Data Sphere

Starting a thread for my planned space station board. I'm a Haqq player so far and the idea of giving my QK guys a caravansarai of their own mess around in appeals. We've got a lot of Nomads in our local group as well, so more space station/spaceship concerned folks!

The plan is for a modular, flexible board, with some standard-sized walls and other modules to make it easy to reconfigure between games.

I'm going to be basing the walls on 3"x3" measurements, with most wall units being 9 or 12" long to try and strike a balance between flexibility, practicality, and set up time! Most of the walls will be 3" high, with some bigger walls 6" or possibly higher, with catwalks halfway up. I want a mix of relatively open cargo bays and hangar spaces with tighter corridors or living areas, ideally about a 50/50 mix on the table.

To test out the basic proportions, I've built an Objective Room/Armoury. It's 9" a side, with half inch buttresses sticking out to increase the footprint to 9x9 from the standard 8x8 room, and 3" tall. This one will be usable on regular tables as well as the planned station table, of course. I built a roof for it as well, but don't plan on using that when it's "on station".


I thought about using 4"x4" units to do the modular walls & bulkheads with, but that would make the double height big bulkheads 8" tall. After building the Objective Room and messing around a bit with test pieces of scrap cardboard, I think 3x3 units and multiples thereof is indeed better than 4x4.

The other thing I want to mess around with is lights! I bought a batch of LEDs and some other basic supplies from China just recently and the first lighting install will be red LEDs in all four corners of the Objective Room, with the batteries and wiring hidden under the raised floor. Pardon the really terrible late night photo...


I'm trying to finish some regular scenery and figures right now before our first-even Infinity tournament event near the end of October, so I doubt I'll get more done on this project before November, but thought I'd start a thread to commit myself to this Battle of the Boards, which I think is a really great idea.

Edit to add a really awesome piece of inspirational artwork I just found today: http://conceptships.blogspot.ca/2015/09 ... zhang.html

Looks good, I can't wait to see the updates. Some time ago I have also been thinking about space station/space ship terrain but never got down to actually producing it. You should check out USC Noctis made by Scenery Planet, it's a great set of terrain and may serve as an inspiration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRdg9HKg39w

Look like someone has a set of Daler-Rowney acrylic inks They are quite useful, no?

I've been playing around with space station ideas too, and objective rooms. I think the key is good wall details. Things like screens, access panels, signage, pilasters etc. Any plans for this sort of thing?

red harvest wrote:Look like someone has a set of Daler-Rowney acrylic inks They are quite useful, no?

I've been playing around with space station ideas too, and objective rooms. I think the key is good wall details. Things like screens, access panels, signage, pilasters etc. Any plans for this sort of thing?

The inks are great, I don't use them as much as I used to but they get deployed on figures and scenery regularly. Lovely saturated colours. Also useful as props and ballast when gluing scenery together!

I entirely agree on wall details and general greeblies. I've got an order of display screens coming from Antenociti via Warsenal, I'll be doing a bunch of my own, and my plans for details and panels include borrowing a friend's Silhouette Cameo craft cutter and figuring it out to mass-produce detail bits and panels in light card. I've also been creating a lot of graphics, ads, and display graphics to put on the walls and other surfaces.

That Noctis board is spectacular, I'll have to watch the whole video this weekend but I stole a few glimpses of it just now. It's more worn, rusty, and rivet-y than the look I'll be going for but there's lots of texture and detail going on there and some really nicely designed and interesting modules.

Inspired by Captain Spud's spectacular Yu Jing transport ship (see his website or the official forums) and using the same Creative Commons-licenced images that he started with, I've actually started doing some test graphics and test prints for this project.

I'll be doing it as printed graphics over mattboard or foamcore, for the most part. I want to make sure there's lots of doors of various sizes to keep things interesting, including some double-door airlock arrangements that will be tactically challenging.

The basic walls are on a 3x3 base setup, with multiples of that for different heights and widths. Standard walls will be 3" high and either 6" or 12" long, with a few 9" just to break the grid up a bit.

Hangar bays and cargo areas will have 6" high walls, often with a catwalk halfway up at the 3" mark. I might do one or two 9" high modules to frame really giant hangar doors, but not too many.

I'm also planning a few more room/"building" modules like the 9x9 Objective Room seen upthread, all based on the same 3x3 base measurements. This will allow me to do some more detailed segments like office areas, labs, or whatever.

I've done a single 3x6 set of wall unit graphics so far, and I'm going to organize a master graphic file in GIMP with many layers that I can change quickly and easily to have lots of unique arrangements to keep everything from looking identical.

I'll try and add a picture here this weekend, in between Christmas shopping and various other real-world chores!

6" long by 3" high panel, propped up temporarily by a Hunzakut and a Ghulam. Many, many more to go, but I'm satisfied with the look and I have a system evolving to quickly and easily crank out slightly different wall sections.

Great "dirty sci-fi" feel to that wall section. Can't wait to see the whole project!

Moving forward in fits and starts and seldom in the direction(s) first thought of!

I've gotten most of a set of big walls done, suitable for a hangar or cargo bay area. They're 12" long by 6" high and have a variety of doors and hatches in them, and each also has an access tunnel long the top to increase the play possibilities.



