One Scale to Rule Them All

It's time for the 10mm sci-fi figures in my collection to shuffle out of the regular rotation.  For a variety of reasons, I'm abandoning the scale.  There are too many great looking 15mm figures out there for me to ever buy and paint them all.  The selection is broader. Ditching the 10mm terrain frees up more space in the limited storage box.  The list goes on...

That's not to say I'm getting rid off all of my 10mm figures, though.  Pendraken's line includes a fair few 10mm figures that work great in 15mm.  Their space minotaurs match up well, for example.

15mm.co.uk, two Pendraken 10mm, Khurasan

The other salvagable pieces are the green !aliens.  They are a little undersized, but for a mindless swarm army, they'll work fine in 15mm scale.  Yo check it:

Oh, and speaking of limited storage, wait'll you see my fancy-dancy new case...

More Tens

Those of you that are just here for the 10mm figures can rest assured that we're not done with those.  Tonight I finished painting up my son's Sand Raider infantry pack.  These are Dream Pod 9 figures for the Heavy Gear game.  Darned if I can find a link or even remember what they are called on the package.  My son wants to use them as alien planet local tribesmen...sort of a Red Fremen style guerilla force.

These stand taller than the Pendraken figures that make up the bulk of my forces, approximately 12mm tall to be a little more precise.  To level the playing field a bit, I've left off the washer bases.  That way their heads reach about the same height.  They are meant to be mounted three to a hex-base, and fielded in four base units.  They'll be single mount infantry in my game, same as the rest of the figures.

I can't imagine I'd use these guys for skirmish gaming - Heavy Gear is a giant fighty robot game where these guys play a limited role - there just isn't enough variation in figure to be able to use them for Tomorrow's War without modifying a bunch of squad support and heavy weapon guys.  This is part of the reason I'm bumping up a step to 15mm gaming.  I haven't been at this very long, and already feel that I've done everything I can with 10mm.

Heavy Marine Support

This is Pendraken's new style for Marines with Heavy Weapons (SF3).  Those assistants might make decent noncoms or other officers.  Might have to assign a couple of regular troops to serve as assistant gunners are re-position these pointers as LTs.

Snipers!  This pack comes with five teams of snipers, but two will suffice for this force.  The other sets will be put to good use backing up another force.

About those armored marines; I painted the visors greenish, and gave their shoulder pads bright logos to help players discriminate between these guys and the regular troops.

Played another warm-up game of Tomorrow's War this past weekend.  I think I have a decent enough grasp of the rules and enough figures to put together a platoon sized force list.  It might be light on the anti-tank stuff, but that won't be a problem until I order up some tanks.

Next Up on the Block

More Pendraken boys for the Kitchen Sink sci-fi extravaganza.  Turns out Pendraken is revamping their sci-fi line.  This first batch of dudes is Marines is SF-1, Marines in Battle Armor.  Now, I was expecting something a little more like what's shown in this picture here.  What I got was something more like SF2, but with added faceplates and heavy shoulder pads:

New style SF-1.

I sent an email to Pendraken complaining that I got the wrong package, and their customer service asked me to double check.  Lo and behold, I went back to my already painted figures and realized...I'd already bought and painted a pack of SF-1, but never made the connection.  Here are the two types of figures next to each other for comparison:

SF-1 on the outside, SF-2 on the inside

Whoops.  The plan was to have one force of Imperial Guard style marines and one force of Space Marine style battle armored troops.  Not a big deal because I can use different caliber troops with Tomorrow's War - some have more armor than others.  But I'm going to have to go back and make it a little more obvious on the table which ones have armor and which ones don't.

Also, it turns out you can still get the old style heavy suited marines from Pendraken, but you have to shoot them an email.  It's like a secret menu just for the cool kids.

I also picked up some heavy weapon teams (SF3) to add some firepower.  These are some pretty solid turrets they pack - can't imagine them humping these into combat without some sort of transport, but they are easy to spot on the table.

And we'll round the whole thing off with some additional support in the form of two man sniper teams.  These are from the Falklands British line (FLB-15 to be exact).  At this scale, and given that they are wearing gillie suits, they'll blend in with the sci-fi types with no muss and no fuss.

Size Matters Plus

Here's a comparative shot of each of the different types of figures in my sci-fi collection. It's worth seeing how they all stack up against each other.

Action shot!  The lizards are caught by the human marines in a classic pincer movement. 

Finally got around to getting the BNL logo onto the side of the colony buildings.  This outfit doesn't have nearly enough logos to fit the canon universe, and it uses colors other than red, white, and blue, too.  It must be a prequel colony or maybe one of the other ships in the fleet pulled a Voyager and wound up half way across the galaxy where they gave up on the cruise and built their own space-empire.

Empty Queue

What kind of terrible wargamer am I?  These mounted lizardmen represent the last of the figures waiting to be painted.  At this rate, I may have to resort to painting more of my son's figures.  These are the kinds of problems you want to have.

It's hard to get a good idea of what exactly what Pendraken's SF28, mounted lizardmen with lazer weapons, looks like.  The title says it all, but in most of the online photos you can't really make out where the lizardman ends and the mount begins.  Hopefully these photos will give everyone a better idea of the details on these little gems.

Each pack comes with five figures, three of these
multi-barrel gunners...

...and two of these heavy machine guns.  This is two photos
of the same two figures from different angles.

All my lizards are blue, having evolved to hide among the blue plants of the local red planet. The lizards are gray for much the same reason, to hide among the rocks.  Conveniently, that results in figures that provide contrast between the lizards and their mounts.

