From PeterB: A final transforming robot (70 Points)

I promised something for the end of the challenge and I think I can call it done. Last year in my first challenge I had it all planned what I would paint, then Mrs B very kindly gave me a giant Space Marine for Christmas. So of course I had to then paint that up as part of the challenge. This year my very generous friend with a 3D printer (all wargamers need one) that printed my Viking bust asked me the most random of questions. "Would you also like an Optimus Prime?" 

This was the beginning of the project when I had "primed" the parts and begun construction

Well, of course who am I to say no to such an offer, so a box of random parts with no instructions arrived. I have been slowly painting this beast of a project over the challenge and like the Space Marine before him, it took a lot of paint!

The design is inspired by the Michael Bay movie design so it had some flames etched into some of the red panelling. These are blue in the movie which if I am honest I think look awful, so I changed them to yellow.

The rest of the paint scheme, I wanted to keep similar to classic Optimus so that he was recognisable, then the whole model had detailing added to make him look like he has had the odd scrap or two.

Ruler for scale

I have now gifted Optimus to a dear friend as a thank you for doing me a favour by fixing an engine for my Dad for his railway setup. Yes, I am the son of a hobbyist, I guess it runs in the blood. It definitely is where I get the joy of tinkering with things and although they are different hobbies there is enough crossover that we appreciate and discuss them with each other at length. Thousands of wiser folk than I have written paragraphs about the healthy benefits of hobbying so I am grateful we have found what we love.

Points wise, I have no idea, my Space Marine garnered 50 points and he is around that size (maybe a bit taller) as you can see below. Then 20 points for a visit to the gift shop. So 70 points overall?

From TeemuL: We have Ray painting minis, which some think are too small, and then we have Peter, who does the opposite! And gives it away as gift! You have good friends and your friends have a good friend, well done Peter! 50 points for Optimus Prime and 20 bonus for location. Thank you for joining us!

From SanderS: Visiting Cybertron via Maelstrom! (40 points)

 Hoi,

With only a few weeks to go, I need to make haste in order to reach my points goal of 1000 points. For that I will now visit two more planets in the Challenge Galaxay Quadrant, let's make landfall on one of my favourites: Cybertron!

Quite some years ago a small Australian firm, aptly called Traders Galaxy, (headed by two nice blokes) had obtained a license to produce a Transformers miniature game. Something went wrong, they fell out with each other and the license was cancelled. Before the line of miniatures was mothballed as well, several sets had been available for purchase for some time and I got my hands on a few of them. Through the last Challenges I have been painting them and have now amassed a small but delightful amount of Transformers; both Autobots as well as Decepticons. 

They are a pain to put together as they are extremely fiddly and I have really fat clumsy fingers as well as detoriating eyesight, oh well I got there in the end.   

Todays offering is a duo I really remember fondly from the old cartoons: Hot Rod (or rather Rodimus Prime)  and Jazz! 

Jazz:

Hot Rod:

The Bots were put on Battletech Hexbases and Arthur has been busy making CBT Rostersheets for them in Heavy Metal Pro (if this all sounds like gibberish to you just have a look at the pretty pictures ;-) so we will be able to use the Bots in games of Battletech as well.

If I understand correctly entering a planet through Maelstrom is 30 points rather than 20 and 2 x 28mm figures is another 10 so 40 points all round. Next stop will be Arrakis!

Cheers Sander

Those robots looks great, sander. And you're right - being dumped out of the Maelstrom scores you 30 points for this planet!

Tamsin

From TashaH: Tiptoe Through The Planets [Cybertron][Krypton][Gethen] (80 points)

 

No special permissions required for this entry on Cybertron! I actually got this one spot on!

 

 

This is Bumblebee, from the WizKids Transformers collection. 

I had great vision for Bumblebee when I ordered him. In my mind he was going to be a glorious yellow with highlights. It was going to be magnificent. 

I realized quite quickly that yellow is an incredibly difficult colour to master. This was further confirmed to me in a Paint and Chat session!

