one-side molds!

Remember, K, 15mm games mean a 2x2 or 2x3 table for a lot of the skirmishing that is terrain-heavy (sure, Flames of war is best on a BIG table, but no FoW player wants an oil rig). Making an oil drilling rig (or Return of the Jedi landing platform) that's 40cm square might not be too outrageously expensive, especially if you make the legs as a separate pieces.

Actually, the rig top could be as simple as 4-6 of the basic 'landing pad' kits, minus some of the deck edging! Make the rig underside as a separate kit (any habitable structures directly under the deck, which may or may not include the tops of the legs), leg tops as a kit if necessary, and leg extensions as another kit. That way, gamers have a choice of how much they want to put together, and that determines how many stages they buy.

Then there's the top buildings and whatnot. I mean, a drill derrick looks a lot like the winch tower for a vertical-shaft mine, so that's actually two uses for one set of molds (just needs a different base). A lot of structures on oil rigs are pretty pre-fab, so all you'd need is an 'industrial steel' base to put them on instead of a 'rocky ground' base! Many oil rigs have an operations tower (re-using the control tower kit on a different base), and maybe make a cantilever base for a VTOL pad. Presto, lots of expansion abilities, minimal risk to the manufacturer.

There is something to be said for having an entire, interlocking/expandable terrain system.
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What do people need:
Hospital/clinic (yes, you can build one yourself, but a prefab one wouldn't hurt)
Housing (ditto)
barracks for military/police/security (sources of reinforcements/objectives)
Ways to get from home to work, roads/rails, vehicles (ditto)
places of employment (ie, reason for the fight in the first place!)

Lots of good ideas.

I'd like to see some Sci Fi builing and prefab 'frontages' that can be attached to cardboard/plastic formers to create full buildings economically.

Cheers
Mark

Well, Lion, looking at it the other way, gamers can easily use smaller components of retail terrain to make their own oil rig, especially if they are as generic as you're saying. Then they can fill in the gaps to make an oil rig if that's what floats their boats (no pun intended!). The special built stuff like legs and rig undersides would be very large, very expensive to manufacture, and IMO too obscure to ever pay for itself. Look at it this way. If you want to have a 15mm vehicle (any genre) made, you're looking at about $500 USD just for the master sculpt for a tank-sized vehicle. And that's only 3" long or so. Something that's 16" square with enough detail to warrant someone buying it in the first place is going to cost a small fortune to have created and the resulting mould would be quite large and complex.

I suspect that most gamers wanting such an experience will simply make the rig as large as their tabletop and decorate it as follows, easily doable using poster board, especially if the whole tabletop size is limited to 2' square.

That said coming out of that are some interesting ideas about modular terrain and items that could be used as terrain features on an oil rig. Thanks for that guys!

Mark, that's a great idea, but what size boxes are we talking about? And what sort of formers do you mean?

We did some of the buildings you are talking about (pre-fabs, desalination plant…but called it a solar energy plant).

Here: link

For 6-10mm, and they are not really too expensive IMHO.

Not many know us for our non-historicals. We are trying to change that.

Best
Tom Dye
GFI

Ah, I think we're having a misunderstanding, K.

What I'm talking about is making the *smaller* kits with the ability to combine them into a larger structure designed in, kinda like how the Hirst Arts molds work.

The hazards of not having a drawing program on this computer…

An Oil Rig, from the top down:
Superstructure. Whatever parts the builder wants. The derrick crane could simply be two A-frames with the cross-members as separate pieces, so possibly one single-sided mold would suffice.

Deckplate (single-sided mold, 8" square or so). Use the deckplates alone as a ground-level VTOL pad, or add the Structural Framework kit to make a raised VTOL pad. Alternatively, add the substructure to make a taller building with a VTOL pad on the roof, repeat as desired until you have as many stories as you want. Put several together to make a larger platform.

Substructure (living quarters, etc). Two single-sided molds for roof and floor, then a choice of how to build the walls (either more single-sided molds for separate outside and inside details, or some double-sided molds).

Structural framework. This would be the most complicated part, all angle-iron and truss girders, with a few pipes thrown in for good measure. I'm not sure how complex this section would be to cast up, to be honest, but the Derrick crane would be a good trial run.

Upper leg sections. These might be part of the structural framework, to make footings for raised landing pads. Basically, round or square sections with the attachment bolts for the framework.

Leg extensions. pure, simple cylinders or rectangular solids. Depending on the size and shape of the upper legs, these may be simpler to just give instructions for the right size cardboard tube, or to make from cardstock.

Does that make more sense, K?
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@Tom Dye: Those are pretty cool, and are similar to what we're talking about here.

Lion in the Stars explained a breakdown better than I could have. In originally suggesting the platform as an idea, I wasn't thinking a massive structure for an entire tabletop. I was thinking something that takes up perhaps a square foot.

Then again, I'm just as likely to throw one together for myself out of Platformer/Hexagon plastic bits and pipe from an HO scale oil refinery.

Does that make more sense, K?

Well, I appreciate the continued explanations. As far as I see it, at least some of these pieces would still, at the end of the day, be specific to building an oil rig or another big legged platform. I doubt someone would want to buy a leg all by itself. They are buying it as part of a big platform, and as far as I can see, the same goes for the deckplate, substructure, and so on. They'd be pieces that would have limited utility outside the framework (pardon the expression!) of a big platform like this. It's an awful lot of stuff to have sculpted and cast, and probably sold for a decent amount of coin, for what I'd think would be only an occasional gaming experience. Not sure someone would want to invest a few hundred dollars on something like this unless they'd game on it over and over again, and who wants to have their weekly game on an oil platform?

