"Colony and hive clutter" Topic

More questions for my 28mm scifi bug hunt game. I have decided to base my bug hunt scenarios on very small scale skirmish actions. They will primarily involve fighting in the interior of a small human colony (Aliens) or hive penetration. I want to have a lot of interior details like furniture, barrels, crates, computers etc… The purpose is to channel attacks, movement and allow the players to create barricades etc… Bugs will be able to hide in some of the items.

What manufacturers make interior details for a space colony?

What kind of details should I put in my hive other than eggs?

Any do it yourself sites or examples?

You definitely want to check out Grendel: link and Ainsty: ainsty.co.uk .

Lots of excellent sci-fi resin clutter.

There was some good crate and barrel stacks from Warzone, check out Prince August. Also Void 1.1 had quite a bit, not sure if Grendel is selling them again yet.

I am also looking for a 28mm forklift and golf cart. Many of the items will be of use to players they will be able interact with their environment.

"What kind of details should I put in my hive other than eggs?"

Food! Food is what comes first to mind. How about chambers with mushrooms. These could be any scale or size as these are space bugs, right? Also some loose, already harvested mushrooms dropped by the workers as you bust into there home. But who is to say these are just veg eating bugs. Piles of bones (not necessarily just human), shells of other life forms.

One could also imagine that bugs might be pack-rats. They might pull almost anything into there tunnels. The ruins of cars, trucks, shuttle craft. Things from the surface world such as tree trunks and boulders. Perhaps piles of dead bugs and bug poop in trash chambers.

DyeHard
15mmvsf.bagofmice.com/index.html

@DyeHard

Fantastic ideas! I always thought of bug hives as being clean and orderly with workers removing waste and dumping it outside. Now that I think about it spiders surround themselves with the remains of their victims. It would be real cool to have a rusted out car with a skeleton sitting at the wheel deep underground. Lots of ideas keep them coming!

I am amazed that companies like Grendle stay in business not offering photos of their products. They assume a description like Science Fiction accessories is suffient to sell an item. Customers must be very trusting in England!

Piles of food like little hills blocking lines of sight.

Piles of bones and carpaces and (the car)

Honey comb when ruptured will release piles of goo to wade through.

Functional heavy weapon in the refuse pile.

Hirst has a new line of sci-fi molds, which include crates, barrels & detailing for cargobays/medbays. The look is very clean, more like star wars than aliens.

link
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JR has asorted Sci-fi dressing, at the bottom of the page he has computers, generators, med beds, etc…
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Ertl makes a Gator model which I have thought would be perfect for driving around a base complex.

auction

Barrels are always good, Fortress has some nice ones if they have fixed there website issues.

Ertl Gator is perfect it has a nice utility look to it and players could load things in back.

You guys are great!

Antenociti's Workshop has great detailing stuff.

barrule.com/workshop

Also, for civvie vehicles, check out GZG's line of 25mm resin; it'll work with 28mm.

DG, most gamers use 1/43 civilian vehicles with 28mm minis. It's not really "correct", but it looks right.

Kovap does a 1/43 fork lift and Road Champs does a 1/43 golf cart. You can search for them online, or search Ebay:

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You might also be able to find 1/48 fork lifts among O-scale model railroad kits.

Also, the Ertl Gator is 1/32, which will dwarf 28mm minis.

Ertl makes it in serveral differnet scales. The one in the auction is only 3 inches long.
The seller states he is guessing on scale.

DG, if you don't mind spending the time, skip over to your local hobby store that carries something like Evergreen polysterene and grab some sheeting, tubing of diffent shapes and so on. It's shockingly easy to start cutting stuff up and gluing it together to look "scifi". If you want to go the extra mile, you can get rolls of screen at a hardware/home improvement store for a couple of bucks and it makes great decking, just glue it down to your styrene floor.

I know a lot of people prefer to just buythe stuff, but seriously, you spend a long weekend or two (I usually grab some friends to help out)just slapping styrene together, you'd be surprise how much money you save and how easy it is.

Great topic.

For human colonies I use all manner of crates and barrels. Tamiya makes 1/35 (and now I think 1/48) plastic barrels. The Warzone crates mentioned earlier are excellent, too. Sometimes you can get small wooden barrels from craft stores that can be glued into stacks and painted up. I've made wood pallets/skids from coffee stirrers and have a 1/43 forklift.

I often like human colonies to have construction material laying around as cover. I've chopped up plastic bars and stacked them into piles, cut tubing for pipes, etc.

I also have trash piles. I cut low hills from beaded white foam and then hot glue model scraps, wire, and other debris to it. Then I paint it with black texture paint and drybrush or paint the raised details.

Grenadier or someone else made a line of resin Sci-fi cars for the old Future Wars range. I've got a bunch of those. You might find them on Ebay or a hobby store with old stock.

I ran some Shockforce games two weeks ago with most of the above items. I haven't had time to download and sort through the good pics but I plan to post a battle report in the next week or two.

The Alien colony ideas above sound great. I'm half tempted to try making some discarded shells by coating model carapaces with something that I can peel off, paint and then glue in piles.

There could be people in there. Webbed to a wall for later feeding or herded into a room somewhere.

Fortress Figures make some cool looking Larva Pods but they don't appear to have a working website anymore, so it looks like they may not even be in business.

-B6

@Red5Angel

My plan is to make most of the walls floor and interior using the method you described. Pipe fittings and machinery will also come from the hardware store. I cannot afford most of the terrain on the market in particular whole systems. Some of the more technical bits are affordable if I only have to buy one or two of an item.

@Goldwyrm
I would love to hear your battle report and if you could post pictures even better. Pallets full of building materials would be very easy to make. It would be easy and affordable to create a storage room that looked like Home Depot.

@saxondog
I could use some zombies and cover parts of them with resin to show the recently dead. A few live humans stuck in resin and screaming their heads off would be cool. Alerts the bugs to where you are.

I have even had thoughts of making a subway train with several cars that run on a monorail.

I played a game once where they guy who owned the table had sawn a bunch of paths into styrene sheeting and then melted into the walls with acetone or something… he painted it all after it hardened and it was VERY icky/organic looking stuff to wander our marines through while they hunted for bugs.
He had also done up some machinery out of sculpy that was based on the old 2D car counters for Tyranid equipment out some of their boxed games (Tyranid Attack?).
It looked like a lot of work but was very cool… too bad I only played there once.

Wooden crates always strike me as very anachronistic in Sci-Fi games.

Do bugs shed their skins as they grow? Paint a bug in a grayish scheme as a shed skin, and leave it alone in a room for the players to freak out over, and waste ammo on, until they realize it's not moving and somebody gets the nerve to check it out. Then put a real bug alone in a room nearby, and see if the players hesitate to attack before it moves. By then, you'll have messed with their heads quite badly.

If you're doing this on the cheap (always a good idea), don't forget a package of bendy straws. Excellent for piping and such.

Eureka make some modern desk and computer sets:

link

Also, if you can't find enough imges of the Grendel items as mentioned, I have more images here of parts of the range I really liked enough to buy:

link

For SF accessories I like Worldworks games card terrain. Cheap ($15) and sturdy if printed onto card. Mars Station gives a large range of SF bits such as stairs, computer terminals, tables etc. I've always found that they mix well with my resin stuff. Their buildings can be flimsy so I just cut the walls in two (interior and exterior)and glue them to foamcore and Hey Presto, a fully painted building.

link