Gencon 2015 Recap

I got to spend last week at Gencon 2015, which was an absolute blast. I got to try out Robotech RPG Tactics on the table. I doubled my games played for Dropzone Commander, and generally got to take in all sorts of cool stuff. I won't try to capture all of it here, but I will try to hit some of the highlights.

 Certainly, the biggest miniatures splash at the con was Halo Fleet Battles, by Spartan Games. This was Spartan's first trip to Gencon, and they only had a small booth to show off their product. Fortunately, the War Store was there to provide some additional table space, and a store front for product sales. If they hadn't been, I Spartan would have been completely overwhelmed. They even had the gigantic Covenant flagship looming over the demo table to keep all the Human players in-line.

By Special Request

One of our local Catalyst demo agents asked me to provide a miniature for his next scheduled Battletech demo event. I told him that I didn't have one ready, but that I could get one done in time. The deadline for completion is December 16th, so we'll see how I do. I am not the speediest painter out there.

My first move, now completed, was to bite off a needlessly elaborate basing scheme to complicate the project and add work. No miniatures project can be complete without extra work. The picture you see here is as far as I've gotten, as of the time of this writing.

Battletech Conversions: AWS-8T

I'm not quite sure why, but I have a distinct fondness for odd-ball Battlemech configurations. My last installment in this series detailed, probably, the single least popular Atlas variant in the game. This one deals with a 'mech no less unusual, although it is probably a bit more useful in game terms.

Shown above is the AWS-8T Awesome. The 8T swaps out the traditional particle cannons of the classic 8Q for a set of missile racks and large lasers. Wacky to be sure, but really not a bad assault 'mech for the Succession Wars era.

Read on to find out how I built it.

Battletech Conversions - first in a series

I've been playing Battletech for many, many years. In recent times, I've been increasingly customizing miniatures with alternate poses, or with conversion parts to represent variant units. This short build  outlines the work I did to both re-pose and re-configure one of the Nova Omnimech models from Ironwind Metals.

I started with a lot of parts, and my first move was to start cutting pieces apart to make more. As you can see in the photo, I had already sliced the right leg into three pieces before I started taking pictures. In this shot, the right ankle has already been glued down onto the matching foot, and the whole assemblage has been attached to an Ironwind hex base.