Asteroid with our name on it

Well, I like space, I like informative and visually pleasing graphs and I like asteroids, so I guess this is like the perfect storm or something: here you can see the 17 near Earth objects (NEO) that are closest to hitting us. There are many more of course, but these are the 1,000m diameter and up boys that really would spell doom for us if they hit. Have a look!

So, mark july 8th 2027 in your calendar and hope for the best! :D


From Power of Visualization via FastCo Design via Gizmodo.

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What's going on?

Haven't been much activity here lately. Basically I've been really new busy with a new job and some other stuff, so I haven't had time to really paint anything. Naturally, I'm still thinking about my different gamer projects as I work and here's an update about what I'm doing and what I'm  planning to do in the (hopefully) near future.

Spaceships!
First off, I'm still in the process of painting my Relthoza fleet. I've started on the battleship which I think might get finished during the weekend. However, I'm not really planning any more Firestorm: Armada purchases at the moment. It's a pretty good game with pretty good models, but I'm not sure if I'll actually get to play it all that much and with that in mind, I'd rather paint minis I love rather than ones I simply like. Which leads us to...

More spaceships!

I've mentioned the ships from Irrational Designs before and I think it might soon be time to invest in some belter ships (seen above). They're simply some of the coolest sculpts around! I'm also keeping an eye on Cold Navy and With Hostile Intent models but I think that might be a while longer.

15mm 

I've got my small Heavy Gear force that I want to finish (although that's closer to 12mm), but I'm kind of hankering for a more generic hardish scifi army. Or armies. What I have in mind right now is two small forces loosely inspired from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the video game series Red Faction. That is to say, one paramilitary "Earth gov" force and then some Red Mars rebels. I'll probably use mostly vehicles from GZG and infantry from Rebel Minis. As it happened I came across Rebel Minis' infantry and thought they looked ideal and then I discovered that they actually are Earth gov and Mars rebel minis in Two Hour Wargames' 5150 First Contact. Hehe!

Board games

I came across the above picture on BoardGameGeek a while back (click on it for full effect) and it lead me to the hard SF game High Frontier. It's a descendant of Rocket Flight (which was also developed by Phil Eklund) and in it you play different factions in the race for space where you try to go out and explore/exploit our solar system.
It uses realistic physics with real or near-future technology and I'm increadibly excited to try it out! However since the small plastic rockets you get to use as pawns are kind of boring, I'm going to put together a few cool semi-realistic looking ships using different civilian and support ships from GZG. I think I would like to use this tanker ship (painted by Yui over at SCN), but I wonder if it might be a bit too large. Hmm...

Other board games on the horizon is Dust Tactics, Alien Frontiers and Mansions of Madness. More about these as I get them. :)

Roleplaying games
Although we haven't been able to play lately WFRP3 is where it's at. Our group of heroes have just arrived at Stromdorf so things are about to heat up. Also I very much would like to try Diaspora. Both because I'm in a very hard scifi-mood as of late and also because I'd like to try out switching GM now and then and play a much more loosely structured and more improvisation centered game. We'll see...

Mordheim
You thought I'd forgot this, didn't you?! No no, it's still there, puttering along one model at a time. Actually, today I finally got my witch hunter captain that I ordered from Black Scorpion Miniatures almost two months ago! No fault of theirs though, quite the contrary. There was some kind of mix-up at my local post office and Black Scorpion had to send it out to me three times before I finally got it. Oh well, all's well that ends well.


There hasn't been much painting but I have managed to squeeze in some board gaming. First off, Claustrophobia and Cyclades - two awesome games from Asmodée! Claustrophobia is a kind of Space Hulk-ish dungeon crawler, but it plays much quicker and playing the monsters is just as fun as playing the humans. Cyclades is an area control games taking place in the archipelago of ancient Greece and it feels kind of similar to Chaos in the Old world, although this scales well from 2-5 players and I think it might be even quicker than CitOW.

I've also played Death Angel - The Space Hulk Card Game (great fun, although a little lengthier than I had expected) and just the other day we managed to get four players together for a game of Age of Conan. It's been a while since we played it and it was a lot of fun! And naturally it didn't hurt that my Turanian hordes won the day! Muahaha!

So... that's a little status update. Hopefully things will start picking up again soon.

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