Dave Posted September 7, 2011 Share Posted September 7, 2011 As well building my railways, I also do other scale modelling stuff, which traingeekboy asked about on his thread but I thought I'd break it out to here instead. So as well as model trains, I also am a wargaming, which means I paint scale soldiers - lots of different scales, from 1/54 (scalextrix scale, or a bit larger than O gauge) down to 1/300 (not quite a small as T gauge) and even smaller than that when I'm painting spaceships. Although most of the things I paint are between 1/76 (OO gauge) and 1/43 (O gauge) I also write regular for a free online magazine, Irregular Magazine http://www.irregularmagazine.com which (if you are so inclined) you can download as a PDF. This magazine is about games, mostly tabletop, wargames and role playing games. Although we often have articles about painting, since that is something that many of us do as well. I used to be a role player as well, but I just don't have as much time for that as I used to any more. Anyone else do other types of scale modelling? Dave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ba14eagle Posted September 7, 2011 Share Posted September 7, 2011 I have a large collection of diecast fire engines and to display the 1/43 - 1/50 models I used to have a large baseboard with a model fire station on it. The buildings were all scratchbuilt for me by an old friend from the local O gauge model railway group and I developed the diorama - a fire station open day, with lots of visiting fire appliances, old and new. The diorama made a number of appearances at local model shows and a few fire station open days, before I sold it on last year. Unfortunately, events such as this attract a lot of young children, who think the models are for playing with (too many little pieces to get broken and lost)However, I was very pleased to see it again at our local fire station open day this summer with its new owner. If anybody is interested, I have a few photos of it that I could post in the gallery..... I have recently bought a 1/76 kit for a large London style fire station and am thinking I may develop another diorama in the smaller scale, as I have a growing collection of 1/76 models thanks to Oxford Diecast Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted September 7, 2011 Author Share Posted September 7, 2011 Sounds pretty good! I'd be interested if you have some photos I assume you've seen the Scaledale Country Fire Station? http://www.transport-models.com/picture/number1242.asp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ba14eagle Posted September 7, 2011 Share Posted September 7, 2011 Yes Dave, I have. Pretty hideous really. My dad bought the N gauge version for his railway, only to find that the Oxford Diecast Dennis F12 didnt look like it would fit in it! Another problem with scale creep! I have the Bachmann Scenecraft fire station for OO - a much more modern offering and very nicely done too. On days when the weather is good and I bother to get the buildings out on the HFR, it looks very nice. I have a nice array of trucks to pose with it too. Spookly, in line with a lot of the Bachmann Scenecraft buildings, it has a sign board on the outside saying "Hamptons Fire Station" - and it is mine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted September 7, 2011 Author Share Posted September 7, 2011 Some of the ready-made stuff you can buy really does make you feel good about your own modelling efforts, don't they? I've been building some of the Ratio and Dapol kits recently. I've not found one I don't like yet, but I was a bit unsure about the Dapol OO turntable my father-in-law bought. It looks a little unsubstantial in pieces. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted September 8, 2011 Author Share Posted September 8, 2011 Thanks for the photos of the fire station Looks impressive! I can see why it would be a draw at fire station open days and model shows. It makes me want to ask question about how you build different bits of it, but I know you said you didn't build it yourself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mick Posted September 9, 2011 Share Posted September 9, 2011 That Sanbec fire station reminds me of one on a less grand scale that I watched being built over a period of time when I was a youngster, without ever realising it was to be a Xmas present for me and my younger brother. Our 'surprise' present was complete with opening doors and a set of fire engines. Haven't a clue what scale the vehicles were or even what eventually became of them and the fire station. Apart from model railways I've never really been interested in any other type of scale models. Perhaps the closest I ever came was when I took an interest in making 1/12th scale horse drawn vehicles, though I never did get round to making that Gypsy Caravan. When my daughters were young I spent a period making a dolls house and became interested in making interior furniture to 1/12th scale. I feel most comfortable working with timber! