"Route 66: Slammers at Salute 2013" Topic

We are working on stuff for the game at Salute:

I've been painting vehicles and Roger Dixon's been building scenery.

See below:

We hope you like!

In addition, there will be new Slammers 15mm vehicles on the day too! (least ways – that's the plan!)

See you on the day!

John Treadaway

That is almost reason alone to go to Salute.

Look forward to seeing it!

Sign me up!

Looking good John, I've got sinusitis at the moment so not able to paint up much for our game "The Von Trinkenessen Chronicles" at the moment.
Guy

I'm not picking up the connection between Route 66, some multi-story blocks and a bunch of futuristic AFV's!

Am I missing something?

John, looks fantastic. What out of interest are you using the Khurasan kit for?

Great looking buildings and vehicles. Are the vehicles 15mm? They look great for 28mm, but if 15s you have gone above and beyond on details.

Lovely work! One to watch out for at Salute.

Simon

Great looking stuff, as always! Thanks for sharing!

Beautiful stuff, as always.

Thanks all

@Oddball: yes, the game will be a 15mm game.

@JimDuncanUK: the idea is to have a rush along a road (in this case 'route 66') by a force of Slammers to get to a built up destination – a city. It's either going to be a rush from or to the city from the star port (I can't rememer which we settled on!). The Slammers force will be meeting opponents on the way.

@McWong73: the Khurusan kit (along with the Critical Mass stuff) will be opponents on the table on the day. However, with my Slammers rules hat on, I am invoking a policy of enabling people with extant forces (or who chose to buy new forces) from a variety of manufacturers to be able to use them as legitimate forces in Hammer's Slammers: The Crucible rules and will be supplying support material to suit. The CMG forces are the New Ukrainian Army and the Khurasan vehicles are the Antargran Regular Army (progenitors of the Thunderbolt Division: a force already in the rules book).

Fortunately Dave Drake described (or just mentioned) a wealth of forces in his stories and I have other manufacturers' kit in the pipeline to service this (Brigade and Combat Wombat/Armies Army to name just two) and will be publishing information and Big Detachment sheets for them all, as I did for the CMG forces link

Thanks again for the positive feedback people.

John Treadaway

Fantastic work.

Excellent work John.

Those combined buildings in the forth photo look simply amazing, is that the complete table layout you will be using for the Route 66 15mm Slammers game at Salute?

John, Great looking stuff as always can't wait to see the pictures of the table are the buildings custom made or a kit?

@ avamango: the complete table layout will – hopefully – look something like this:

That's Roger's plan sketch of the table. To give you an idea of size, each of those smaller tables on the plan is a 6ft by 2ft6in table to the whole table is planned to be over 30 feet long.

@ ARMY Strong: the buildings for the game will be a mixture of scenery we have used before (like Roger's Star Ship Port we used at the Sheffield game)…

… the drilling platform (also extant and custom built)…

…some shanty town stuff on the edge of the more up market housing and work areas…

…and the new city itself which is using a lot of worked over Kato buildings with plazas and so forth that Roger is building (see previous pictures: I think we have close to 20 of them), with the monorail I've built…

The eponymous road is to be built from plastic sheet with worked upprinted output stuck down to it. I have custom drawn the latter (it's a proper motorway/interstate type thing almost a foot wide). Here's a couple of examples: each bit is about 4 ft long.

So- the long and the short of it – is there's going to be a lot of table, a lot of toys and a lot of scenery on the day.

Fingers crossed!!!

John T

Some incredibly impressive stuff… love the roads too. Gonna have them as a download?

Thanks Mr H

Download on the roads? I see no reason why not. I haven't got them saved anywhere sensible at the moment (and certaily not at full resolution! there's about 20 of them and they are around 6meg each as a jpg [give or take]).

I'll have to think where to put them but: yes – I would like to.

John T

If you did all this, but in 6mm I would propose to you!

If you did all this, but in 6mm I would propose to you!

My wife would complain (she did last time…!)

But: you are too kind :)

John Y

fabulous!

Those buildings make me drool.

Impressive layout John

Wonderful looking game. Thanks for sharing with the rest of us.

Yeah looks great and gives many of us inspiration.

Those newest Kato buildings are wonderfully gritty and I love what Roger has done with them and the bases. Do you have a favorite place to source them from? The price has been a bit offputting for me to pick up a few.

The roads or should i say highway look superb with the skid marks and all that weathering you should add them to 'The Crucible' site for others to download maybe in the how to section. The 30ft gaming table planned for this up and coming Salute that is going to cause one serious bottle neck i can just imagine all the drooling gamer's standing transfixed on what i know will be a magnificent sight, i only live five minutes away ill try to get there this year. Zac

Very cool indeed!

Seconds the motion for road downloads. Those are truly superb, John.

Thanks all, again.

The Kato stuff (and, Roger tells me, 'Kato equivalence' type stuff) have mostly been sourced through eBay. They vary in price from (as Roger said to me last night) "4 for £20.00 GBP of which you might have to trash one as it's beyond redemtion" for 'Kato equivalence' buildings up to £60.00 GBP for 4 as a 'job lot' for Kato's (maybe half price) to 'mint boxed' at – effectively – full price (ie up to £45.00 GBP or so).

It's a mixture of whatever we can get, to be honest.

Thanks a lot for the road comments: Xara is a very powerful drawing tool – only one of the ones I use but probably one of the best: For those who have a copy of the rules or who look on the Slammers web site, all of the serious illustration work by me is all done in Xara. ie:

On the subject (again) or the roads, I will find a way of making them available as soon as I can. What would be the preferred format? Remember the pdfs are of really quite large slabs of road. Should I cut them up a little (after all – not many of you are gonna want 4ft slabs of road, I assume!!)