 

 

I further complicated my painting situation by deciding to try a little bit of contrast paint in an inconspicuous spot, to see if I could brighten it up. This figure is too heavy. I set it down to open the pot of paint. Bumblebee decided he wanted to transform and toppled over, dumping a brand new pot of Contrast paint all over my desk, onto myself, but most devastatingly onto Bumblebee. Having to incorporate the contrast paint into the rest of the figure brought it too orange. I threw up my hands and said "enough"! (actually I said a lot of bad words ...shhh) I did some highlights and blending to try and help the situation but I’m not sure there was any coming back at this point! 

He is not magnificent but he is acceptable. My daughter is a gaming streamer online. She took Bumblebee for decor in her streaming background. She’s very particular, so I take it as a compliment!

 

 

From here we are going to take a little zip through the Great Abyssal, into the Inner Ring, landing on Krypton. I just happen to have a superhero at hand! 

 

I am not at all up on any of the Universes. I know the major characters but other than that, I’m clueless. This is the Cannonball Heroclix figure from WizKids. I bought a few of these specifically for the challenge.

 

 

 

I don’t know anything about Cannonball, but he sure looks super fast! 

 

Continuing with our superhero theme, we are going to bounce next door to Gethen. It’s mighty cold here and Emma Frost, another WizKids Heroclix figure, fits right in. 

 

 

This figure is dreadful. If I were to do it over, I’d forego the clear bits and just prime the whole thing. Actually, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t buy this figure again! The WizKids figures are a convenient option, particularly for someone like me just starting out. Unfortunately, I find that they are hit or miss with detail quality and their pre-priming is iffy.

 

 

 

I’m not sure where we are going next, so we will chill here for a bit!

 

The points:

1 54 mm figure - 10 points

2 28 mm figures - 10 points

3 planet bonuses - 60 points

Total - 80 points

What a delightful set of minis! Yellow is a very difficult colour to paint, as the pigments are very translucent. I'm not sure if we shared our tips with you on chat, but my top one is to paint a different, more opaque colour (eg, yellow ochre, white, flesh, pink, light brown) underneath first.

Tamsin

From SanderS: Going to Solaris! (50 points)

 Hoi,

 

Finally I have come round to starting my Challenge Quadrant journey. Last Challenges I tried to visit every waypoint on the bonus maps but I won't even try that here. Time is precious with work at school, COVID and an impending renovation of the house as well as several cool projects in the works. 

This year I have ample figures in store for my Quadrant entries so I just had to find a pleasant locale to start from. Of course my greatest Sci-Fi love is Battletech and therefore I just had to start at Solaris the Gameworld! Now I am not going to explain in length what Solaris means in the Battletech lore, that's why I put the link in after all, but let's just suffice with: Battlemechs are made for waging war and can thus also be used for sports and that happens on Solaris.

Many of the great CBT novels tell the story of Solaris and the great FedCom civil war starts there. So it's not surprising that I have several mechs I want to paint up in the colours of some of the larger Gaming Stables of Solaris VII. The two featured here are: 

An Awesome in blue and white tiger stripes (yes thát's what they are) of the Skye Tigers and a Locust of the De Lon stable in red, black and white. The red squares are sporting Stable logo's from the brilliant people at Fighting Piranha Decals and they are really cool. 

Now the description in the Challenge Quadrant information says "Deception" for Solaris and these two mechs are hardly deceptive. The mechs down below however...

Yes these are true Decepticons from the Transformers Universe, but CBT scale and no they're not commercially available any more. They were very shortly until lawyers were let loose and TM rules were enacted.

Included here are two of the Seekers (the Decepticon Airforce) and the 5 Cassette Bots used as a sort of drones by my all time favourite: Soundwave!

Soundwave (whom I painted earlier) and his Cassette Bots

Above: Laserbeak (red) and Buzzsaw (yellow)

Frenzy (left) and Rumble (right) 

Ravage

Thundercracker (left) and Star Scream (leader of the Seekers and Righthand bot to Megatron)

Below are the 3 original seekers: Thundercracker, Starscream and Skywarp

So we come to the points and as far as I am are concerned it's rather easy, the Cassette Bots counts as 6mm vehicles for 2 points each (5x2=10) then there's 4 mechs that are basically as big as an 28mm figure so 5 pop each makes 30 in total. Together with the locale bonus that should be 50 points. 

Decepticons ATTACK!

Great work on these Decepticons, Sander! Very crisp colouring.

