Dropfleet Commander PHR

Last batch of PHR ships for Dropfleet Commander, at least for a while. I've still got one starter fleet left, but I'm leaving that for until I've gotten more games in and a better feel for how I want my fleet to work. I've already got more than I'll ever use in a single game, so just need to figure out what kind of ships I want more.

Got these done a couple of weeks ago for a game at the club, but took my sweet time taking photos and putting them up here. Painted here is one of the two PHR battleships, Heracles, some corvettes and four support frigates in the form of two Calypsos and two Andromedas.

The battleships are some of the newer additions to the game and only came out a few months ago. I ordered mine straight away, but unfortunately it arrived with some parts missing which lead to a few more weeks of waiting until I got the items from Hawk. With them still being somewhat overwhelmed with Kickstarter issues it took some time to get replacements, but in the end I have the missing fins and a complete ship. The quality is a bit mixed with the body showing the layers from 3D printing that was used to make the master. Still nothing too bad and a light sanding followed by a heavier basecoat on the affected areas fixed everything.

The resin Corvettes on the other hand were excellent with a super smooth finish and no apparent flash or parting lines. Hopefully when the old moulds wear out on the battleships they'll redo them with a better finish on the master model.

Heracles

Calypso

Andromeda

 Echo

 
Finally I dug out all my current PHR ships. There's surprisingly many now that they are out of the storage box. Can't even fit them on my regular photo backdrop :) Next up for Dropfleet is an UCM fleet, I've put most together and I'm only really waiting for a few online only limited edition light cruisers to arrive and I'm all set for a large fleet. When I'm done with that I need to start running some demos at the club as there's only a few guys playing at the moment and new opponents certainly wouldn't hurt!

Christmas gifts and first challenge entries

Christmas has been celebrated and it's time to start easing back to normal life. A busy festive season again as we were visiting different relatives and both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were spent with our parents. It was the first time in years that I'd been at a Christmas  celebration with smaller children in years and boy had I forgotten how hectic it can be when you have a bunch of preschool aged children going crazy while waiting for Santa :)

With a massive renovation of our new apartment looming in the horizon we had asked relatives and each other not to give any gifts expect for help in the construction work. There were still a couple of nice gaming and hobby related surprises. The missus bought me Shooting Up by Lukasz Kamiensky which is a history about substance use by militaries throughout the years, both as recreational and in trying to improve combat performance. The psychological aspect of warface has always fascinated me so a very welcome gift. Only gotten through the first third, but it's definitely turning out to be a great book giving a good overview on the subject.

My Secret Santa was also very generous with a Königstiger popping up in the mail! A very welcome addition to the Remagen force that I'm working on for Flames of War now. Thank you very much for an amazing gift!

With the christmas fuzz over I had a couple of days of uninterrupted painting time as the better half left with her family for a short vacation at a holiday village also taking the warhound with her as well. In addition to the Panzergrenadier platoon that I just managed to finish before setting of for Christmas I managed to squeeze in further reinforcements for my Dropfleet Commander PHR fleet as well as an AA platoon for the Jerries. 176 points out of my goal of 1000 achieved within a week, so I'm pretty pleased with my output. Still I'm going to have to get quite a bit done before February as we'll start renovations then and I'm probably not going to get any painting done until mid-March.

With this post done, it's back to painting. I'm still hoping to get one more entry out before the end of the year. I've got base colours more or less done for the new Blood Bowl Orc team so hopefully I'll have enough time to get them finished in time for 2016!

Entry #1 - Panzergrenadier Platoon

Entry #2 - Dropfleet Commander PHR

 

 

Entry #3 - 2cm Flak38 Platoon

 

PHR Starter fleets for Dropfleet Commander

Change of subjects again, this time with a switch to a completely new game for me, Dropfleet Commander. I've always been a massive fan of different space movies and tv series with fond memories of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and some of the Star Trek series like Next Generation. Naturally space combat fascinated me and I've played multiple games including Battlefleet Gothic and lately X-Wing and Armada. So when Hawk came out with their Dropfleet Commander Kickstarter about a year ago I immediately jumped on board with a pledge. With the Horned Rat, Andy Chambers, behind the rules there was no way that I was going to miss this especially since the aesthetics of the ships are brilliant.

Little over a year has gone since the Kickstarter and I still haven't received any of my toys. Bit of a shame as some people got their stuff already in September and they've been in stores for a while, but I don't back Kickstarters thinking they are presales, rather to make sure that a cool looking product gets made and gets a good start on the market. I doubt Dropfleet could ever have become so big straight from the start without the Kickstarter. The only thing that I'm a bit pissed about in the whole project is the initial lack of communication from Hawk's side. Most backers were kept in the dark and when stuff started to show up on sale in online stores with only a few backers having received stuff, it's pretty understandable that people got angry. But luckily their communication has improved  greatly with updates coming in every few days, so I think Hawk have learned their lesson and if they ever do another one I think they'll do much better.


