from PeteF: Transmat and Ghar - a bit home made Awdry's Atoll (90 points)

Having arrived at the trailhead for The Path of New Shiny I was faced with a bit of a stumper. Unused to building terrain I really wasn't sure what might work. I thought about the armies that I'm aiming to complete during Challenge X and the scenarios they might be involved in. One of the more enjoyable scenarios in Beyond The Gates of Antares has one faction defending a transmat. Reinforcements arrive as the scenario progresses and the attackers close in.

Warlord Games sells a nice looking official transmat - and it's about the size of a CD. I also wanted to see if I could do something with LEDs and used one that slowly cycles through different colours to give the piece a beam-me-up-Scotty vibe. The central column is a quip electric toothbrush container.

The Ghar are one of the factions in Beyond The Gates of Antares. Most of them fight in hard to damage battle suits and I had four of these left from my accidental purchase of the Ghar Starter Army a couple of years ago. The theme of the army is my local NBA team, the Portland Trailblazers. Each battle suit represents one of the players - past and future. The one with the big launch tube (the Bomber) is named for Clyde Drexler, their best ever player. Many Portlanders are rabid Blazers fans and local gamers seem to like the army's theme.

I painted one face of the top CD in a colour shift blue metallic from Turbo Dork. Although this should have been a simple task.... what can I say? Take one involved trying to get two colours going in concentric rings. I was handbrushing at this point. It looked, er, terrible. For take 2 I just brushed the stuff on - but the brush strokes rose like giant ridges on the CDs surface. Than I remembered I had an airbrush packed away somewhere - a cheap one. So I tried that. It is called an airbrush because what comes out of the end of it is mainly air. I did my best to encourage more paint to join the air... but it barely co-operated. Not being very handy, I couldn't figure out how to up the air pressure. Eventually, enough paint emerged to call it done. I should really learn how to use that thing. It could be useful.

The end result has a bit of the something-that-they-made feel. It does look quite nice in the dark (no, not just because you can't see it - because of the light which changes colour). I tried to add a short video to the post but, like the airbrush, I couldn't get it to work properly - maybe too big.

The transmat would fit in a 5x5x6" cube so how does 15 points sound? Four Ghar battle suits at 10 points each (what they've scored in the past) plus 30 for a new area would make it 85. Does that sound reasonable?

This is the best cd based bit of terrain so far, i really love it. That coupled with supporting a 2nd rate team, mine are 4th rate, makes it extra special. I'll give it the full cube - close enough to a full size one, especially if you count the one at the other end with the queue of reinforcements