Hexagonal Modular Gametable: Part 1: Preliminary Designs

One of the Eternal Projects of mine has been building a game table for to be used in the Ruins and Ratmen games. The table should be small enough to fit into our living room, small also for storage purposes, of modular design for an easy setup, and the modules should contain depth, since I've always thought that a table where you can build terrain only upward lacks something. So when my wife got fed up with a round table, about one meter in diameter, my brain switched gears.

First thing to do was to trim the edges of the table, so that a hexagon remained, each side having a length of 50 cm. So the gaming surface would consist of six triangular terrain blocks, with different surface definitions on either side of the block. As the gaming setup would be that of a ruined medieval-esque city, my initial idea was to have canal sections of different layout on one side, and flat surface on the other. That setup would allow for a lot of variation when setting up the table, and yet I would initially need to make just six blocks. The hexagonal design would also give the opportunity to set up three-way battles as easily as skirmishes of two sides.

The canals would be needed to set up so that the 'end' sections would be at the middle point of the triangle sides, so that when two sections would end up side by side, it would seem that the canal was continuous, and the spot where the sections meet would look like a small bridge crossing the canal. The end part of the canal should also be designed so that it would seem to just continue beneath the surface of the tile, in effect becoming a sewer. Thus it would not matter how the different blocks were assembled, the gaming board would look natural and uniform.

Initially, my intention was to build the triangular blocks from styrofoam or some similar material, but as I was doing mock-ups of the canal walls from HirstArts blocks, I realised that styrofoam by itself might not be robust enough for this purpose. Also, the thought of cutting straight lines and 60° angles to styrofoam suddenly begun to lose its appeal. And even if I were to manage to cut the pieces right, they would be quite fragile, even if one considers just the storaging of the tiles. So, even though I am by no means a carpenter, I decided to build the tiles from wooden strips of 2"x 1", with fibreboard as the 'surface' of the tiles. The biggest challenge would of course be in keeping the angles and therefore the whole tiles uniform in shape and size, in all dimensions. And in all honesty this means that the overall construction must have some tolerance to allow for some faults during the construction, since they're inevitable, especially since I don't have access to any woodworking shop but have to rely on my meager DIY tools.

Traveller Reskins: Small Craft

The various Small Crafts were never the intended focus for my Traveller Reskinning project; in fact, I originally considered doing the Ship's Boat, the Launch and a Fighter, and leave it at that. Well, one fighter turned into two designs, and when trying to figure the High Guard rules for the Small Crafts, the idea of a System Ferry slowly formed. It represents a type of craft that is used to transport passengers short distances in space, from Capital ships to Space Stations and other similar habitats - essentially a mobile airlock. It uses a 10 dTon hull, with minimal thrusters and has batteries instead of a reactor of any kind.

So with a 'bonus' ship, I thought I was ready to make a full PDF page. However, as I assembled the ships to the layout, I realized that there would be too much white space for my liking on the design. Something had to be done, and inspired by the Whartson Hall audio game recordings of Traveller at RPGMP3.com, I grabbed the Pinnace as a space filler.

And from there, things just went downhill. Somehow, I could not get the idea of the Modular Cutter out of my mind. It is not a glamorous ship, but the utility aspect of it started to haunt me, especially as there were no concrete examples of the various configurations in the rulebook. I wanted to see what an ATV compartment would look like, and that's when I knew I would get no peace of mind until I were done with the designs.

The rulebook mentions ATV, fuel and open modules, and I included the latter as the 'default' one; it is also quite simple to make one's own designs on that module. In addition to the already mentioned modules, I decided to include a basic Cargo Module, a Survey or Scout Module with living quarters for two, and a frontier Medical Facility, with an operating theater, sleeper pods and isolation wards.

In a way, the hardest one to make was the Fuel Module, due to it's simplicity. Just to make it more interesting, I had to add the service tunnel/crawlspace. Since it had Fuel Scoops, I also wanted to include fuel purifiers to the design, but as they were not mentioned in the rules I eventually left them out.

It also occurred to me that these modules could easily be used in creating a rudimentary planetary base or habitat. In that case, some sort of passenger module would be needed, and I was going to include one but just ran out of space. But Habitat Module, and some sort of connector modules might not be a bad idea...

Well, now I feel I have done everything I should with the Small Craft designs. Actually, the only one left out is the 95 dTon shuttle, and since that would eventually be just a enlarged version of the Pinnace, I think I'll give it a pass. Unless of course I get some horrible pangs of guilt for leaving things incomplete.

