While searching for new items from the Shapeways/Star Ranger crowd of companies, I found a new shop doing not-Trek stuff:
These are the basic Heavy Cruisers of legend, and are pretty sweetly detailed. The "alien heavy cruiser" has already had its basecoat applied, I find it helps somewhat with the slightly roughness of the White/Strong/Flexible material (which is still way cheaper than the other materials). Coincidently, Klingon Armada and Romulan Armada (licenced Starmada variants in the Starfleet Battles Universe) just made their way to the E23 Warehouse for digital ordering, so now I have a game to go with them, although I'll be tweaking the ship stats to bring them more in line with the TV series. The Armadas are set in the General War (SFU)/post-movie (TV) era, and I'd like to scale them back.And then for my super-VSF project, using Iron Stars, I picked up Objects May Appear's Gothic Space Fortress. It's an expensive bugger, but the discount helped, and it's awesome. I think the Germans are getting it, but I'll see.
And then for Land Ironclads, also part of the VSF-unity, I picked up (from left to right) some self-propelled superguns (going to the French), a monster ironclad, going to the Turks, and well, the gingerbread house from hell. I'm going to make it the largest possible ironclad in the game, all tricked out with options, but of course it'll be stationary, so maybe some sort of battlefield HQ.
So all this madness, and the fact I'm spending so much time prepping and so little painting, has made me consider establishing a theme for 2011 around painting and terrain, and that's it. Only a few essential purchases (mainly terrain), and no more prepping until I've cleared the backlog that's currently prepped, for a year. More on this in a future post, as I establish my rules.
Wowsers! Those are some sweet looking models - the 'not' TOS ships appear really crisp - and the Gothic fortress is amazing - hate to say it, but is this resiny material the future, to the detriment of good 'ole sculpted metal? Some great stuff coming out of Shapeways now....
ReplyDeleteDigging the VSF pieces, too - great to see some unique and fresh designs for this coming to the market place - keep us updated!
I'm not sure if White/Strong/Flexible will be the material of the future, I think the "Detailed" plastic may be though, but it's at least 50% more at the moment. I think we're about 5 years away from prices dropping from the 3D printing process, even WSF is slightly more expensive than metal at the moment.
ReplyDeleteI don't think metal will go away though, because it's pretty well entrenched, is still cheaper, and allows for "art", e.g. a Bob Murch figure could never be done with a Autocad program with the same life in it.
I think the 3D printing will have a strong place for things like big pieces (e.g. the Gothic fortress would weight about a pound in metal!) and ranges that wouldn't be profitable in metal. It probably isn't coincidence that most stuff on Shapeways are spaceships and weird VSF.