Closing gaps

Back to my never ending vertical mining town board! I expected my progress on this area to be slow, but oh, man, not that slow!

First of all, let's just recap:

This was last time you saw it

My plan from now on was focusing mostly on the left area, but... well, you'll see.

The foamboard here is not yet glued, it's just for visual reference:

Yet to be fixed, will be the base for next urban expansion

However, this concept left me some unused space beneath that surface. I believe it was time to bring the mining element to my... well, mining town!

Nothing speaks of mines more than dead end railways coming from a cave

I used a Terrain Crate box by Mantic, which I found at quite a reasonable price. My idea is to leave here the entrance to the mines, just at the very gates of the rest of the town. Might sound odd, but I totally see this happening in places such as Logan's World or so. There can be other entrances, sure, but having this one here seemed suitable for me. In gaming terms it provides me quite a perfect spot for the Genestealer Cult to enter the board, stuff like that.

In the pic above you may be wondering what's that circle about. Well, it's related to this:

Epic, timeless butter cookie can!

Pff, I may have to digress a little.This box was originally planned for another project:

The Genestealer Dungeon!

Shame on me, the Dungeon doesn't currently have a label of its own. I may have to remedy that.

Anyway, this project was abandoned when I started to build the vertical board. In my mind it all will be part of a campaign involving the Cult, first played on the surface and later on through this underground Space Hulk or whatever. I may have everything ready by 2030.

Ahem.

Enough digression. The cookie can. It was meant to be a pit in the Dungeon, hence the texture. For my current purposes I may have to remove it (it's just DAS clay). But what purposes are those...?

Unexpected!

Right, instead of building, I'm hollowing spaces! My idea is to place a round bazaar, with ladders, stalls and stuff. It will communicate (with a false door; I'm not cutting through the tin can) with the front part, providing a point of access close to the entrance of the mine.

So first thing now is to make the access for the railway. I had to make the full thing, because it will be inaccessible later.

Lost opportunity to place a LED light in the background

Now, more logistic issues. The hole on the foamboard is so tight (it has to be!) that the cookie can cannot fit in from above:

That's due to the ledge on the lower part

So I'll have to place the tin can from below, or else I'd had to add a lot of work all around the edge of the hole.

This way

Soooo... I first have to build the whole bazaar, then fit it into the board from below and place some supporting pieces beneath it. Whoah, easier said than done.

Well, then this is the board. You may notice some additional work on the center building (close ups later):

Ready to receive some spray colour

After receiving some colour!

 

Well. The thing is that I still haven't done the bazaar. "Oh, what a lousy blog post then" I hear you say. "This is all you got?" you rightfully claim.

I say NO.

 

There's still plenty of stuff to do here, don't fear.

I need another kind of digression in order to move forward. Please look at the next pic, it will be relevant for so many projects (I hope):

 

A humongous, absurdly oversized toy crane

It finally broke. I had nothing to do with it, promise. But the moment I had been waiting for a few years finally arrived. The Suberlings kindly donated their broken toy so it could have a second life. Trust me, I'm cannibalising every bit I can use!

For now let's see...

Hmmm... So what? What's this stuff about?

A cardboard piece and a textured sheet. Now it looks different

If it looks dirty enough, no one will look for errors

It is a bridge! It will cover the gap over the first section, the on on the right, from the center building to the spaceport on the right:

You thought I had forgotten about that part?

This has been a hard decision. For quite some time I planned about building a barge suspended by a wire. I mean something like this (but well done!)

I hope you understand what my deranged mind envisions here

The thing is that it's quite a logistic mess. I had to provide anchorage points to distribute the weight and it all had to be detachable so I could take it away for storage. I believe it's feasible, but it's a hell of a work and I wasn't really doing it for all these years. But when I saw this crane thing and took a couple of measurements, I knew I had it sorted. I may still do the barge thing in the future, but for now I have a practical solution that allows me to move forward.

 

Now there's a full way from the spaceport to the floor level of the board

You can see I've painted the doors and added a few details here and there.

For example the doors and the carpet on this middle bridge in the central piece

Or the tiles on the rooftop piece here

In the (long, distant) future, this will represent a lift to the upper module

Now that we've come this far, let's move one step ahead. The tiny details. I have these air scrubbers from Antenocitis:

One base is missing. It will appear some day in a box, for sure

Windows is still a thing in the Dark Millenium

I also got these fantastic consoles/control pads/whatever from Antenocitis:

The ones on the top, the electric breaker box and stuff may resemble the Jurassic Park ones

I haven't placed them all, but I've painted them and will add them here and there as I need. Here you can see a couple of examples:

I think they add a nice touch and calm my horror vacui

Well, you wouldn't expect them all to function correctly, would you?

This is how the board looks now when all the gubbins are in place:

Pleasingly dirty, weathered and inhospitable. As it should

In retrospective, not having the bazaar was a good thing, as in the end it forced myself to end the central-to-right area. Now I can focus on the left front.

Still a lot of work to do, but I'm happy with the way this is looking so far. Hmm, I'm going to make a few numbers and plans. See you!