Lizard Cavalry

Figuring out how to stat these dinosaur riding, laser cannon wielding lizards is gonna be a whole lot of fun.

SF28 - Mounted lizardmen with laser weapons

And again with an enemy and ally for scale.

Cut to the Scaly Chase

Surprise!  Finished lizardmen.  I forgot to post the unpainted versions of these little critters.  Whoops.  We're looking at four  orders of Pendraken's Lizardmen with Laser Weapons (SF27).  Each pack comes with five figures, two of the ones shown in the first photo and three of the ones shown in the second photo.  I separated the photos by the two different model types that come in the packs just for the sake of clarity.

And of course, one shot with a human marine to show how well they scale.

Space Cows!

Behold!  Cows...in...Spaaaaaace!

These are Pendraken's SF36, "Minotaur with Heavy Weapon", but they look like space cows to me.

The guy in the center has sergeant stripes and white hair, just in case I need a sarge for future rulesets.

This one's for the ladies?

The figures tower over human sized figures, and wouldn't look at all out of place on a table as a force of 15mm cowmen.

On Transports

I erred in the pursuit of making this sci-fi extranganza as portable as possible.  The terrain boards took up too much space in the box, leaving me with little left over for a figure box.  Then I found these:

Four small craft boxes at the local craft store (Ben Franklin for those of you keeping score at home) for about five bucks.  Just large enough for one faction:

 They fit snug inside the big box like so:

These have been lined with magnetic paper liberated from the local pizza joint - the magnets are 1/4 page ads with the phone number on them that you're supposed to stick on your refrigerator.  I cut them up and glue them down to give the troops a non-slick surface.

These figures are even small enough you can turn the whole thing upside down and they won't fall off.  That should save a few dings and scrapes.

New and Improved Aliens

To refresh your memory, these aliens were originally painted with a bright shaded to dark, and it really didn't work.  I hit them with a thin Devlan Mud wash, and that helped, but these critters needed another dusting of bright green highlight and bone white spine to polish them off.

These guys are starting to suffer from the dreaded "too many layers of paint" syndrome, but it seems to work.  It adds a bit of a mottled texture that looks organic.

They finally look like real threatening aliens and not just random green blobs.  Especially the babies.  Nasty little things.

Awful Green Thing Repair

It's amazing how starting to train for a marathon (told you I was a beast), finding out your wife is expecting a new baby, and getting transferred to a new office in the company that means a 20% cut in hours and pay will interfere with miniature wargaming, isn't it?  No wait, not 'amazing' - that other thing.  The opposite of amazing.

Still and all, managed to take some advice and try to patch up the !aliens tonight:

This is the results of a test batch - a smarter man would have tested the light to dark technique before using it on 30+ figures - with one untouched figure next to a figure with some thinned down black ink.  The black wash helps bring out the limbs of these guys, so we're almost there.  I'll try a light highlight on the black ink to add a little more texture, and then these guys will be done.

Baby Mommas and Babies

Just pictures of the last of the Pendraken Aaliens today:

Three lovely ladies, all painted up and ready for a
night on the town.

Ten little babies all in a row.

Action shot!

Side by side comparison of the three types of critters and
a human marine for scale.

Awful Green Things

These Pendraken alien creatures are normally painted black for reasons obvious to anyone who has ever seen the movie Alien or Aliens or so on and so forth.  Not me though - I'm a rebel. (Slight pause here for me to give a firm Barney Fife sniff and hoist up my belt buckle.)  My alien critters are green for three reasons:

1.  Green shows up really well on the reddish battlefield.

2. It gives the aliens a unique and cohesive look - I already
painted the marines black and gray, but no other
faction has green as a primary color.

3. Someday I hope to make a 3D "Awful Green Things" board using
a collection of 10mm miniatures and these are perfect for that.

The paint job looks a bit off here because I started with bright green and shaded up to dark green.  Then I lightly hit them with a dark purple and finally a dusting of bright white.  That brings out all the textures, but without clothing, they tend to look like greenish blobs.  To compensate, I painted the spines and tailbones white - that helps distinguish the ass from the elbows a bit.

The real problem here is that these guys have no real faces - just a blank slate.  That more than anything makes it hard to tell front from back.  Not a huge deal, these are aliens after all, so we're gonna roll with it.

This is three of the medium alien packs from Pendraken - I'll have queens and babies for you tomorrow along with a size comparison.

Civvies

Those alien eggs can't hatch from their own chests, you know.  They need warm bodies for incubation, and the marines need something to protect, so here's some cannon fodder.  

SF20 - Civilian men

SF21 - Civilian women

As usual, excellent sculpts from Pendraken.  SF20 comes with two poses, and SF21 with three, including two smaller figures that could serve as Newtish children (and I don't mean Ginrich) for that all important moment of, "They mostly come at night.  Mostly."

One Two Three Four...

...Who here loves the Marine Corp?

The humans have twenty solid spacejarheads to protect them from a hostile universe.

Pendraken SF2

Note the BnL logos on their sleeves.  Pretty proud of
them, to be completely honest with you.

The BNL logo on these guys was easier than it looks.  It's just a red circle with a white slash and a blue dot in the middle.  Sort of like a blue eye on a red background.  Gives these gray uniforms a splash of color.

The guys in front are Pendraken SF1.  Near as I can figure the only real difference is that the guys in FL2 have full face covering screens.  Otherwise they are all lightly armored infantry in near-future battledress.