For The Glory Of The Republic!

With Desert Wars fast approaching I have started digging out some of my old minis to get them ready for the big day.  First on my list is my Centauri battle group for the Call To Arms game and do they need a lot of work!



The fleet adrift in the endless void of the tabletop...

As you can tell from the picture the first thing to do is get them mounted on bases since having my spaceships sitting on the tabletop just wouldn't look right.  This is also kind of the problem; just how the heck am I going to base them?

For any of you not familiar with space minis and their flight stands these are some of the most fragile pieces you could run in to which is not too surprising.  After all we're taking a big chuck of metal and balancing it on a tiny post so of course its going to break if you're not careful.  Mongoose Publishing recently came out with some new bases that are supposed to help alleviate this problem but for right now I've decided to dig out some old bases that I have lying around so I can get these things up and running.

The first thing to do in a situation like this is drill out the mounting hole on the mini and insert some brass rod into it.

This is the easy part of the drilling done...

This will be much more durable than the little plastic stub that tops most flight bases though you still need to be careful with them.  And speaking of being careful, you also have to be careful when you drill the hole into the plastic post so that the brass rod has where to go.  Since this is a very fiddly process I've found the best way to center the whole in the post is to cut a small X into the top of the post (once the plastic nub is removed of course).  This gives you a good idea of where the center of the hole needs to be located.  Just to be on the safe side I usually use the tip of an x-acto knife to cut a small guide hole for the drill bit and then proceed with the drilling.  This part can be especially tricky since you have little room for error as you drill the post so make sure you take your time.  Still with a little bit of patience I was thankfully able to get them all mounted and ready for paint.



The fleet in drydock...

The next step was deciding what color to go with.  In the TV series, the Centauri ships are a combination of purple and grey with some gold trim.  As you can see I had used this scheme from a number of my ships but I'd kind of like to do something different but what?  While pondering this I decided to go ahead and do them with a black base coat and work from there but once I got the black on them I kind of liked how they looked.  Add in some Ironhull Grey (from the P3 line) and some Shining Gold (from one of the really old GW lines) and voila!



The fleet ready for action!  Well, almost anyway...

This is a pretty basic paint scheme but I think it looks more menacing than the purple and gold so I'm gonna run with it.  There is still a little bit of work to do on them as far as detailing especially on the Primus battle cruiser in the back (plus the other two ships in the battle group).  So that's one project down and three more to go before Desert Wars!  More resurrecting of the dead is coming soon...  not to mention the other projects that I'm working on as well but more on that later.  Until next time...