More Battletech Terrain - Kurita Weapons Depot

Hi everyone,

It's now February, 3039 in our campaign.  The team (which hasn't yet decided on a name for itself) has taken a job working for House Davion's equivalent of the CIA -- the Department of Military Intelligence, MI-4.

Here is a quick post with more of our work on terrain.  And, here is a quick link to our prior posting:  Terrain Update
 

The team has taken an assignment working for House Davion's Department of Military Intelligence MI-4:  Covert Operations Division (known as the "Stealthy Foxes")

The Mission:

• Receive intel on the location in the McComb system of a House Kurita weapons and ammunition depot.
• Assault the depot - overcome opposing forces.
• With control of the depot, ensure neither the weapons nor ammo are available to House Kurita forces - i.e., take these off the market.
• Payment:  since there can be no traceable connection to House Davion, the payment is modest -- but the team will receive 100% salvage rights including rights to captured munitions and equipment.

So, with this in mind, we knew we would need some terrain to make the attack more fun.  Here's what we came up with:

• Could we build a walled structure?  If so, that would make an assault more fun - and make the scenario more interesting visually.

We got to work on what to use to build our walled structure.

• Use recycled packaging plastic for wall pieces
• Use medicine bottles for corner columns
• Use magnetic joints to allow for flexible set-up [we might use these again in the future!]

Scrounging up four medicine bottles - we had three small ones and one medium sized one.  Figured that would be OK because we could mount more things on the larger one.

 Here are our four medicine bottles -- nothing fancy :)

Next we marked the positions where we could add magnets to the medicine bottles.  

Was a bit tricky to mark the bottles at 90 degree angles.  Managed to find a triangle square ruler which worked.  Note the darned-slippery plastic which would not stick to superglue!

Note:  the plastic of medicine bottles does *NOT* stick well to superglue.  Even when we roughed up the surface, the superglue was poorly bonded.  We had tried superglue first - but had to re-glue all of the magnets with epoxy [you'll certainly notice our epoxy blobs on the final pieces].

We then used the trusty band-saw to cut our recycled plastic into wall pieces.  We had learned on some prior efforts that if you cut the lip off the bottom of medicine bottles (to make the shape more clean) you also destroy the structural integrity of the bottle.  So, for the sake of time, we kept that structure and simply put a notch in the wall pieces.

Wall pieces are ready!

Then, with the magnets glued to the bottles, we needed some steel on the wall pieces.  We carved a slot out of the ends of the plastic and epoxy'ed nails in there.

Mounted nails to the ends of the wall pieces with epoxy

Then, we roughed up the plastic.  The cool thing is that it is made with a honey-comb internal structure.  Looks like it just might be some ferro-crete material!!  So, we sanded it down to make that internal part show a little bit.  We also sanded through in spots to create battle damage.  [After all, McComb is a border world - and has seen Kurita - Davion action at many points in the past.]

Sanded on the wall pieces to make them look worn and battle-damaged

Then, we added some camo-type painting -- aiming for a city pattern.  And, it seemed a bit plain after that, so we 3D printed a House Kurita banner with the one available on Thingiverse.

Here's our finished product:

Our finished walls with battle damage and Kurita banner.  Used some structures from Game Kastle Mountain View for the building inside.  We certainly need to have something ready for that which isn't blue (next time....)

General take-aways:

• The magnets worked.  They are a little bit small - but do hold up the walls.
• The medicine bottles look like medicine bottles.  *We have some work to do there!*
• The camo-painting was fun.  We need a better set of patterns for doing this.
• We need to do something to cover our epoxy blobs.
• And, it would be fun to have a gate of some sort.

And, lastly, the battle damage was a good idea!

 Lance member Buckaroo (a.k.a. Bob Bobson) fires on the Kurita strong-hold with his Centurion!