Battleship! Done and done!

Pew-pew!

Today I finally got it done. The Relthoza Brood class battleship. Phew! The other day I was looking through the archives of Fire Broadside and I realized that I started on this thing back in October. Sure, I haven't really touched it much since, but still! That's quite a while it's been looming over me.

I'm fairly happy with the result although I could feel myself cutting corners here and there. Oh well, it's perfectly fine for tabletop gaming. Some quick snaps:

I do wish the engines would've been a bit larger. Sure, it's slow but not THAT slow. 

 Note the hangar doors center left. Relthoza love themselves some fighters!

And the fleet so far:

Now that I've actually finished this beast I'm thinking about what to tackle next. The sensible thing would be to finish the fleet I think. Or at least three cruisers so I have the complete starter fleet set. But I think I might go with my Witch Hunters or the minis from Earth Reborn first.

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Quick Battleship WIP

I think I might go back and soften the highlights a bit. They're quite sharp at the moment.

Nope, I didn't manage to finish the battleship yesterday. However, I did finish the brown areas that are the most time consuming. Couldn't do much today since I was working late, but it'll get finished by tomorrow.

And I'm really looking forward to it! There's a bunch of stuff that I want to get started on but this colossus has been holding up the line...

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Carrier done!

I sat down today at about 21:00 and thought I'd finish the carrier. It wouldn't take too long I said to myself, and here I am at 01:00 - just finished. These Firestorm: Armada models are quite big and take longer to paint than you think. I'm almost dreading painting the battleship.

Anyway, here she is:

I love all the great pipes going into the engine! 

Tried to get a shot of the hangar doors (and the supposed light) but again it gets kind of washed out because of my bad photography setup. You can actually see it better at the two rear doors.

A group shot of what's done so far. 

"We break for no one!"

So there we go! My current goal is to paint the starter fleet (battleship, three cruisers and six frigates) plus one  carrier, so I'm almost there. Hehe! I'm now pondering whether to tackle the BB next or the cruisers. Hmm...

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Carrier WIP, part II

Last time I said that I'd given up on trying to paint the open hangar doors, but looking at the boring black rhombi I decided to give it another go. I'm still not sure about it, but at least it's better than just flat black. However, does it actually look like light spilling out or just... weird?

Not the best pictures as the ambient light is a bit too strong kind of washing out the interesting areas, but better than nothing I hope.

Haven't got around to starting on the brown parts yet... next time. :)

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Carrier WIP

Today it was election day in Sweden and while watching the vote tally I decided to start working on my Hive class carrier. It comes in three pieces; the large main hull and two side pieces covering the 12 hangar doors. Since I wanted some detail on the doors I chose to paint these separetaly so currently it looks like this:

Of course, it will look like this:

My original idea was to paint the open hangar doors in a yellow colour and use it to highlight nearby areas, but after some experimenting with it I couldn't get it to look good. I'm not very experienced with painting reflected lights, so I think I'll save it for another time. Hehe!

So, that's the grey areas more or less done, next up: brown.

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Pair of finished frigs

I decided to finish a couple of the frigates to make sure I was satisfied with the colours I'd chosen, and here's the result:

Contrary to the cruiser I'm quite happy with these! I think it's a combination of the model being smaller and me using a different (and faster! Yay!) technique. So I'll redo the cruiser in the same way and see what happens.

My original inspiration was actually the Shroud Mages from Spartan Games' other naval game Uncharted Seas. That's to say, brown, metal and brass. I early on realized that I couldn't use metal quite as extensively as on the shroud mages so went with dark grey instead, but I kept the brass details for a slightly steampunk look. Since the engines are quite hi-tech looking though I went with a blue/white sheen that I think makes a good contrast next to the retro feel of the rest of the ship.

So, feeling good about my Relthoza now. I'm considering skipping the cruisers again and go straight for the carrier. Hmm...

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Frigates WIP

I decided to try painting some frigates to see what they'd look like with my brown/grey colour scheme. This time I did a few things differently and they look more like how I imagined them.

They're far from finished, but here's a work in progress shot:

After highlighting the last two it'll be time for some washes and inks and then we'll see what happens. Hehe!

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Troublesome Arachnids...

As I've mentioned earlier I started painting one of my Relthoza cruisers a couple of weeks ago to test out a colour sceme. The Relthoza ships are kind of tricky as there's no particular colour that jumps at you when you see them (at least not for me), but I decided to try a dark brown and grey combo. I didn't really like how it turned out so I put it away for a while pondering on how to proceed.

However I brought it out again today and continued experimenting with it. My biggest problem is with the big flat  "wings" as they're kind of hard to highlight. In the end I did it kind of slap-dash just to get a general idea of the final look.

