Terrain: Landing Pad and Elevator Tower

Finished up a landing pad with an elevator tower for my sci-fi gaming. This build has been made with a few battlezone tiles to mix it well with my other sci-fi terrain. But the bulk of it is as always from scrap materials and homemade stuff:

Lots of plastic sprue, insulation foam, wire mesh, necklace chain, destroyed toys and miliput.

This one has been made to look and feel like my Industrial Crane (link).

The top of the elevator tower is made with a 50:50 miliput:play doh mix and the Greenstuff World Factory Floor rolling pin (external link).  Same technique as my sci-fi bases. The barbed wire is made with a 1$ wire saw from China. That one will give you around 4 metres of barbed wire.

The underside of the elevator floor is made from a broken fladbed toy truck. The chain for the elevator is a recycle shop necklace that cost next to nothing.

The elevator itself is made from sprue, plastic card and wire mesh from the hardware store.

The landing pad is a serprate buiolding. The buttom of it is made from battlezone tules. The triangular pieces are made from floorboard insulation foam. Really cheap stuff, that's currogated on one side. You'll get crazy large amounts of this stuff for nothing.

Handrails are sprue, barrels are superglue lids.

9 battlezone tiles and 6 half tiles. The rest is scrap materials, used to extend it all and keep down cost.

I went with a yellow and grey paint scheme like my other industrial buildings. The stripes on the triangular bits is easy to make, as the plates are currogated when you buy them. I've build this with superglue, and some places it has melted the foam - but it's an easy cover up painted it as battle damage.

The easy extra 'cube' extension from sprue is visible here.The cheapest way to get a lot more from your battlezone tiles.

The signs add a lot of detail to a terrain build. I compiled a bunch of photos from google and printed them on to adhessive sticker. You can find the sheet of danger and warning signs here.

The trap door in this tile was a tough one to make. Lots of cutting in the very hard, very thick plastic. But it's a nice little detail and adds an extra entry to the landing pad.

Tutorial: Wooden Palettes

Wooden palettes are great little pieces of scatter terrain. I love doing multi purpose terrain and these will work for all my modern, post-apoc and sci-fi games.

One of the issues with a lot of scatter terrain, is that it'll fall over and get pushed around during games. Often just becoming an annoyance or getting ignored. And like most gamers I have lots of small scatter pieces. Gluing some barrels, crates and cannisters to a palette will prevent that and give the whole thing a bit more mass

Materials:

• Popsickle sticks / coffee stirrers
• Match sticks
• Super glue (or wood glue)
• Clippers (or hobby knife)

Step 1:
For each palette you'll ned 4 popsickle sticks and three matches.

Step 2:
Cut of the round ends with your clippers.

Step 3:
Cut the four popsickle sticks in half, for a total of eight pieces.

Step 4:
I use super glue (but if you're patient you can of cause use wood glue). Line up the three matches on three popsickle sticks. Went it's lined up, I dap superglue on all three popsickle sticks and drop the matches into it.

Step 5:
Turn it over and add the last two popsickle sticks. Doing it like this will make sure you don't run out of space before using all 5 sticks.

Step 6: 
Turn over the palette and add three sticks to the other side.

Done palettes: 
Using super glue makes it fast to build these. If using wood glue, I suggest you get a very large wor space going. So you can start multible palettes at the same time. I build 12 palettes in an hours worth of hobby time.

Scatter terrain:
Anything goes for scatter terrain. But keep you eye out in second hand stores and at flea markets. The oil drums below I got for 10 Danske Kroner, that's well below 2 EUR, 2 USD or 2 GBP. The bunch of metal pipes are from an old dinosaur toy set and the wheels are from a broken toy car. The remaing cannisters and boxes are Mantic Games battlezone stuff. I've cut it up and rearranged most of it. 

 Showcase:
 All painted up and weathered. I've added danger stripes and warning signs to some of it using these 'Warning Danger Signs'. I've glued the scatter pieces to the palettes, in such a manner that there's room for 25mm round bases on all of them.

 

Printable: Warning and Danger Signs

A great and easy way to add some quick details to your builds is with some signs. I've made a sheet of signs, stripes and the like. It's all photos from Google, that I've resized, copy/paste, mixed and match with Paint-Fu.

The PDF is A4 sized with a lot of sign ready to use in 28mm and 20mm scale gaming. It's a really easy way to add detail to your modern, post-apoc and sci fi builds - especially the larger ones.

I've printed the page on a sheet of adhesive sticker paper, stuck the entire thing on a sheet of 0,5 mm plastic card. That's a lot danger and warning signs for your terrain projects.

The file can be downloaded through this link: Warning Danger Signs.pdf

The sheet
Click the image to see it in a larger quality.

Examples
Stuck to 0,5mm plastic card and then it's easy to cut out the signs you want to use.

 

Warpath Universe: Ogre Mercenary

I really like this Ogre mercenary model for Deadzone, there's something about him that reminds me of the Super Mutants from Fallout. I painted him up in the same colours as my Marauders, but without any GCPS insignia.

Unlike many of the other models this is Mantic distinct in its feel. So this one could fit into Necromunda as well without feeling like the wrong brand - if that's something you're into.

I haven't really been using mercenaries in games of Deadzone. But for Star Saga there'll be character cards for all the Deadzone Mercenaries, so they'll properly see some action there. He's also gonna serve some gangs in Scrappers.

The model is on a homemade base. See how to make them here.