Tamsin

From SanderS - The final push to the finish or "More than meets the eye!" (130 points)

Hoi,

Yup I am a measly few points short of my target of 1500 points. So these last days my poor wife and kids have had to put up with, a grumpier than usual, me trying to get at least 26 figures done.
Now if this would be a regular Tuesday post I'd have split it up in 3 parts, but so as to not bother poor old Curt too much, I put them all together.

Let's start with a batch of 11 more GI Joe figures. I have painted quite a lot of vehicles this Challenge, but there's still a lot of metal in the pile of the GI Joe purchase. So here I present 5 members of Destro's Iron Grenadiers, 4 members of the Joe Steel Brigade and two Joe characters Airborne and Dial Tone.

First up are the Iron Grenadiers, more info can be found when clicking the link.

The Steel Brigade were action figures you could not buy in stores but each regular figure came on a card and on that card was a "Flag point" a kind of stamp you had to cut out and collect. If you had enough you'd sent them with postal costs to the GI Joe club (Hasbro) and they would sent you a Steel Brigade figure. There are about 6 versions all slightly different in parts but always in the same paint scheme except the commander who had a dark blue set of fatigues and a golden helmet rather than a steel one. These figures are basically made from the plastic modern troopers from Warlord Games Project Z with custom heads. There are not too many poses in the set so I ended up making one I pretty much already had done before.

Dial Tone (to the right) is an old favourite as a communications specialist and with a beret he was pretty cool to 12 year old me. Airborne (left) is just a good all-rounder to have in your squad.

Since the Challenge isn't over yet, why not start a new project? Since the Necromunda rules are harder for Arthur to grasp then Heroquest I was thinking about making a 40k version of said game when a friend remarked that it already exists in the form of Space Crusade (Star Quest for us Europeans) a forerunner to Space Hulk. So an E-bay search and some cash later I had obtained a run down but complete game of Space Crusade. There's 3 teams of Space Marines in there and to net me another 50 points, I decided to paint the Ultra Marines and Blood Angels.
There are a few small additions and reparations but nothing major. Here's a pre-painting picture.

 Painted without weapons fitted:

Painted Blood Angels:

Painted Ultra Marines:

I've used old transfers and banners I had saved for what seems an age now really. The banners must have been Dreadnaught banners because I had to cut them to fit. The decals/ transfers have gone horribly wrong and wobbly so I am thinking of removing them and doing freehands on them later. There's enough figures in that box to last me a while.

Finally we come to the figures providing me with the title of this post and another new project started this Challenge. Let's figure a few friends who are fond of wargaming and a certain popular 80's comic/ cartoon featuring Alien robots transforming into Earth cars and planes. Let's imagine them creating a ruleset and masters of the miniatures and applying for the license to market the game and miniatures. The license procedure goes well but the friends cease to be partners and it all goes bums up... One of them still wants a restart (all the stuff is basically there after all) but no license, so he switched track away from said franchise into a mecha game but still has some of the figures that are now a little bit of a problem so I jumped in and ordered some while still available.

In the picture above from left to right: Bubblebi, General Duke, Megatyrant, Elecktroshock and Communicator ;-) Some battle pictures below: 

 A closer peak at the chaps:

Soundwave is my favourite, his voice and sound effects in series one of the G1 cartoon are soooo cool!

Oh and a "sizing" shot as well. You can see I have mounted them on CBT bases since I actually think of using them as Mechs for Battletech (Prima as Atlas, Bee as Centurion etc)

 Now these 26 figures in 28mm scale should be good for 130 points. So my current total is 1374 + 130 = 1504 yeah!

Cheers Sander

Guest minion JamieM - 
Wow.  Just wow.  It's like diving into a pool filled with nothing but Saturday mornings from the 80's!  Or, as I like to call it, My Happy Place :)

The Action Force stuff is awesome.  I don't remember Dialtone, but sadly his name has aged somewhat given he existed in a calmer, internet free time.....

Excellent work on tracking down space crusade.... I never played it but I can see how it could work with young children...... I'm now tempted to pick a set up myself!

That's a real shame on those Transformers, Id totally have bought some myself but sounds like they aren't available due to licencing thingies?!?!?

Lovely stuff, I've awarded the 130 points you need to get to your target, so jolly well done!