Oh, and as usual, the PDFs can be found from the Downloads (PDF) section.

Traveller Reskins: 10 dTon Fighter

Count the 20 squares!

After the Scouts and Trader, I encountered a designer's block with the Far Trader design, and decided to try something smaller and simpler for a change. That proved to be a bad decision, as the Small Crafts are very vaguely defined in the Traveller main rulebook, and the plans still manage to contain all kind of contradictions. Of course, it could be asked that is there even a point in trying to come up with a top-down floorplan for a single-seat spacecraft such as the fighter, but that is another kettle of fish altogether.

Since there is an online version of Traveller SRD that includes the High Guard supplement, my next step was to go there and try to figure out whether the apparent contradictions could be solved using that resource. Instead, things just got muddier, and I realized that although I could use High Guard to craft the kind of ships I wanted, they would eventually end up resembling nothing like the ships in the main rulebook, stat-wise. For example, a 10 dTon ship with a power plant big enough to power a single laser could have a Thrust of 12, whereas in the main rulebook the Thrust of a fighter is only 6. But my plan was not to redesign the ships from the ground-up, just to provide upgraded visuals. So after some headscratching, I went back to the original designs, and decided just to approximate them, making sure that the things like Cargo space would match the tonnage given in the rulebook, and just roughly eyeball the rest.

In the end, I came up with two designs I liked, and with a different function to boot. The Aerospace Fighter is quite close in design to the the in the rulebook, and performs much the same role, having a streamlined hull and thus the ability to perform both planetary and system-wide missions. The Interceptor, on the other hand is a pure starfighter, with a distributed hull and not having even landing gear. What it does have, however, is an airlock, so that it can dock with other spacecraft easily, and of course the airlock can be used as an extra transport space.

Traveller Reskins: Scout. Type S PDF

The finalised version of the Scout, Type 1 can be found from the right sidebar, under Downloads (PDF). The PDF file contains 3 layers, one with the basic plan, one with 1,5 m grid, and one with some definitions. The file is restricted to print only. At least in my computer, the Dropbox preview redraws the file a bit funkily, but the downloaded file seems okay.

Traveller Reskins: Free Trader

Whew! Somehow, cranking this one out took inordinate amount of time. I had a clear idea of what I wanted, the basic shape, the cargo bay that was two decks high with multiple loading ramps, but getting everything mesh nicely took way too many trials and errors. Especially the 'wing' sections drove me nuts, it took maybe six or seven tries to get the shape just right, all the time counting the fractional fuel cell squares on the graph paper, over and over again... maybe I just should learn to cheat, but what would be the fun in that? (And I'm pretty sure if someone would take the time and count all the dTons, the results would be slightly 'off' from what they're supposed to be, anyway.)

But on the whole, this design much moreso than the previous ones made me refine the basic 'blocks' of the layout style. Most of the elements work well enough, and I was able to refine those that did not quite cut it. There are, however, still a couple of 'overflow' issues that have to be sorted before I can do the PDF's exactly as I want.

In my mind, the 'silhouette' of the ship, the side view, is always secondary to the top down design, and I do that one last, when I'm mostly satisfied with everything else. However, this time as I was designing the silhouette, the rear cargo hatch was originally perpendicular, and somehow that made the whole ship look clumsy as hell. With a small angle, it looked much better, but then it had to make adjustments in the original plans as well. I'm pretty sure I lost a couple of dTons there, as well ;-) Also, the 'outcrop' between the rear cargo hatches was originally just that, a design quirk, but only during the side view drafting I realised that it would be a great place for a turret; a place to oversee loading procedures and to keep the hostiles at bay.

It appears that I've hit a snag with the Far Trader plans, and there are a couple of minis that cry for attention, so I guess there will be a brief pause before the next design gets finalised. Then again, if I have trouble sleeping, going through these plans seems to be a good way to doze off, so who knows what my subconscious conjures up.

Traveller Reskins: Seeker Mining Ship

"Oh, that one's easy. Just a slight modification of the existing Scout design." Yeah, right. Making it look good, that was the hard part.

This time, I gave the crew bigger personal quarters, as there really would not be space for a lounge. The drones, well, I can see some sort of struts extending from their bay when the hatch are open, for easy deployment and recovery. And I just had to put airlocks for the ore bays, in case there was need for some manual supervision of the loading. One thing I could not fit into the design was some sort of drone repair facility, but I guess a drone could be brought in from the frontal airlock, and the relatively open space there used for such purposes.

One thing I did for just aesthetic reasons was to slant the walls of the ore bay. Originally, they were more rectangular, but that just did not look right.