Even though I still don't have my pledge I caved in in November and went ahead and bought two boxes of ships. Seeing people's efforts around the internet I couldn't resist the urge for ships and as I only had a single box of PHR coming from the KS I figured some reinforcements on that sector would be most welcome. So a few clicks and some wait for the postman to bring my stuff, and I was a proud owner of two starter sets.

I don't really have any clue about the rules yet so knowing what to build was a bit tricky. In the end I decided to build one box as the suggested starter composition. The other box was a bit harder, but after browsing some blogs I decided on building all the frigates as Pandoras. Burnthrough lasers seemed pretty cool and I'd think a hunting pack of four of these little ships can easily bring the pain to unwary opponents. The Cruisers were then built as two Ganymedes, which are large ships filled with ground troops ready for landing operations and finally a Bellerophon bringing two Burnthrough lasers and massive strike aircraft wings into play.

On thing that struck me was how massive the models were. To give an idea of the scale the larger Heavy Cruisers come in at around 13 centimeters long and even the smallest ships are bigger than 28mm figures. I'd seen these live at Salute and tons of pictures online, but still I managed to get surprised by the size of these things. As these are something like 1:15 000 scale models I just pictured them to be a lot smaller. But then again they are space ships so even the smallest ones would be massive.

Ikarus, Hector and Theseus

Bellerophon and two Ganymedes

Paintjob wise I tried out a few different schemes with varying colours and camouflage patterns done with the help of stencils. None of them really seemed to do the trick and in the end I just ended up with a simple gradient that keeps the large flat surfaces clean looking. Some smallish decals would probably be a nice addition, but I still haven't found any that I like. Though looking at 40k stuff Tau decals would probably look quite good on the sides of the PHR ships as there are some similarities in the design aesthetics as well. Rest of the ships were painted with a metal colour then washed black to bring out details, before finally painting the engine lights red and picking out things like ends of guns with the same colour. Finally I painted the bases to highlight the front and side sectors to make playing a bit faster.

 

4 Pandoras

 2 Medeas and 2 Europas

With these done I'm probably not going to paint anything until the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge starts again. I need to prep stuff for it to have at least something to start on when Curt blows the whistle. Christmas holidays should provide ample time to paint my first few entries.

Starting with Dropfleet Commander

The wait is finally starting to be over with Dropfleet! With a wildly successful Kickstarter roughly a year ago Hawk launched their new game in the Dropzone universe. With over 600 thousand pounds pledged and multiple new designs added as stretch goals I wasn't too surprised when they didn't make the original June/July goal. And with deliveries starting in October it was still quite well on time by Kickstarter standards. (I'm still waiting for nearly all of my Winter War Kickstarter minis from 2013...)

I actually haven't gotten my pledge yet, and none have been hitting Finland as far as I know. But I couldn't resist when I saw some starter fleets on sale in hobby stores in the UK. Coupled with free shipping offers it didn't take long for me to order two boxes to get started with PHR. When filling the pledge manager I had planned to do UCM and PHR fleets and start with UCM and only taking one PHR fleet. But with time passing and seeing plenty of painted PHR fleets around the web I decided that I want to make that my main fleet. With one starter box not being enough for a full game I ordered two more which should give me a good start and after the pledge arrives with the final third box and freebies I should have enough for larger 2000 point games as well.

The first thing that struck me when I got the boxes was how big the ships were. I'd seen them live at Salute, but in a display cabinet without anything to compare the sizes to I just hadn't realized that these things are huge. The heavier cruisers coming at around 13 centimeters long and even the small frigates being double the size of your regular Space Marine. They did take quite a while to put together, but after a few evenings and today morning I'm now a happy owner of a sizable fleet.

Alongside building them I've used a couple of ships as test beds for paint schemes. I'd originally planned to do them with a digital camo or hex camo scheme, but after some tests I'm not that sure anymore. The ships have large nice flat surfaces and I'm really starting to think that maybe just a flat shade with some slight modulation towards the ends of the ship is the way to go. I'm starting to settle on a blue shade, but still not completely sold on it. It's probably going to need one or more tests still to settle on something that I'm happy with, but I think I'm getting pretty close.

On another note Blood Bowl seems to be on preorder! It seems like Christmas is coming early with Dropfleet coming in and now Blood Bowl. It's bit of a shame that they are not selling the rulebook and orc teams separately as I'm not that interested in the human team as it's a bit dull in my opinion. I'm trying to resist the urge to buy the starter box and wait for a separate rulebook and then just buy the Skaven and Orc team separately when they come out, but I'm fearing that I might budge with promo images popping up around my Facebook and blogger feeds.