Dr Who in 6mm: Alien reinforcements

Having recently provided U.N.I.T. with Heavy Weapons and Transport, I wanted to augment the Dalek and Sontaran infantry with some 'heavy metal' of their own; even though such things are not very often seen in the TV show, I felt a bit of tweaking wouldn't hurt. The fact is that the search for suitable look-alike minis in 6mm has been difficult, whether thinking in terms of Sea Devils, Silurians, Ice Warriors, Yetis or Cybermen, and with nothing really to hand, I was itching to add something to the forces available.

As you can see in the photo above, a Dalek Commander, in the form of Davros, was roughly scratch built from some plastic and half of a Heroics and Ros WWII Artilleryman, but I needed to cast my net wider to come up with some other items to bolster the Doctor's enemies.

Trawling through some old posts over on TMP concerning 6mm Sci-Fi, I came across a link that had some photos of the vehicle ranges from Scotia, and I knew at once that I had found a likely Sontaran AFV, to whit the SF7 Heavy Scout Vehicle, which has an excellent bulbous cab/cockpit, so redolent of the potato-headed warrior's own helmets!

The TMP discussion is here,

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=160349

The photos, which are so lacking on Scotia's own site are here, at least those that are still working links:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051030205501/www.scotiagrendel.com/scotia/scotiasf.html

and Scotia Grendel can be found here:

http://www.scotiagrendel.com/page110.html

So this lucky find gave me my Sontaran 'Weapon Sled', which of course could be used as a transport, but I took the liberty of up-gunning them with two more useful additions from Scotia, the SF16 Medium Field Laser, and the SF17 Twin Light Support Laser.

The former is a meaty looking cannon, which comes with a separate wheeled carriage, whilst the latter is a nice twin-barreled sculpt that also comes with a small separate base.

I decided not to use these, but rather mount them on plastic sprue in the cargo bay as turreted weapons as you can see below. The paint scheme is not very inspiring I'm afraid, being based on the Sontaran uniform, but perhaps I'll tweak it later.

The Sontaran Scout Force was then complete, although I'd still like to have a go at doing a couple of their distinctive ball-shaped sphere ships, so perhaps room for some improvement here in the future:

Having given the potato-heads some better weaponry, I couldn't neglect their 'pepperpot' cousins the Daleks, so I again turned to Scotia for ideas. If I remember rightly, Dalek ships appeared in the form of saucers for the TV version of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and were seen more recently in fleets massing during the 'Bad Wolf' story arc, so I knew I wanted something along those lines, giving the earthbound enemies of the Doctor some chance at levitation on the battlefield; (why bother climbing stairs when you can obliterate the whole building from the sky?)

SF13, Large Flying Saucer, was just the ticket:

These saucers are relatively plain, apart from the nice inscribed pattern on one surface, and come with a traditional bulb cockpit to the other side. Deciding to mount visible pilots for a bit of close air support, I filed down the bulb somewhat to enable the addition of some rare earth magnets, and mounted some cannibalised Daleks on the reverse side.

I suppose I ought to paint in some of the Dalek sphere sensors which traditionally adorn their lower casings, around the outer rim of the saucer, but decided that my painting skills weren't up to doing that many perfect circles, so I chickened out!

I filed off the support peg atop the plastic flight stands to enable the addition of a corresponding magnet, so that these stands might do double duty with other craft or fighters from different projects. Being me, of course, my filing down on both saucers and stands was not entirely level, but this had the side-effect of creating some variety in the flying angle of the saucers, so was no real problem in the end.

I obtained the magnets from Dom's Decals, who give excellent service with their unparalleled decals for small scale aircraft as well as stocking Tumbling Dice Miniature's aircraft ranges.

So, overall, a good start on beefing up the table-top forces of the protagonists so far, just hope that I will stumble across some more minis that might stand in for my other favourite villains from the show!

*Note: I just wanted to apologise to regular readers for the lack of posts recently, but down here in S.E. England over the last week or so, it has been definitely too hot to Blog, or more specifically too hot to paint! I use a wet palette when painting with acrylics, but was finding even this was drying out within minutes of the paint coming out of the tube. For those of you who live in hotter climes, the 'scorching' nature of 32 degrees Celsius might seem ridiculous, but for us Brits, that's plenty hot! Anyway, normal service has resumed now, with cooling temperatures and outbreaks of rain, so things should be back to normal from now on.....