Next up: The Free Trader, I think?

Traveller Reskins: Scout, type S

Kicking off my redesigns of the Mongoose Traveller spaceships, here's my version of the iconic scout ship. Now, I know that in it's original incarnation, the scout ship was wedge-shaped, much like the Imperial Star Destroyers, so I did not want to use that. Also, I'm not quite sure what the sublight propulsion of the Traveller ships is supposed to be, but whatever it is, in my book there should be some sort of reverse thrusters, unless you want to turn the whole ship around in order to slow down. Hence all of my designs will have engines in back and front. Sure, there should also be some smaller navigation thrusters, but I guess they are too small to be significant on the deck plans.

Other than the thrusters, I also deviated from the 'standard' plan by making the individual staterooms much smaller, so that I could get larger common area (washroom and a kitchenette) for the crew. I also introduced a second airlock at the bridge, 'cause that just seemed to make sense. The Scout is all about utility and redundancy, and having a second airlock in case the primary one malfunctions was a no-brainer.

One thing that also bugged me about the Mongoose plans that it was not always clear how the decks related to each other. Hence the cut-out section, to show the decks and the vertical shafts align.

Just one final note: These are just the previews, the final files will have grids and whatnot. But that will have to wait until I have all the designs I initially planned to do ready.

Mongoose Traveller: Spaceship reskins

The other day I was re-reading Mongoose's Traveller Core rulebook, and it occurred to me how - well, uninspiring, the designs for the iconic spaceships were. And not only that, but most of them are in a scale that is of little use for a gamer. Also, although I only have the physical book, I've come to understand that even in the PDF version, the plans are in low-resolution raster images, and therefore unscalable even there.

So, here then is my mission: to present good quality, scalable (meaning: vectorized) deck plans of the various Traveller ships. At the very least, my intention is to cover the Scout ships, the three Trader ships, the Yacht and some of the various Small Craft -class vessels: Fighters, Ship's Boats etc. The attractiveness of the designs will of course be in the eye of the beholder, but I at least try to make the designs feasible, interesting and functional. And of course, the designs will follow the numerical descriptions and tonnages of the ships in question. And if I'm able to grok it, I will try to publish each design as a layered PDF, so the grids and legends can be switched on and off when needed.

City in Ruins - Ruined Houses Basement

As an addendum to the yesterday's post, here's an alternative basement level with the height of one full story.

City in Ruins - Ruined houses

When I first started making ruined buildings I went for more or less intact ones, with a wall or two collapsed, and partially roofed. Now I want to make some more heavily damaged ones, using the same recipe. I have based my buildings on HirstArts blocks, but actually building whole series of houses using the bricks would mean way too much casting - and would make the buildings much heavier than I would like. Therefore, I usually use the blocks for foundations and detailing, but use foamboard, cardboard and balsa wood for the other stuff. For walls, I usually use 3mm Foamboard. It is sturdy enough, and the thickness is close to 1/8 of an inch that meshes well with the HirstArts blocks.

The plan here is for a simple house with a small amount of the second story left. The 5"x3" refers to the  size of the foundation, so the walls themselves are 1/2" shorter. There's no windows or doors marked on the wall plans, but on the foundation I did leave out the width of my separately cast door piece.

The corner stonework is made from a modified 1/2"x1/4"x1/4" brick, from which the thickness of the foamboard has been filed away. I suppose one could file all the pieces by hand, but for me it was evident I would need a lot of these, and making a custom mold for these was the sensible option. There are great tutorials at the HirstArts site for moldmaking, if one's interested.

City in Ruins: Public Wells

Here's a couple of plans for Public Wells, using HirstArts blocks. Features pieces from Gothic Dungeon Builder #45, Small Brick Mold #250, Dragon's Inn Mold #51 (the 'turret' of the well is made from four doorframe halves, with the wall parts sawn/filed away), and Flagstone Floor Tile Mold #260.

The floor tiles with the curb, both rounded and square, are custom tiles I've made to speed up the building of walkways. The roof is made from corrugated cardboard, found from a nearby arts&crafts store, and glued to place with small strips of regular cardboard placed under the front edge, to create the illusion of overlapping. The top is just a roud dowel. Bits and bobs have been added as appropriate, and the whole thing has been mounted on a fibreboard. Painted with acrylics (and the roof is reddish, no matter what the picture might indicate), with a lot of drybrushing.

I actually built the Well N:o 1 a while back, but as I now wanted a companion to it with similar style, it was easier to design the new one while comparing it to the already built one.