Stainless Steel Planning

 Hi!

I've been having all sorts of fun re-reading the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison and am slowly putting together a list of what I need to collect up to get my project re-started.

As such, I've been rummaging my 15mm stuff and have begun work on cleaning, tidying and sorting out suitable figures as well as painting up some odds and ends to add to the mix:

Governor General van Dorn, accompanied by Journo's observes militia manoeuvres.

While I've still got quite a bit of work to do, mostly on refurbing bases to make them a bit brighter, I'm quite pleased with how well some of these old paintjobs have held together and I'm looking forward to getting more done over the coming weeks.

Media Scrum!

While I'm using the Stainless Steel Rat novels as inspiration, I will be diverging somewhat to use characters in a somewhat different fashion, so for example, the villainous Count Cassitor Rdunrundt is only in one book and decidedly a side character but I plan on making him more of a nemesis, if somewhat hapless as we can't have our anti-hero being outshone by a thuggish toad!

The Governor's personal ride - prime target for theft!

While I do love the larger scale stuff and 28mm, this smaller scale does allow me to paint up quite a bit of stuff with minimal time and still looks pretty decent on the table and should allow me to get some games played fairly quickly to boot.

I've discovered I actually have quite a few civilians and non combatants painted up ranging from heavy exo-suited construction guys to lowly journalists and random passers by which is a handy and rather unexpected boon as I do need to represent quite a few miscellaneous denizens of assorted worlds to add random elements to my scenarios.

 

On top of that, I do have several little warbands that make for suitable combatants in the game too as there's nothing to stop me from having Jim turn up on Farpoint to loot the Governor Generals private wine cellar...

Journalistic Talent

I painted these little Peter Pig journalists a while back and still have a half pack to paint as rivals. In hindsight, I do think that the central pair should have been mounted on a 25mm rather than 30mm base but I will add another doodad onto it to bulk it out a bit. 

A have also found some of my newer Rdunrundt troops. I painted these when I'd been planning on using AK-47 Republic for a pulpy sci-fi ruleset but had been dissatisfied with how they turned out but looking at them now, they're not as bad as I had thought. Hopefully I'll get another few painted in the coming weeks to add up to a full squad of eight.

Finally, to get back into the swing of 15mm painting, I found my old WW2 US troops that have languished in my bits box for probably two decades now (once again Peter Pig figures) and decided to paint them up as random low tech sci-fi troops. Their should actually be six of them but I managed to drop one in the man cave and can't find him which is one of the downsides to smaller scales but I really like how they came out.

I may go back and paint some sort of emblem on their helmets but I figure they'll do as is for the time being.

With this fresh enthusiasm, I'm hoping to keep the mojo going and even if I don't manage to get many games played, I do seem to be really enjoying the process of reading favourite books and painting random gubbins so I'll take it as a win!

Hopefully I'll have something more to show in my next post but until then, All the best!