John T

At last….I've finally manged to join this group,(laziness on my part I have to say), so I can at last give John some support on this thread.

Still in the middle of building all this scenery for Hammering Route 66…and I'm hoping it's going to be a real show stopper at Salute in April. The whole project has been a joint effort from all those involved, and over the years we have amassed a large collection of Hammer's Slammers models and scenery which we are hoping to display at Salute in April.

I've really enjoyed making the scenery, and once you get over the 'how am I going to do that' part of the project, things always seem to fall into place and at the moment we are 'on target' to completing the game.
I have to say the best advice I could give to anyone building scenery is, look outside the regular source of ready built scenery. There's so much useful stuff out there where you least expect it. A trip to the DIY store or a charity shop can be a real eye opener!
More than happy to answer any question on the build so far if I can…and we are hoping to post up WIP photos as and when we get time to take them.

Go for it Roger! Nice to see you here!

John T

Yeah…..you know me John…lazy,lazy,lazy!

Golly, 30' long! Looks fantastic.

On the subject (again) or the roads, I will find a way of making them available as soon as I can. What would be the preferred format? Remember the pdfs are of really quite large slabs of road. Should I cut them up a little (after all – not many of you are gonna want 4ft slabs of road, I assume!!)

Would 6" x 6" inch squares be possible? I could then print them up, mount them, and then move them around and it'd probably be able to line up with most table sizes.

Mr H – those bits of 4 lans are already a foot wide…

My suggestion would be I could reduce them to something people could print on an A4 or American letter sized bit of paper but that's 297 by 210 in mm for A4 (sorry – I know that one by rote but I'd have to look upwhat american letter is).

I could do 200mm squares? – that's around 8 inches? Failing that, I guess I could cut the carriageways in half to have a '2 lane and one verge 6 inch piece' for half the width of the road.

That'd mean that a 1ft length by 1ft wide piece of road would need four 6inch squares assembled.

Does that make sense?

John T

By the way:

More work in progress on vehicles:

John T

Good looking vehicles JT……working on some where to display all this stuff in at Salute.
Folks….I just got hold of the print out of the Route66 roads and they are LARGE to say the least….not sure if there is a way around this to download….if you want wide 4 lane wide motorways..you're gonna get large print outs. Guess the only way would be to do very small sections….just not sure how easy they will be to work with as you will end up with a lot of short wide pieces on the board.
I'm planning to mount the Hammers ones on thin PVA and texture the run offs to match our clothes. Just got to make sure that the PVA won't warp at this length,(4' long), or the Hammer's Slammers will be in for a bumpy ride!

working on some where to display all this stuff in at Salute

Display it? Roger shouldn't we just line everyting upon the table and let the Slammers shoot them?

Just kidding, of course…

John T

Really looking forward to seeing this at Salute. Good thing th etable is so long, otherwise there may not be room to get a look-in around it!

Those vehicles are great… always love your stowage, do you create them yourself?

I like those KM medium tanks… how do they compare size wise to the other vehicles?

In terms of the road… anyway that is easy for you works for me. Even if you did a Tabloid size (11" x 17") i'd be pretty happy with that!

H

If you did all this, but in 6mm I would propose to you!

You could reproduce it all in 6mm……

Mr H

The stowage is a mixture of two things: pre-painted bought stowage from Hobby Master (ok, it's technically too big at 1/72nd, but a crate is a crate and they'll just have to struggle harder to lift the bigger jerry cans…).

Though I still have to weather and shade it, the advantage of it being pre-painted is some of the 'heavy lifting' is done for me (and – as you can see – we have a lot of work to do before the game!).

Other stowage is made by me in greenstuff, just because I want to get the folds and droops 'looking right'. The Hobby Master sets go for between £3.00 GBP and £5.00 GBP plus some postage on ebay and – depending what set you get – there are between 12 and perhaps 18 components in a set (I'm looking at the German Fuel Drums set as we speak, that I'd used on the Critical Mass New Ukrainians, and there are 4 oil drums and 8 jerry cans).

I suppose – on that basis – there's perhaps £3.00 GBP worth of stowage on this vehicle but I do like to load them up if I can.

Size wise, the Khurusan stuff is large, certainly – I'll do some comparison shots and proper photography when I get them finished (just working on the infantry to go with them). I'd say they are commensurate with the Critical Mass stuff and the bigger of the Old Crow stuff: so 'proper' 1/100th if you see what I mean!

Like I said, give it a week or so and I plan to have them all in a position to take some shots with them and produce the play sheet and so forth.

I will sort out something with the roadway sections.

@20thmaine: I'll get straight on that!! :) (at least the table would be a whole lot smaller…)

John T

Thanks for the heads-up on the stowage… I'll have to pick up some 1/72 sets… maybe even the aircraft sets that i've seen can be used!

Extremely impressive work, John. I look forward to seeing the game at Salute. You deserve enormous credit for the effort you put in year after year. I remember you writing in the magazines when I was still a lad – Fantasy Facts, wasn't it?

Henry
Battlegames

Henry

Thanks, and well remembered: I first did that column in Military Modelling in '85, I believe, and it quickly changed to appear in Practical Wargaming where it stayed for over a decade.

I finished writing it (though it was carried on by another author) until around two years before Pracical ceased publication (so to, I guess, late eighties at some point – I'm fuzzy as to exactly when!).

Seems a long time ago!

John T

Roger has been at it again!

"This town ain't big enoigh for the both of us"

Well, it might be…

John T

Those look amazing john… good show!

my my my