Fleet Scale Sci-Fi: The Fleet limps along.....

Aplogies for the long New Year hiatus in posting here; I wish I could say that this time had been filled with much prep, painting and photography of miniatures, but unfortunately this has hardly been the case - the shameful neglect of the Blog down to 'Real Life' intruding and keeping me far too busy. Not that I am complaining - no real dramas, but definitely a dearth of Wargaming-related activity, I'm afraid....

What has left the workbench is very much in the way of some small progress with the BSG themed fleets, and the happy discovery of my rare-earth magnets has lead to a pulse of activity, including the fighters and various other craft. For what it's worth, I thought I'd share some pics of how this has been going, first up some civilian freighters and transports:

For reasons that will become evident later on, I decided to add the Brigade Models Bantu Destroyer in with the civvies rather than positing it as another military type, and also flipped the Irregular ship seen in the middle of the photo above onto its back - the sculpt is somewhat enigmatic, and I think this way up, it somewhat resembles the Gemini Freighter seen in the original series.

Colour schemes wise, I went for a quite dirty thrashing with various dry-brush colours, overlaid with some detailing of panels, running lights and so forth, hopefully going for a very 'lived-in' and well-used look for these old transports.

The Cylon flotilla is complete for now, with Baseship, two Heavy Cruisers that I am calling the 'Styx' Class, and those GZG fighters masquerading as the iconic Raiders:

The fighters are mounted on the Brigade trio fighter stands, with magnets stuck into the hollow space underneath, and then a corresponding magnet fixed atop the plastic flying base.

I found this was a very frustrating and tricky procedure, as whilst Brigade's own craft mostly have a small depression which matches the upright nubs at the end of each of the fighter stand's arms, those of GZG do not, so much fiddling and swearing with rapidly-drying super-glue was required. I eventually, in fact, filed down the mounting nubs and placed the fighters down flat to ensure a tougher bond.

I had envisioned hordes of Cylon Raiders to accompany the larger ships, but I will definitely need a rest before I attempt this procedure again in the near future..... these will be enough for now!

The magnets themselves I obtained from Dom's Decals, and they are good and strong, and being meant for 1/600th aircraft, are a nice tiny size - the only issue is trying not to mix up the polarity of each pair to be used - I got around this by having a marker pen to hand and colouring the top surface of each magnet as it came off the stack - those for the ships, went coloured side to hull, and then the paired flight stand would have its coloured side fixed upmost to match.

Moving on, we see the two non-canon Cruiser types which I added to beef up the respective fleets, on the left, the Colonial Heavy Cruiser, the 'Charybdis', and on the right the Cylon:

The lighting for these photos has been rather unkind to the finish on both types - the contrast is not really so stark in real life, but you get the idea as to how they match up. I think either craft might have some fighters on board, but to all intents and purposes they are gunships - to take out the opponent's Carrier with heavy weaponry - relatively slow, but very heavily armoured and armed....

Next up, the Cruisers 'Scylla' and Charybdis move forward accompanied by some Colonial Vipers:

These were mounted in the same way as the Cylon Raiders, and were even more fiddly, as the base of each craft is slightly convex, so more filing required. These are nifty little stand-in craft from GZG, perhaps only the downward tilt of the lower wings missing from the original - I quite like them, but those classic red stripes were very hard to do freehand, particularly in order to match up around the tail section - so again, I won't be rushing to do more!

The Galactica Battlegroup, then, in the final days before the Fall of Caprica:

Overall, I'm pleased with how things have gone so far, but am painfully aware as to how much all this has diverted me from my more long term projects, so these will probably go on the back burner from now, given that I haven't even thought about how they might be used game-wise, or even with what rules....

Then again, there are the scratch-built Agri-ship and the Colonial Movers to be done yet......oh well!