I still didn't like it and had more or less settled on respraying and trying another configuration when I decided to try and use a grey wash on the brown areas. This worked pretty well, giving the miniature the more indistinct grey/brown colour that I'd wanted from the beginning. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I've at least decided to postpone repainting. This is what it looks like at the moment:

The highlights and detailing are a bit hap hazardous, but you get the idea.

So, I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to this colour scheme and I'd love to hear any input or ideas about how it could be made better. Is it a scheme that can be salvaged or should I start again from scratch?


Oh, and it finally hit me why the Relthoza cruisers always have felt kind of familiar to me; they look very similar to the Minmataar Rupture cruiser from EVE online! Just look at this:

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Bigger is better?

Earlier I've mentioned the size of the ships for Firestorm: Armada in a kind of offhand manner, but I've never actually shown you how big they are. So without further ado, here you go Andy:

A Relthoza battleship, heavy cruiser and cruiser next to a UNSC battleship, heavy cruiser and light cruiser from Full Thrust.

Battleship vs battleship!

Cruiser vs heavy cruiser. Keep in mind however that the Relthoza cruisers are relatively short at only 6.6 cm (compared to the 9.2 cm Dindrenzi and Sorylian cruisers for example).

And a tiny little Warrior class corvette.

It's like the beginning of  A New Hope! Pew pew!

I think using Full Thrust ships as a yardstick works pretty well since the huge majority of starship battle games out there are roughly the same size, ie a cruiser about 5 cm and a battleship maybe 8-10.

The big chunky ships of Firestorm: Armada definitely look cool and impressive, no problems there. But the big size difference from other games makes it hard to mix and match. As you might remember, originally I wasn't very keen on the looks of the F:A fleets so I was looking around for alternatives. But in the end I kind of gave up because it'd look a bit silly with my miniature fleet against my friends F:A models (although, the Yamato models are a close match!).

In other news, we might get some Mordheim rolling over here! Which would be good as it's both fun (although I prefer Necromunda) and we can also use the models we paint in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Win-win... win!

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Oh no! Space Arachnids!

Yepp, today I put together the resin parts of my Relthoza fleet. So here are some grainy pics:

On the search for that great cosmic spider web... 

 Svarm class cruiser

Scarab class heavy cruiser 

Brood class battleship

Hive class carrier

I quite like these models. Especially their great size! Well, actually I don't like it because  it makes it harder to mix and match with models from other ranges, but it does look cool.

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Ackbar vs Adama

So, the other day I had just orderered a bunch of magnets from Amazing Magnets and was in the process of odering some flight stands from Litko. Then it occured to me that for the same price as 30 stands (including shipping) I could actually get a regular Firestorm: Armada starter fleet, which includes 10 stands. Hmm...

Also, as it happens, a friend of mine bought the mega deal where all four starter fleets are included, although he was only really interested in the Dindrenzi and the Sorylians. So he has the Terrans and Aquans just lying around. Now, I'll be the first to admit not being all that excited about the miniatures for those two races, especially the Aquans that I really hated when I first saw them. Since then though I've seen several pretty cool Aquan paint jobs and in a way it'd be interesting to paint them just to have more freedom to go a little wild and try crazy stuff. And ruleswise they might be a fun secondary fleet as they seem to play quite differently from the Star Blazers (ie Terran) fleet I'm working on at the moment.

The big problem with the Aquans as they stand today is their cruisers and frigates, they simply don't look very good. I like the carrier, the battleship isn't too shabby either, and the hammerhead design of their escorts and upcoming heavy cruiser looks pretty cool. If only they'd gone with that design from the start...

Then we have the Terrans. As I see it there's nothing really wrong with their design, it's just kind of... boring. The big flat areas don't appeal to me, without more texture they look kind of bland and toy-like. Actually, I think that's problem with the Terran design: they lack texture and detail which makes them look like toys and hence break the illusion of being huge lumbering spaceships. The Dindrenzi and Sorylians have lots of surface details in the form of hull plating etc. The Aquans don't have as much but they're supposed to be sleek and fish-like. The Terrans are just like flying shoe boxes. Boring.


I'm sure this could be offset with some clever painting, and just as with the Aquans it seems like they're trying to address this with the new miniatures that have a lot more detail, but still.

In the end I think it comes down to painting. They both pose a challenge in their own way. With the Aquans the challenge is to manage to get that fishy/coral reef thing going which makes them look a lot better (actually, as soon as I started thinking about them as fish instead of spaceships it kind of clicked). And with the Terrans it's all about providing details with your brush that aren't actually there on the model (kind of like this Zandris IV carrier).

So what do you say? Ackbar or Adama?

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