Got a few more Hirst rooms done. It's starting to look a little substantial.

It's starting to get to me, though. They definitely are not the speediest things in the world to put together. It makes me worry less about quality and more about just getting it done. I may take a break and get back to painting. I have three JC Figures Thrashers primed and ready to go, as well as the CLAWS and all the Infinity figures. Or maybe I'll get back to my Napoleonics.

It was a long weekend...my son was sick, then my wife and I were sick, I had to go out of town for a house warming, my son had his 5th birthday (January 22, the anniversary of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, how cool is that?) and then, unsurprisingly perhaps, I got sick again. However, I did finish a couple of rooms.

You can see the large room with the blue carpet is still being mocked up, but the rest are done. Check out the windows! (They look cooler in real life...)

I've got my first Hirst Arts starship room put together and painted.

I didn't bother to read Bruce's painting instructions, I just jumped right into it. I quickly figured out Bruce had put a little effort into this and really did have some great instructions on how to paint these, read them, and pretty much followed his lead here.

I got my Smooth-On OOMOO 30 RTV Silicone, and made a new Hirst Arts starship walls mold.

It mixes 1:1, sets in 6 hours and claims not to need degassing. Plus, it didn't cause any noticable shrinkage, so I have to say I'm pretty pleased with it. I had more problems with the rubber seeping under the master pieces, but I wasn't as careful getting the pieces flush this time.

You can see I also added some 1/2" wide pieces to secure the walls to.

NOT the George Costanza kind, the RTV silicone kind. I was feeling pretty chuffed to have made my own mold of the Hirst starship walls and was cranking them out at an impressive rate. Now I see that my mold shrank quite a bit, and they're about 1/16" too short.

That's a decrease of 1/32" per inch, about .0312 inches per linear inch. In the picture, you can see a casting placed over a master and flush on the left side. I used Alumilite Quick-Set RTV silicone, picked up at Hobby Lobby at a half-price sale. I talked to Carol in their customer support, and it's apparently rated for .6% linear shrinkage, or .006 in./in. (all of this assuming my math is correct). I don't know what went wrong, but I'm hoping Alumilite can give some tips to prevent it.

In the meantime, I placed an order for a quart of Smooth-On OOMOO 30 RTV Silicone, which is rated for .0025 in./in. I need to make another mold anyway...I think I'm going to do 1/2" walls around halls and rooms built on 1" square boundries. That means I need to make some 1/2" wide pieces at the same rate as the walls, so I will need at the very least another mold of them, or more than likely, a new, hopefully more accurate mold, incorporating both.

I got my first Hirst Arts molds, the starship molds, and have been playing with them a lot the last few days. They rock.

I made some paper proxies just to fool around with the layout before I ordered any, to make sure they would work for my corridors. There's not a lot of pieces, but they're pretty modular, so you have some choices about how to lay them out. I also ordered some samples and played around with them.

It was clear to me that once I started casting the molds, the walls would be pretty scarce, so after I ordered them, I took some of the samples I had and made my own wall mold. I had some Durham's Water Putty on hand and started casting with it, but it set too slowly.

The molds came in, and I began casting. I'm trying to get some quality dental plaster, but in the meantime, I've been casting with Plaster of Paris. Here, you can see me casting up about two pounds worth. It goes by pretty quickly.

I glued down some floor tiles, but I was thinking about leaving the inside areas on square boundries. That way you could play something square-based, like Space Hulk. It's kind of weird, though, leaving the square around the outside, and it means you can't just have a door into a hall, you have to have a small corridor. Also, I haven't played Space Hulk in five years, so I doubt it really matters.

I got the casts of the Hirst Arts Starship molds I ordered from Castle Kits. They're pretty nice, there's a lot you can do with them. You can see me dry-fitting together a little corridor section to try them out.

The doors are too small, only 1" wide, for a lot of my figures, but other than that I don't have much of a complaint with them. If I bought the molds, you would have to cast A LOT. If you look at the wall mold, you're only getting a single wall section per cast-- two if you're not picky and don't mind a window into nothing on one side. That's a lot of casting, yes sirree. I'd probably make my own mold of just wall sections. I seem to recall Bruce encouraging that on his site at one point, but I don't see a link right now.

I spent most of my spare time today putting together some correctly scaled Orbital Terrain. It takes time, but I printed out about 35 sheets (not all used) at top quality in my printer with a fairly new color ink jet cartridge, so I felt okay about that. I had visions of having to buy multiple $30 cartridges just to get a decent amount of terrain.

Here are some Pig Iron troopers luring a Carnifex into a cargo bay. I think the terrain looks pretty good and isn't too expensive. It just gets a little old, like most things, taking the time and effort to put it together.

I mounted the Stones Edges Orbital pieces on black foam core, with the rug grip rubber pieces underneath them. It's pretty unobtrusive, and much more playable now. Notice the door that fits snugly into the doorway.

The only issue I have with them (other than the things that naturally come with paper models, such as the time to assemble them) is that they don't seem to be scaled properly. The 1.5" wall is about 1 5/16", so I don't bother to measure the foamcore, I just lay a piece down next to it and try to err on the side of being too short. Update: Looking at it now, I realize the pages are A4, and the "Shrink oversized pages to paper size" is set, shrinking the 11 11/16" A4 paper length to 11". It seems to print okay unscaled, so I'm not sure how I will procede. I'll probably just start over.

Ooooo, shiny!! I saw the Stone Edges Orbital starter pack was only $5.00 on RPG Now, and couldn't pass it up.

You may recall my custom corridor system I've worked on. It's pretty nice, but I'm never going to detail it. I thought I'd try out the Orbital system, and it's alright.

What you see here took me probably about three hours to put together. It's not fast! Also, the pieces have bases, but still slide around from simple touches. I'm going to glue them to black foamcore and put the non-slip rug grip under it like I did my own system.

The Orbital pack in designed for this (for upper levels), and includes stips to cover the sides of the foam core, so it should even look pretty good when done.

You can check out the corridor system I'm working on. Not as nice as Ainsty's, but definitely cheaper.