Planetfall Magnetised Storage

Now I've mentioned the games room is coming along, so I've been sorting out my various gaming model collections - Firestorm ships, Zombicide, Strange Aeons and Deadzone figures in GW cases, larger models in display cases...but that leaves a lot of Planetfall stuff...question is, where to put it?

Now some time ago I acquired a postal letter rack thing - I don't know the official name for it - the kind of thing you'd get in an office for distributing letters to staff. I picked it up off our local Freecycle - a community where unwanted items are advertised to others to use if they have a use for them.

By itself this letter rack is not that useful - deep, shallow shelves are not that easy for using with many things other than letters! I had a plan however...First, I bought some sheet steel - 0.8mm thick and 625mm square...the company allowed up to 10 cuts for free on this, so cutting in half in one direction and in thirds in the other produces 6 sheets of about A4 dimension - the same as a standard piece of paper (in Europe). In other words, a piece of steel that will fit the letter rack.

I also ordered some flexible magnetic sheets - these were A5 size and 0.8 mm thick, the sort used for making fridge magnets.

The steel sheet also works well as a straight edge to cut the magnetic sheets on my cutting mat, so the first stage is to get everything lined up to cut a 4cm wide strip...

...and the cut it using a scalpel or similar blade.

This is repeated...

...until we've a stack of strips.

After that, this 3cm rectangles are cut off this strips, either as before with the scalpel

Or even using scissors and an infantry base as a guide

In any case, you then have some appropriately sized rectangles of magnetic sheet, and your small Planetfall bases. make sure you get the right side up, as typically only one side is magnetic, and you want to make sure that's NOT the side you're gluing to the base!

It's then a simple matter of adding superglue

And attaching firmly

Voila!

i found that a couple of drops of superglue was sufficient, and the base can then be used to quickly spread it around, either with a circular or dragging motion, to ensure there's glue over most of the base/magnet union without getting too much seepage of glue (you can see a little in the bottom right hand corner of the base above).

This can then be put on the magnetic sheet until its fully dried

Even so, it will cling to the steel sheet...

...even upside down!

When it's completely dry, you can then trim off any excess sheet from the base. I just used scissors for this - it's quick and easy.

Repeat until finished...

And here they are stored in the letter-rack - or at least the start of the forces

I've ordered some more sheet as I got through the small A5 sheets quite quickly - and as you can see I've a lot of Planetfall stuff to do.

Upgrading bases again...

Back at Warfare last November I bought some micro-dice holders to put on some of our FSA bases, this intended to replace crew and Hull Point damage markers. Unfortunately I ended up buying the wrong ones (a size too small) and so this never happened.

The the other week I saw a post on Facebook by Dan Bird, with dice held in place with these little laser-cut MDF frames. It prompted me into action, seeing as there's no reason to wait until a show with all of the internet at my disposal (and nothing in the way of a local gaming store to support). I thus ordered a bunch of these from Minibits (www.minibits.net), together with some Blue and Red micro dice. A few days later these arrived, and it was off to work!

Here are the Minibits pieces and dice - I bought a pack each of red and blue, plus a pack of extra frames

So step one is to take a standard base, two frames (one for HP, one for CP) and superglue them on. I went for the extreme corners, leaving maybe 0.5mm gap between base edge and frame.

Like so! Now it is possible to stop at this stage...

...and as you can see it's very effective.  You can do the same thing for large bases and also for small bases where the HP or CP is larger than 6 - there are a fair few of these, but the majority of small bases have only one of these parameters exceeding 6 at a time, so a 2+1 configuration also suits.

I'm not a huge fan of clear bases, however, so I sprayed mine black - this also helps in covering up any fogging of the acrylic from the superglue.

I will then go for a simple starfield effect as I did before (see http://mannmomo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/upgrading-flight-stands-for-fsa.html), but for the moment they have seen their first service in the Ba'kash giving the Sorylians a real "Ba'kashing" (too much??)...thought I failed to take Oscar's Falx, it FSD escaping with just a single point left.

Anyway, I hope this inspires you to look at possible upgrades of your own  let me know if it does!

Upgrading flight stands for FSA

I'm not a great fan of clear acrylic on the tabletop - although its supposed to be transparent, I find it's shiny reflectivity a bit distracting and "unrealistic" (I know this is a bit ridiculous for a space-combat game with kilometre-long ships, magic energy fields and 9 foot spiders....). This, together with my replacement of the pegs with steel in many cases, meant I needed to find a solution to this.

My first, most obvious decision was to spray the bases black - very simple!

Now this is all very well, but lacks something - they don't draw the eye in the way I find the reflective clear bases do, but they're pretty boring. So, something more is needed, and a basic star-field effect was a good start. This was also incredibly simple - take a little white paint, add a small amount of water (depending on the thickness of the paint - mine was old GW stock and minus a little of the original solvent. If you had new paint it'll need very little, if any). What you're looking to get is a consistency that will "flick" off a brush, but isn't so thin it'll form streaks, but discrete spots.

Now the next bit is messy! Put plenty of newspaper around or do it in a high sided box (as I did above), unless you want berating by your partner/parents/landlord! I used an old toothbrush (never throw them away - they have a myriad of hobby-related uses!), dip into the paint, then hold at about 45 degrees with the bristles pointing towards the base at a distance of about 6-12" (15-30cm). Run your finger back along the brush and it will flick little drops of paint on the bases. Practice on a piece of black card or something beforehand, and you'll find you can vary the density, size and pattern of these pretty easily. It takes seconds and creates a pretty convincing effect;

So that was my bases covered. Next was something that (like many inventions) came out of an error. I'd ordered some 1-6 dial counters from Litco which I intended to make SRS counters with, but in fact I'd made a mistake and ordered 1-10 dials.

So what to do with these? I had an idea - I could use them for hull point damage on capital ships. Unfortunately I found that the pointer moved at the slightest nudge of the base, which made it pretty unsuitable, so I needed a way of preventing this. First, I found some steel washers the same size at the local hardware chain, and sprayed one side red oxide primer;

Next I carefully drilled out the back of the pointer and inserted a 3mm Neo magnet;

The next steps are just assembly - the washers fit over the peg of a standard base, the dial goes over that....

...and then the pointer with magnet goes on top - the magnet stopping the dial/pointer rotating around every time you move or knock the model, whilst still being able to turn and indicate Hull Points;

So we now use these on our Capital class models to record HP, reducing the number of tokens we have to have on ships - meaning they can be used for more important things - like critical effects.