Much more here on the blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2016/02/02/infini ... gar-walls/

I also put in an order to Impudent Mortal and picked up several of their items that will become part of this space station project, namely the Elevators I posted a review of recently: http://www.warbard.ca/2016/01/31/review ... elevators/



...and also two sets of their Near Future Walls; I assembled the first set of those last night. Haven't done a full review or anything of them yet, though.



I'm hoping to have a usable table up at our Infinity event this Saturday - pics if it happens!

Got the setup out onto the table for the first time today; obviously lots still to do but everything was well received by the other players at our little local tourney. I was happy to see some of the extra features I'd designed in, especially the overhead access tunnels in the tops of the walls, get used every game. I got a few good suggestions from some of the other players, as well.

Onward - starting with buying more grey primer, as my current can ran out on Friday evening while painting the walls...

Elevator tower to offset long runs of walls and make the access tunnel less of a long thin shooting gallery. 3"x3" footprint, 6" tall like the walls.



Random ground clutter - tanks for the station's environmental system, fuel storage, who knows? Will it object to being shot at? Hmm, there's an idea for house ruled terrain!

Less than a month left until the end of this Battle of the Boards thing!

Yesterday I got distracted from working on the hangar walls to do a bit of cardboard scenery design. This is the result - there's six styles of locker all told, this is just three of the designs printed and assembled.



They're pretty much the size of a matchbox, 2" tall, 1.5" wide, 3/4" deep. I'll eventually be tweaking the designs to do pairs and trios of lockers all as single units, and the PDF will be up on my blog for free download at some point.

I've gotten about half the detailing on the hangar walls that I want done. The plan is that the insides will be mostly grey with various hazard striping, warning labels, and that sort of thing; the outside walls will be mostly white with brighter accents and ads, along with some stripes/warning labels/etc - trying to give an impression of having working areas and public areas of a station.

Those big walls have a lot of potential. With the right sort of connectors, you could re-arrange them to make all sorts of interesting structures.

red harvest wrote:Those big walls have a lot of potential. With the right sort of connectors, you could re-arrange them to make all sorts of interesting structures.

For the moment I'm not planning on anything other than another couple of basic square corner pieces and possibly another piece with the same footprint and purpose as the elevator tower, but yeah, with the right corner bits I could do all sorts of fun shapes - half-hexagon cargo bays instead of the three-sided one in the photos above, that sort of thing.

Because the dimensions are all standardized (and written down!) this is the sort of project I'll probably come back to now and then after it's "finished" and add new bits to expand the potential and add novelty.

Everything set up last night for a 200pt QK vs Hassassin game with one of our new players. I won with QK by 1 VP; would have been higher if I hadn't gotten kill-focussed and burned orders wiping out Hassassin cheerleaders I could probably have ignored...



The overhead access ways allowed one of my al'Hawwa Hacker infiltrators to skulk deep into the Hassassin zone, pop open a hatch, and blow to Hassassin Ghulam away with a Boarding Shotgun from behind. He then got his brain blown all over the access way by the opposing Barid Hacker via Brain Blast, in one of the more entertaining Hacker vs Hacker duels I've ever had.

Today being the deadline for BoB, I'm not going to get this table completely finished by the end!

Still, major progress has been made on the six big wall sections in the last few days.

I've finished and installed all the sliding doors in the oversized doorways, done all the surface decoration on all the wall surfaces, installed the ladders up into the second-level control room, and done the base spraypainting on everything.

I've also built another new small module which can be used as either a corner piece or, like the elevator tower, to offset a long run of walls to break LoS both at ground level and up in the overhead access tunnels.

I'll get more photos up a bit later this afternoon; right now everything is lying around with spraypaint drying on it!

Photos, at least of four of the six modules, the other two still have wet paint on them...


Walls, grey (hangar) side.


Walls, white (civvie) side.


Corner module, white side, with Azra'il.


Corner module on grey side, Azzie again.

The corner module can be used either as a corner, as in the first two pictures, or in a straight run of wall to offset two wall modules to break up line of fire.

No idea what's going on with the actual Battle of the Boards but this is the most complete build thread extant for my space station, so I'll update it again!

Been a while since I did anything major to this scenery set, although my P-Works "Combat Plaza" PVC mat did arrive and looks pretty awesome.



After spending almost all my hobby time in October painting up Haqqislam's awesome Maghariba Guard TAG it's time to switch back to some scenery for a bit! I fired up my printer last weekend and ran off a whole bunch of my Infinity-themed ads and graphics, and some stuff I've found elsewhere on the web.

Here's the current state of the white-painted "civvie" sides of the big space station bulkheads.


I want about double the density of advertising for that full cyberpunk-esque cluttered feel. I'm also putting together a bunch of ID and directional signage - ID numbers on doors, elevator #3 that way -->, fire extinguisher here, that sort of thing. I also want to modify my existing utility/maintenance/emergency lockers to put them as if they're built right into the walls, and some maintenance access hatches as well.

I'm also working on a set of Dock Status boards - think Arrival/Departure displays in airports, but for a commercial space station somewhere in the Human Sphere.

Also, a graphic I created a while ago finally got added to a freestanding big (5" tall, 3" wide) billboard...