At least that's my opinion about the big pieces that would be necessary to "bring it all together" as a rig. If there are lots of individual parts that can be also used as standalone terrestrial structures, well, that's the kind of stuff I'm inquiring about, but I think the gamer's going to need to put them together himself to make something like an oil rig.

Then again, I'm just as likely to throw one together for myself

I think if someone gets the itch to have such a battle, that's what they'd end up doing.

I think I'll have to throw some sketches together to get the idea across. You're still seeing the individual sections as only useful as part of a larger whole, while I have these images of Hadley's Hope, the habitat from the Abyss, Moonbase, and half a dozen other movies or TV shows.

While a whole oil rig (or the Imperial landing platform on Endor) might be a little much for 15mm, there are some smaller examples to reference.

Lemme get back to you.

Well, actually, I do get that about the individual sections, that's why I wrote:

If there are lots of individual parts that can be also used as standalone terrestrial structures, well, that's the kind of stuff I'm inquiring about,

It's parts like the legs and the big platform for all these individual pieces to be stacked on in order to get an oil rig that I think would be impractical to market. Someone else may be able to make it work, but I don't see doing it myself.

I see what "K" is going for so do it as you see fit "K". If I want an oil platform then some pvc tubing and 1/4" by 2'x2' and I have a platfrom made cheaper then "K" may be able to produce add some wires and smaller tubing for detail, some card stock for plating, and you can have a very nice looking platform, add the modular prefab kind of things that I believe "K" is going for and there low cost for everybody "there is my two cents"

An offshore oil rig could double as an on-shore mining rig too, on Earth, the moon, an alien planet, an asteroid, and/or as an offshore radar sentry post. The USA used the latter during the 1950's and 1960's, to detect enemy bombers and ships.

Just add a golfball to the top of the building for the radar dome.

Bits, like GZG's new range. Windows, hatches, doors, ventillation, lights, control pads (though these should probably be part of the doors), vending machines, rubbish bins, etc. With stuff like this you can convert any box of any size into a building.
GZG stuff is very good but different styles would sell just as well, I'm sure.

Ah yes, vending machines are a great idea.

When your Mk. III Laser Rifle goes on the fritz, just pop over to the local vending machine, and for a few electronic credits more, upgrade to the Mk. II Plasma Rifle instead.

Trade-in's are accepted as well by the machine, if presented in a reasonable condition.

Ah, I completely forgot the ever-essential street clutter… I mean, hard cover!

Vend-its, free-standing ATMs, even dumpsters.

Guys, I decided instead to start off with a civvie sci fi vehicle, and I think it came out GREAT! Hope to be bringing it to you in a month or two (probably more two than one).

Buildings are intriguing too though -- may follow.

"So some sort of over-water built-up area. Not sure how much demand there would be for that."

Honestly, I know of no one that does 15mm Post Apocalyptic boats, barges, items for "island" defense (tops of submerged buildings), even jetskis, etc.

From the many comments offered by gamers, it is clear that they are in demand.

TMP link
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CC
TMP link

"From the many comments offered by gamers,"

First link: 38 posts, 16 of which by CC. The many comments offered by gamer is more like it!

Dude, there were another 22 posts there. As a moderator of sorts, I was providing more links, images and related updates, as food for thought.

So, no I'm not the only one to comment on those threads (see the other ones).

Glad to see you are counting the posts on my threads. Are you doing the same with this thread by Khurasan? :)

CC

Before we go all water on the brain, if I were in the manufacturing game I'd be producing modeular buildings that are flexible enough to be used as 'first footprint' colonist outposts, scientific/research stations and military bases.

I'd then create a complimentary 'landing pad' set including a couple of blast deflectors and a refuelling station.

Street clutter = of course. Both Modern (Middle East city) and downtown Sci Fiville.

Cheers
Mark

Would you guys be willing to preorder a water platform that was, let's say, 8" by 7" and perhaps 3" deep, with four legs that would make the bottom clear abouy 3" from tabletop? Cost would be at a minimum $150. USD If so.please post here in response. You would have to prepay via paypal and commit to buying it -- I would consult with you as to look but final decision would have to be mine. I'd need to get at least six orders, I think.

Let me know -- it will take my sculptor from other projects but I want to make what you guys want.

Prefab buildings to create Hadley's Hope type colony.

Street Clutter (lots of it).

Some specific buildings to establish the purpose of the colony.

Command Bunker

Bug holes for your new Paraschnids.

Type A looks like an ant hill.

Type B looks like it just burst from the ground.

So, no I'm not the only one to comment on those threads (see the other ones).

No, and I didn't say you were. You post up and down the boards, though, and then post and post and post in the threads you start, sometimes posting half or even more of the messages in the thread, which makes the assertion of "all this interest" in a topic based on the "many comments by gamers" more than a little amusing.

Would you guys be willing to preorder a water platform that was, let's say, 8" by 7" and perhaps 3" deep, with four legs that would make the bottom clear abouy 3" from tabletop? Cost would be at a minimum $150. USD USD If so.please post here in response. You would have to prepay via paypal and commit to buying it -- I would consult with you as to look but final decision would have to be mine. I'd need to get at least six orders, I think.

Let me know -- it will take my sculptor from other projects but I want to make what you guys want.

Thank you, but no. $150 USD terrain pieces are more in line with MBA and their prepainted 28mm buildings. If that is the price needed to make it worth your effort on a 15mm piece of the size you suggest, then you're better served concentrating on smaller structures that would be in greater demand. I look forward to seeing what you decide on.