100th Post

Mega Trade Part 2 – my previous post – was actually a bit of a mile-stone article in the life of this blog. It was the Big ‘C Note’, the ‘One Tonner’, the 100th Post.

This, on one hand, goes to show just how silly stats and post numbers are, as some of my posts are barely worth the cost of the electrons that gave their all for them. On the other hand, it does indicate that I have been able to maintain some sort of consistency, or persistence, of posting over the last 26 months or so, and that I’m still enjoying writing about Traveller and model making and painting.

My computer suffered a terminal Windows boot meltdown a couple of weeks ago which has been a major pain in the fundamental posterior orifice. Since then I have had to fight for processor time with my daughter on her machine. Fortunately, as my old machine had been getting a little erratic, I had bought a Terabyte external drive and shifted all my pictures, music and general files, including my website, gaming and blog files, over to it some months ago. So, when Windows finally broke, the only really important files I lost access to were my business emails, and my contact list, which included the logon for my website. This makes updating it a little difficult.


“Bother”, as the Great Sage, Winney the Pooh, said.

Anyway, enough pity party.

I’ve just finished painting a pack of Twanax Horde from Blue Moon Manufacturing, as well as a couple of packs of Ground Zero Games Hammer’s Slammers figures, and a starship captain from Khurasan Miniatures. What these figures have in common, apart from being fun to paint, is a slight pulpish air about them. This is rather fortuitous as I’ve just finished reading my new copy of Blasters and Bulkheads.

While B&B has a very strong Star Wars vibe about, it does claim to be a more generic Pulp/Space Opera Science Fiction Skirmish game, and I can see that you could play out Van Vogt’s Lensmen-based games or even Dominic Flandry scenarios or adventures from Andre Norton’s stories. B&B has one of the better quick-play psionic combat systems I’ve read, and I like the way that the focus is on characters, with minions or henchmen coming along for the ride as mobile scenery. I’m really looking forward to playing B&B, and seeing if I can poach some ideas for 5150: New Beginnings – which has a much better solo play aspect.

Getting back to the figures – the Twanax are basically Yetis, and while I painted them up in shades of brown, I’m now thinking that I need to get a second pack to paint up in greys and whites as Abominable Snowmen, for my GZG Scan Fed figures and for the Snow Troopers/Pulp-guys-that-get-eaten-by-The-Thing that Khurasan Jon is talking about releasing in a couple of months.

The Slammers figures from Ground Zero Games are quite fun in a retro sort of way. I thought of them as being light troops or dragoons and bought enough skimmers to have two ground squads and a squad mounted on the little one-man grav bikes. After dithering over how to paint them, I went with a grey splotch camouflage over Olive Green – a fairly conventional paint job. While they lack the body armour we tend to associate with modern soldiers, the detail on the figures suggests that they wear some sort of harness. I’m seriously thinking of getting another couple of packs to paint up in a more pulpy dress uniform style as palace guard. Mixing the visor-up with the visor-down packs works for me, though the visor down with more solemn uniform colours could make them look more ‘faceless’ and ‘oppressive regime’ type troopers. Either way, they are very nice figures.

The starship captain from Khurasan Miniatures is part of the DPLS spaceship crew pack (TTC-2501). He always seems to be painted up in the style of Han Solo, which made me think Lando Calrissian, and this is what I attempted.

So, in the midst of the computer frustrations, I have managed to complete some figures that I'm very happy with.