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 Yeah, I made a similar mistake the first time I played Napoleonics. - mostly I'd been playing small unit skirmish games before that! Read a couple of books and that sorted my brain out, somewhat! The Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG is a bit like TFT (The Fantasy Trip - for those still reading this that don't know what we're talking about!), although TFT was just a set of micro adventures. AFF was a fully fledged RPG (well, with the usual slightly limited fantasy background) that grew out of the Fighting Fantasy series of game books. Although, I think Fighting Fantasy came after TFT, it was created by the UK Games Designer Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston (both infamous for founding Games Workshop) - but just to add to the confusion US Steve Jackson wrote three of the books in the series, without the books acknowledging that it was a different Steve Jackson! As you can tell, I love some of this RPG history stuff! So I'd better stop before everyone else on this board realises quite how odd I am! I just hope I'm making you all feel better about being model railway people! Anyway, back to the point, this new version of AFF is quite a lot like the old one, with a few more bells and whistles and some of the explanation of things filled out a bit more like a modern RPG. But it still retains a massive amount of flavour of the original, which I find to be a really nice acheivement of the new authors. The sci-fi wargame is called "Tomorrow's War" and is being published next month by Osprey Publishing and I am very fortunate to be sat here with a review copy It is near future hard-sci-fi using a great set of game mechanics that is very similar to a couple of previous games that have proven to be very good. Its more about the fighting men and how good they are as soldiers, rather than the tech they carry. For a sci-fi game, this is really rather refreshing. Anyway, now I'm rambling at length about quite a lot of non-railway stuff on a railway forum! I'll drop a quick note in this topic when we publish the next issue of Irregular Magazine next month, traingeekboy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mick Posted September 17, 2011 Share Posted September 17, 2011 Dave said: ...Anyway, now I'm rambling at length about quite a lot of non-railway stuff on a railway forum!... I'm pretty relaxed about ramblings on other non-railway subjects, in fact I quite enjoy going through these non-related threads and of course, I'm as guilty as anyone about carrying on with non-railway related subjects with my vegetable plot and weather station topics. Life would be extremely dull if all we ever spoke about was railway modelling. I've never had an interest in science fiction nor role-playing games myself. I have experienced the addiction of computer gaming but not for many years. Back in the late 80's - early 1990s (and continuing through that decade) I was 'addicted' to the likes of 'Championship Manager', 'Railroad Tycoon', 'Formula 1', and I mean addicted. It all started with the purchase of an Amiga 500+ computer and the addition of monitor, hard drive etc which in those days cost a small fortune. The computer had 1 meg of memory, which I later upgraded to 2 MB and the hard drive was the bees knees in those days with a massive 20MB storage! In those days I had a young family but the computer and the gaming had more or less taken over my life. Today, the computer remains a major part of my daily routine and I still enjoy the experience of sitting at a keyboard but there are no longer any games on my hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted September 18, 2011 Author Share Posted September 18, 2011 My first PC had a 20Mb hard desk as well. That was an outrageous amount of capacity. I never filled it up I've no idea how you would manage to fill up so much space! When I was at unitversity I lived with a bloke that was addicted to championship manager. He played through to 2050 and discovered that players didn't lose any of their skills as they aged Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
traingeekboy Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 OMG I had an Amiga 500 too! ha ha I loved that thing. It was the first machine with co-processors for handling different things. played marble madness and lemmings with a null modem cable between my amiga and my buddies amiga for head to head play. Populous that way too. Oh and Dungeon Master. I had the massive 2 meg upgrade and an extra external floppy drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazzanoid Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 hehe my first 'proper' computer was an amiga 500... then a 600, then a 1200! which then got upgraded with the internal (wooooo!) hard drive packing a massive 250Mb, and the add-on CD drive so you could *gasp* listen to those new music CD thingies and, wait for it, play games like on the CD32 console! Of course, the chances of any of it working in harmony with each other was slim to none, especially once we added the dedicated graphics card to it. Anyone remember these.... Ah the good ol' days..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
traingeekboy Posted October 14, 2011 Share Posted October 14, 2011 Oh yeah my buddy had a 1200. We thought it was the coolest thing in the world. The thing I always wanted was a video toaster, now that was cool! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted October 15, 2011 Author Share Posted October 15, 2011 I said I'd update when we next published Irregular Magazine, and we did this today, so Issue 10 is now available to download free as a PDF or ZIP (containing the PDF) at http://www.irregularmagazine.com/latest-issue/ @TrainGeekBoy: Issue 10 includes my "Blast From the Past" retrospective of Fighting Fantasy Since they started being published in about '82, this only goes to prove that perhaps I am in the younger half of railway modellers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
