A Billion Suns Fleet Fun

Tube, paint and two bits of sprue tidied up and stuck to the side.

Gunship.

Bulldog clip and pen lid main body, data cable connectors as left and right blaster arrays and paper Sci-Fi texture.

Halfords grey primer and black for the blasters.

I liked the imagination that came with the telephone connectors conversion, but it doesn’t look like it has any scale to it. It looks like a weird removal van at 20mm scale.

I looked around my terrain ideas box and found some Sci-Fi Google images I was going to use to space-station-up some walls for Infinity. I tried to cut some pieces up and applied them to my carrier. Not sure if I have used enough, but I think it’s an improvement.

You can afford to experiment when you haven’t spent a penny I guess. ?

Feedback and advice very welcome.

This carrier was made from a telephone line adapter, pair of telephone cable connectors, a rubber two prong connector of some kind and an unknown clip found on the floor at work.

The adaptor is the main body of the piece and the front, the unknown clip is the lighting array and perhaps bridge on the port side of the ship, the rubber connector is the engine (low at the back) and the telephone connectors are the long distance burners on the sides.

The colours are mix of Celestra Grey and Apothecary White contrast paint for the grey, the Flesh Tearers Red Contrast and Mephiston Red make up the red and the green markings are Orcflesh Green Contrast.

Black primer from above, red primer from underneath so the bottom of the ship was different. This didn’t really achieve anything as there was no overspray to speak of.

I dry brushed the ships in Celestra Grey but with a mini this small and the paint leaving flakes it wasn’t really presenting as I had hoped. I ended up hitting several spots with Contract white, but I didn’t want a pristine paint job.

I hit the studs of the shield with a citadel yellow, the guns in leadbelcher, the gun tips in Trollslayer Orange and a black dot in the centre.

The red markings are Mephiston Red. The green elements are Orcflesh Green contrast.

From the much lauded project “Babylon 5 Returns” by Avernos, I have borrowed the ship class list above.

This might be only be a beta list, but it’s good enough for me to start ruminating over my kitbash fleet.

Being miniatures agnostic is very welcome but there was talk that a lack of direction has puzzled some people. I am not sure why or where this comes from. Once you see this sheet it all makes a lot of sense. It has a neat frame work and a small to large ship basic structure. If the structure doesn’t suits your model collection, as long as your opponent can tell what each vessel is capable of, just play with what makes you happy. You can make up a fiction that some fighters are bigger than small utility ships (but the ship class list says otherwise), but regardless of their physical size on the table their manoeuvrability and some clever grav stealth tech means that to all intents and purposes they meet the correct signature size and capabilities of the fighter class in A Billion Suns.

Immersion can be a fragile thing, broken easily in some, but I feel that if you are already in a fiction set in the fairly distant future I will give you a lot of creative license in ship design and size. As long as you explain what model is what type before we roll the dice, and occasionally throughout the game when I forgot, your huge fighters or pocket battleships don’t ruin the game for me chum. ?

My imagination flew away with me.

I wanted to use the fun shapes of a Mantic Games Dwarf rifle when considered at a different scale. I wanted something uniform to stick beneath it, but the length of the gun was posing a problem.

In the end I settled on a Wargames Atlantic Irish buckler / small shield, sawn off Mantic Games Dwarf rifle and a bevor armour type component from the latest North Star Demons box.

Will paint it up and see how I feel.

Now I have seen other people’s fighters I think these might be a bit big, but I will check out the ship classes and see where these might fit.

The texture on the Capri Sun bottle cap and the general shape of it said Sci-Fi ship to me. Will think up ways to detail it a touch more. Not sure whether to try to have some kind of big energy source in the back of the wide opening and take it as a long distance cargo style ship, or to add a central gun coming out of the void and have it all be a giant wing propelling a huge gun into the the fray.

The break glass keys are fun. As I have a few of these I am thinking of doing two classes of ship. A military class with the long single prong being some kind of rail gun. Plus, a cargo class with cargo containers lined up underneath that single prong. Someone suggested the clips from zip lock bags might have a fun texture and be a good size for this.

So it begins.