Category Archives: Wargame Scenery

Sector Mechanicus #4: Thermic Plasma Conduits & Rogue Trader Pipeworks

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Sector Mechanicus Thermic Plasma Conduits & Rogue Trader Pipeworks

More scenery today – the first pieces from a set of Thermic Plasma Conduits, alongside the matching pieces from a Kill Team: Rogue Trader box. Aside from various personal issues going on, my work has been shut down for this week due to (at least) one positive COVID test. Thankfully I had no direct or even indirect contact with the individual, though one of my close colleagues did, so we’re hoping her test comes back negative. Without being flippant, there’s some stuff I can do remotely, but as it was an unforeseen shutdown and is only for a few days, for the most part it means I need to keep myself busy – and so more terrain is the way I’m trying to keep what’s left of my sanity. Along with Assassins Creed: Odyssey (I consistently get to these games 2 years late) and starting to watch The Witcher. Which is only …okay, so far.

Sector Mechanicus Thermic Plasma Conduits

As with so much of my stuff, I built these quite some time ago, sprayed them black, and these ones even had a (bad) spray of metallic applied. Before being forgotten and left in a box for months if not a couple of years. So now that I’m this current scenery kick, it was time to get them out and spend a couple of days working on them to get them finished to a level I’m happy with. So, well, that’s what I did.

Sector Mechanicus Thermic Plasma Conduits

This first batch is relatively small, only eight components. They’re from my first box of these before more became available later via additional terrain kits, Kill Team boxed kits and the like. I might have gotten some from Conquest Magazine as well? Basically, I was trying not to use all of  my first boxed set of pipes in case I wanted to do something more interesting with some of them later on. Now with addiitonal sets and parts, I’m not so worried about that – so as these drew closer to completion, I started working on a few more simple pipes from that first kit, and now I’ve found a second set worth of sprues in a box and have started assembling those with a (little) bit more variance.

Sector Mechanicus Rogue Trader Pipeworks

For the time being I’ve kept the pipes to a relatively flexible and neutral metal tone. I do like the looks that rusted off-white and also dark red-painted pipes give, so perhaps a future set of two might look different. For the next two waves of these, I’ll stick with a compatable look to these, though. The actual pipe sections could fit in with some modern settings, as long as we don’t look too closely at them, though the segments with the servo-skulls wouldn’t fare so well. Unless that side of the panels was up against a wall, I guess. Otherwise they’ll work well in any sci-fi or many post-apoc settings, as well as (obviously) the Warhammer 40k universe.

Sector Mechanicus Thermic Plasma Conduits

Doing all these dials was a bit of a pain, and I decided to use the rounded panel as a kind of “Aliens” or “Fallout”-inspired monitor screen, with light green text glowing on a dark green screen. As with almost all of my most recent posts, I’m also calling these finished models good for Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge!

Thanks Dave for keeeping my motivation up!

“GorkaMorka Junk Piles” Mostly-Scratchbuilt Scenery

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These three pieces of terrain were something I was inspired to build way back after building my cardstock GorkaMorka fort, sometime between the game’s release in 1997 and about 2010 when I had to move from the place where I had my desert mat set up. The fort turned out really quite well for the time, based on a large piece of thick card with a few bits of additional plastic kit and random stuff added for extra detail. I should take some pics and post it up here, really. Maybe when I do my next Ork army showcase…

Anyway, the first part, where I stuck things to the card worked pretty well. The second part, where I stuck sand to the bases was ..okay. I used sand that was much too coarse, much oif which can still be seen on these. The third part, where i added thinned paint to base coat the sand was when the real disaster hit, and as you can see, warping was a pretty severe consequence. This led to them being pretty much abandoned until, well, last week. After I finished the “Dug-in Tank” that was sitting on the side of the games table, I brought these three pieces in, as they were also sitting on the games table with the vague plan to finish them, well… sometime.

The parts used are a mixture of spare GW parts (tank wheels & tracks, some regular buggy/bike wheels and parts, oil drums) parts from a 1:48-ish scale die-cast 4×4, plasticard of different types, and a lot of bits and pieces from various old broken toys, including a few G1 Transformers.

As with the tank hull piece, despite the wonkiness of the bases on these pieces, they actually finished up decently well. Like, not amazingly, but they’re now pieces I’ll be happy to decorate a tabletop with that also work across a decent number of genres and time periods. While I’ve called them “GorkaMorka” junk piles, that’s simply because of their origins, but they’ll work for most any sci-fi or post-apoc game, and even a lot of modern settings in that a pile of metal and mechanical refuse isn’t exactly something unknown to our modern world. Additionally, I now have another three submissions for Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge!