From DallasE: More Terrain for Lunar! (25 points)

                                        

Second last Challenge post from me and it's more terrain for Lunar. Haven't played the game yet but I definitely am ready - models all painted, mat purchased and delivered, and MORE than enough terrain. These were printed by Challenger ByronM in filament from STLs I purchased from Black Site Studios.

This is a pretty cool piece, it's the entrance to a buried hab pod.

These will also be useful, I think they're supposed to be oxygen tanks. I haven't "branded" the hab or tanks with any national insignia as I want them to be useable for either side.

Here's a crashed lunar buggy. Kinda neat.

I used one of the handy "NASA" decals on the buggy.

Not much more to say about this submission. As for points, I'm gonna claim one-and-a-quarter cubes, so 25 points.

Like I said, I still have one post to go. Not gonna tease it too much but it'll be something that's quite familiar to 40K enthusiasts "of a certain age". I've been looking for those models forever and finally found some. That's all I'll say for now!

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Wonderful work Dallas. These lunar terrain bits turned out a treat. I especially like the crashed buggy. I really appreciate how several game companies are now providing STLs for their games pieces. It's especially good for those in places like Canada where international shipping of physical product can be prohibitively expensive. 

Well done Dallas! I hope to have your final entry up today as well so stay tuned.

 

- Curt

From DallasE: Lunar Astronaut, Cosmonaut, Shuttle Pod, Terrain and Squats! (59 Points)

OK so I've got a little bit of painting done this week - mostly on the new hotness here which is Black Site Studio's Lunar. Today I've got my last two models (astronaut and cosmonaut) plus some craters, and a vehicle from an unexpected source!

Here are the two spacefarers. They're from the "Heroes and Icons Vol.1" pack from Black Site, but each has been converted... the cosmonaut (left) originally carried two geology hammers, and the astronaut (right) had two pistols... that didn't make much sense to me, so I did a bit of converting to give 'em a pistol and hammer each. I also had to replace the shafts on the geology hammers as they were twisted resin that manfully resisted all attempts at straightening. Worked out well I think.

I used the last small CCCP decal from the sheet on this model, I like the look of the tan suits with white helmets and boots. I used GW Rakarth Flesh as a basecoat, highlighted with Pallid Wych Flesh, washed with Agrax Earthshade. The helmet is Corax White with Vallejo pure white on top.  

The NASA astronaut is painted just the same as his colleagues too - basecoat Celestra Grey, highlighted Corax White and Vallejo pure white. 

The stars-and-stripes flags on the sleeves are done by hand. It's easy - paint a few long parallel stripes in Mephiston Red and then the canton over top in dark blue. Even in this larger scale, I call that done.

Recognize this? It's the Escape Pod from the Star Wars: Legion "Crashed Escape Pod" Battlefield Expansion. I couldn't imagine when I'd be using this in a Star Wars game but the style and scale seemed perfect for Lunar, so that's how it got painted!

The model was basecoated Celestra Grey then Corax White...

...then the Vallejo pure white over top. The Soviet flags are Mephiston Red highlighted Evil Sunz Scarlet.

The decals are from the Lunar decal sheet and really finish off the model well. I reckon this space pod looks a bit cobbled-together and janky so that means Soviet to me. I did some sponge chipping with German Camo Black-Brown, despite some misgivings... if this pod is going straight from the Earth to the Moon, how does it get weathered in a vacuum? I suppose there will be some bits of space dust to chip away at the paint, but I imagine that the Soviets with their sense of economy may get these things back down to Earth and reuse them.

 

Here are all the models I've painted for the game so far. You can see on the Soviets that I've repainted to give white helmets and added the CCCP decals, I think they look much better with that contrast.

I've also painted some craters this week. These are all vacuum-formed plastic items that have been kicking around for years, but they did take a bit of work. The vac-formed plastic is pretty thin and tends to warp at the edges - remember that these were all originally cut from a sheet, there was no 3D printing back then! So I cut some plasticard to shape and superglued the craters down to it before painting them. I reckon that's half a cube, the ruler is 6" long.

Lastly here's a couple of models that have been around awhile - they're Squats in Exo-Armour, metal models from the old days of 40K.

I wanted to get these dudes painted to round out a squad of five - I had already painted three "Termineggs" from Wereweevil for my Squat army and these guys fit that bunch to perfection. They'd been sitting primed on the painting desk for ages so it is good to get them up in the cabinet.

Now for the scoring:

2x 40mm Astronauts/Cosmonauts        14 points

1x 40mm space pod vehicle                  25 points

2x 28mm Squats in Exo-Armour          10 points
0.5 terrain cube                                     10 points

Total                                                       59 points

See you next week! 

Nice to see this growing, and expanding across the moon there! Those decals really hit the mark on the helmet. 

Easy 59 pts for you there
Kyle

From DallasE: Astronauts, Cosmonauts and a Rover for Lunar! (49 points)

Like many children of the 1970s, I was obsessed with space and the Space Race. Armstrong landed on the Moon only about two years before I was born and even in the late '70s the competition between the Soviets and the Americans for space superiority was a matter of the very recent past. And with all the secrecy surrounding the former Soviet Union, speculation about what happened in their space program was rampant. So it was almost inevitable that I'd be interested in the Lunar miniatures game from Black Site Studios.

Lunar is basically a miniatures game where astronauts and cosmonauts (and taikonauts if you're so inclined) fight it out on the Moon. The alt-history background diverges from our own in that the Soviets were first to land a man on the Moon, and NASA was not to be deterred from continuing the space race onto the very lunar surface. You can see how that would go. 

The basic game was reissued and updated in 2023 and the two-player box includes 6 resin models (three NASA astronauts and three Soviet cosmonauts), the rulebook, cards and tokens, special dice, and a small decal sheet. I also picked up some more models (the "Heroes and Icons Vol. 1" set) that includes four more figures and a cool unmanned rover. My set had unit cards for the four humans but not for the rover - I've emailed Black Site about that. (And yes, the astronaut above is wielding a pistol and meat cleaver) 

The models are 40mm-ish in scale and come with 32mm bases. I was excited about the decals because I wasn't jazzed about painting US and Soviet flags on the models' arms, but it turns out the decals are much too big to use for that anyway, so I hand-painted them to mixed results. 

Black Site offers all kinds of stuff for the game including a mat (24"x24" is the play surface) and STLs of craters and Moon-surface stuff like oxy tanks and gantries, I'm having Challenger Byron print those for me. But it occurred to me that what you really need for LOS-blocking are just big rocks and Canadian Tire came to the rescue with a bag of lava rocks for the barbecue - $7. I might paint them but they don't look bad as is. I got my mat from Mats by Mars because they make good mats and it was cheap as chips.

The game rules seem pretty cool and it looks like games play very fast. You only have 3-5 models per side and combat in a vacuum can be... dangerous. The game simulates low-G combat with lots of knockbacks (basically many of the weapons are non-lethal "kinetic" ones rather than penetrators, but when you get knocked back you fall prone and the pointy rocks on the Moon's surface are dangerous too). Looking forward to trying the game out soon. 

Scoring:

7x 40mm models = 49 points

Cheers,

Dallas, listening to the lost cosmonauts recorded at Torre Bert :-)

Very interesting models to place up today. And the freehand is looking good in the spaces I can see there. Not sure projectile guns will do the best in the vacuum of space.. but then again am no astro-physicist so what do I know! :D

49 pts for you there!
Kyle