"Go down to the sea in ships" Topic

I'd ordered two Bronze Age ships in 1/72 for my Chariot Wars gaming. Printed by my friend in Adelaide – great job.

The delicate parts of the prints (oars, ropes, rails) needed replacing with mundane string & wooden matches but are now ready for painting.

theminiaturespage.com

‌"TMP link

theminiaturespage.com

‌"TMP link

theminiaturespage.com

‌"TMP link

I'm looking forward to when, crawling with Sea Peoples, they grace my wargames' table.

I suspect many of us have "dream projects" that only became practical once 3D printing arrived.
What unusual periods, armies or terrain pieces has printing finally made possible for your gaming?

Will love to see them crammed with Sea People on their way to their inevitable defeat against the might of Ramses III!

I'm still holding out for the Boxer Rebellion in 6mm with all the various nationalities and the full Legation area complete with the Tartar Wall.

Not possible, I think, but the combination of 3D printing and Etsy made my recent Fantasy and SF bars & such vastly easier. I've been able to target individual figures and adjust scales as necessary.

You're sure about those Sea Peoples, though? Wouldn't you rather land on the beaches near Troy? Or try to get back to Ithaca afterward? To set out after the Golden fleece, or to find a new home for the Trojans? Those ships have a lot of potential!

Definitely, RP.

The Sea Peoples have tremendous flexibility, also. I have three BA armies – Hittites, Mycenaeans & NKE. The People of the Sea can plausibly fight with & against all of them.

At some stage I'll need to get walls & a gatehouse & tower for the period 3d printed.

Good program, Ochoin. Remember the batten at the base of the walls, and the join of the new walls to the old section by the olive tree.

Not many fortifications live on in cultural memory three thousand years after the fall of the city they protected.

So…..I see you said a friend printed them….but…from where did you buy the STLs

Dave, my friend has a 3d printing business. I explain what I want, he locates usually a number of files & I choose the one I like best. For this project, there were 6 to choose from.

I think 4 were pants & only two looked OK. I'm assuming the files are readily available on the web?

What unusual periods, armies or terrain pieces has printing finally made possible for your gaming?

A few:

Ironclads! The ones made after the ACW, before the pre-dreadnoughts, mostly in Europe. There were hundreds of them, but after 1870 they were nearly all one-offs, which makes them an impossible project for a company trying to make money on miniatures sales, but not for enthusiasts making CAD designs.

1/144 tanks and vehicles. I inherited a bunch of pre-painted 1/144 tanks from 21st C. Toys, Takara, Dragon, etc. but they had become collectible and too expensive for gaming. The 3D printing market is fixing that problem.

Plastic WWII planes. After the release of Blood Red Skies, the market for 1/200 fighters and bombers really expanded, and nearly all of them are 3D printed, or just STLs.

There's also been an increase in availability of buildings, though I'm not sure that many are better than what came before.

I have a wishlist of things I'd like to get but nobody makes (yet). I still don't have any interest in getting a 3D printer or spending hundreds of hours in CAD software, so I may never get those until/unless I change my mind.