traingeekboy Posted October 18, 2011 Share Posted October 18, 2011 Dave, Hmmmm... I get this feeling I am being placed in the older category. I actually still have my old tan dnd books and my dice. When I sold my white darf magazines, you're version of the dragon only better, I was surprised to find out that people were willing to bid 50.00 for each one. I wish I had bought more when I was a teenager. Since you are doing articles on dungeons and dragons, you may want to join cyber1.net/org/com i'll have to dig up the link. ahh there is a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_%28computer_game%29 The original dungeon crawl game was on that system back in the day. The lesson as they are called now has a very detailed history about the early dungeon games. It might make for an interesting article. And of course there is always Empire, the first ever multiplayer game. I'm always pushing for someone to give plato network some publicity as we are having trouble finding new players for empire and I love empire. The empire crew is possibly the most hostile group I have ever encountered on the internet, particularly the Feds vs Orions hostility. They've been beating on each other via empire and hating each other for about 40 years now. I stay out of it, I'm a Romulan! Some users have been banned for taking the hostilities to extremes. I think one guy drove to another players house and punched him in the face or something like that. An old plato friend of mine got too addicted and decided to get himself banned so he programmed a robot program and allowed himself to get caught using it. But I spoke to him the other day and he decided he may come back under a fake name. Anyway, as a gamer you may find some of the Plato stuff interesting from a historical aspect, as the system had touch screens that were a LCD display back in the 70's. We all had emails and chat too. Pretty much everything people think is new tech was done on plato. Oh yeah we had vector graphics based games too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted October 19, 2011 Author Share Posted October 19, 2011 Feel free to place yourself wherever you want in that range, GeekBoy, I'm happy to call you young, if you'd prefer! I just keep feeling young when model railway people talk about how old they are! All that PLATO stuff sounds pretty interesting Not something I knew existied before, but exactly the same kind of blast-from-the-past subject we believe our readers like. If you'd like to put some thoughts together in writing, we're open to submissions from anyone - and you clearly know a lot more about this stuff than I do! I'm sure we could put links to Cyber1 in the article as well, to help direct people to the website. Since the purpose of our magazine is really about gaming and painting, the editors are currently trying to get me to find a way to crowbar railways and games together so they can showcase my layout a little. I'm sure everyone here has had the experience that outdoor OO gauge railways seem to be either completely uninteresting or fascinating to people - and most scale modellers find themselves facinated, even if rail isn't thier thing. I probably should just ask Mick if I can lift his Weathering Bachmann's 16t Mineral's thread and re-write it as an article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
traingeekboy Posted October 20, 2011 Share Posted October 20, 2011 You might consider both the historical aspects such as military trains; it would tie in with miniaturists. There is also the game aspect of running railroads from simple games like john allens Time Saver, I built one and played a little; it's a devilish thing with only five switches, all the way to time table and car card operation. I saw a weird thing on the bbc site about avalanches. It chronicled the use of avalanches as military weapons during world war one. You might want to go find it, I would give you a link but my computer crashed yesterday and I had to rebuild everything. I still haven't gotten a decent broswer up and running. Not sure where the history is hidden on this internet exploder thingie. I will think about wirting the article. I am very busy with my start up company as well as a movie screen play right now. I know I talk about being poor all the time, but mainly it's because I am trying to lay the ground work down for being my own boss and that means an extended time of poverty and hard work. Then again I always love distractions. All this talking about Plato makes me recall my early experiences with computers back in the 70's. As a kid I lived in Champaign urbana Illinois. It was where the first computer memory unit was created. My best friends mother worked as an operator on a big mainframe computer. Since I went to school right near her work she would give me rides home after work. I would wander over and hang out in the operations room while I watched the operators load and unload giant spools of tape into the drives. I recall seeing the prototype of the first memory core framed in the hall. It literally was a set of metal rings wrapped with wires. Probably an iron core. Even though it was 1976 or so when I found it, I had this sense that I was seeing something historical and that I should try to remember the symbolic weight of that item in context of computer history. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhickers Posted November 9, 2011 Share Posted November 9, 2011 Hi i'm another wargamer and do modern 20mm here's a few pic's of my work Hope to start on my garden railway come spring as the shed is now in place.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted November 9, 2011 Author Share Posted November 9, 2011 Very nice I particularly like the LWB Landie. The scimitar is excellent, too. Not sure I've seen one painted up for a UN peacekeeping force, before. What rules are you usng for your 20mm gaming? I haven't played much modern stuff recently. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhickers Posted November 9, 2011 Share Posted November 9, 2011 I've got a copy of force on force by Ambush alley games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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