Welcome to a recently created - or rather, colonised - planet, to give my 6mm Sci Fi something extraterrestrial to fight over.
The planet's official designation is only used in boring official documents. Inhabitants and visitors call it Burp.
Why, you might ask. In
an unusual configuration, a solid crust has formed over a gaseous core.
The attempts of said gas to escape its bindings cause the bewildering
and perpetual array of noises that give the planet its nickname.
The atmosphere of Burp is breathable (although you might want to pinch your nose on arrival). The planet is however exposed to frequent meteor storms, whose size is too large for the relatively thin atmosphere to handle.
Here we can see a meteor impact site : they hit so hard they have split the table apart !
The usual result of particularly powerful impacts is the rupturing of the surface rock and a rush of escaping gas. When the super-compressed overheated gas of Burp escapes, it almost instantly solidifies, building colourful and fractal crystalline structures. These are so hard, they can stop a tungsten round. From a battlefield perspective, they act much like trees on a Terran-like landscape.
These are made out of natural moss of a white colour that I bought from a pound store. The bases were painted off-white, then had Akhelian Green contrast paint, diluted, spread over them. The moss was glued on with wood glue, tugged out a bit, and when it dried, painted with some green glaze and then Pylar Glacier Contrast straight out of the pot. The little gas bubbles are half-spherical gems you can buy from any toy store, with a bit of green-yellow glaze over them.
Burp boasts some rather unique vegetation. The Gaspod Cactus, which can grow as tall as a building, stores escaping gas in its digestive chambers and converts it into energy.
These are just cocoa-bean shaped beads, with one of those semi-spherical gems on top.
Redsphere is rarer, and fortunately so. When ripe, it explodes (everything on Burp seems to need to expel something). Stored gas carries the spores over a wide area, and breathing one in is almost guaranteed to be fatal. The flesh is, on the other hand, delicious when prepared correctly.
A Christmas decoration made up of foam beads painted red. I just chopped it up to make these.
The plant that Burp is, however, the most famed for is the Star. Their gigantic tear-shaped seeds are the
planet's most precious resource. Having yielded its bounty, the plants, along with their sprawling root system, decay rapidly, leaving behind
foul-smelling pools, bubbling with gas emissions. In wargaming terms, whilst in their flourishing
form, they are low area terrain offering light cover; in their decayed
form, they are Deep Wet terrain and, before driving into them, please
make sure waterproof sealing is perfectly intact. Otherwise the smell
will be so bad, not even insurgents will want to buy the vehicle from
you.
These are of course aniseed, I only kept the ones that were open and showing some of their seeds, which I painted pink. The underlay, as are all others in these pictures, are from my daughter's scrap book sheets. There is some amazing stuff in those ! And yes, I did ask permission !
Decaying plant-mass : scrap-book paper with dozens (and dozens) of those very useful semi-spherical beads. They have a sticky underside so are not as difficult to pop on the paper as you might think. I outlined the gas bubbles in Agrax Earthshade, then glazed them with some green.
Another sample of Burp flora here. The colonists stay well away from these, as during the spore season, the merest brush is enough to set them off. They reproduce by infecting fauna that touch them, and then going on to do some very unpleasant things to their host.
Just some flocked bark, which I got from a Festive shop, in the "Nature Themed Wedding" section. Obviously they weren't pink when I bought them. For the little spheres, I didn't use normal toy beads (because of the holes for threading string through them). These are instead beads that you drop into a sort of lava-lamp filled with water. They then expand and, driven by a pump, bob up and down and make nice soothing movements. Note to self : don't spill my coffee on these.
The subterranean gas is constantly pushing up against the surface of Burp. When it encounters less solid areas of crust, it drives them up, inch by inch. The crust is however quite elastic and rarely ruptures. This leads to the formation of some very peculiar rounded hills.
I made these out of expanding foam, that stuff you spray in as filler during DIY jobs. It comes in various colours, here I used the beige one. The blue foam could be useful for a future terrain project ! You have to spray it onto cardboard so as to get a flat base. You can go to town creating weird shapes, or poking stuff into it whilst it dries. Then it is just a matter of colouring it with some cheap paint, and doing a bit of drybrushing. A bit of tinting with diluted Contrast paints helps smooth out the surface.
So, Burp, despite its unpleasant aspects, has an atmosphere and it has resources. Which makes it ripe (ha ha) for colonisation.
The planet was colonised several hundred years ago, but around two-thirds of the population still live in hamlets or isolated farmsteads. Here is an image of pre-fab habitation domes and crop matrix hexes ready to ship out.
I found some half-spherical wooden beads in a big Arts & Craft shop. I gave them a coat of metallic paint, and then slapped various glazes over it, using green, orange, purple, blue and a fair bit of yellow. Gloss varnish finished them off.
Some rural communities have become quite prosperous over the decades. As soon as they can, they invest in active shielding to ward off the meteor showers.
The same Arts & Craft shop sells transparent spheres, which come in two parts. Hey presto ! Some glazing could be used, but I preferred not to. I left the clip on, as I think that cutting it away would split the plastic; I'll just cover it up with some scatter terrain.
Less wealthy communities just have to hope and pray they don't get flattened. In the early days of colonisation, the Burpers refrained from building high, since meteor strikes would then cause additional damage as the building came down. Domes were chosen as the most resistant shape, and the easiest to transport pre-fab from off-world : just pile them up on top of each other !
This legacy has shaped modern-day urban architecture. Towns are protected by a state of the art passive shield grid, which is insanely expensive to set up, but then requires little energy input.
The surface area is just a tablemat; scrap-book paper lines the sides. The buildings are polystyrene eggs cut in two, which had the added advantage of having a hex-like surface. I then painted them with metallic paints, did the shiny glaze thing, some blue blobs for light, a little colour ring on the bottom to make them stand out, and gloss varnish.
These urban areas, although small, are clearly visible from orbit due to the refraction effect of the passive shielding.
A second town, much like the first, this one perilously close to a swamp of decaying Star. The passive shield array also provides those green energy matrices to power buildings needs.
Of course you are asking, how to people get around on the surface of the planet ? There are landrunners, naturally, but the quickest and safest way to travel is by MagRail.
Here is a historic satellite image, with the first MagRail tubes lined up and ready for implantation.
These are just round wooden sticks sawed in half. Fortunately, I didn't have to do the sawing, otherwise I would be typing this article with only two fingers. They came that way in the bag. The junctions are made out of wooden bases, and some blue-tinted translucent beads. The idea is that the MagRails are half-buried into the ground, offering additional protection against meteor showers. That idea was conditioned by what I wanted them to represent in gaming terms : linear terrain.
Installation has begun here. The magnaselector has a similar function to a level crossing, the blockers flowing to the section that requires them, directing trains and avoiding collisions.
As I said, I made these because I wanted some linear terrain, but couldn't really see Burpers building walls and fences and the like. Obviously I went a bit overboard, as I have 4m of them. Well, 2m I suppose, as they go by pairs. Reasonable after all.
I hope you enjoyed this quick tour of Burp.
A view of everything. I will use an orangy-brown vinyl mat, and it looks like I have enough for a 1m20 x 1m20 table. It took me about a week of evenings to prepare it all, plus a couple of days beforehand to think it through and hunt for the materials. There were also some failures during the process, such as the infamous Floating Bloaters, gaseous trees lifted up into the atmosphere. I also thought about installing dense networks of gas-collecting balloons, with the idea that their stalk-cables would basically be forests. To appear realistic, however, I think they would have to be quite tall, which meant both trouble storing them, and difficult reaching around them to get to the figures.
Great fun thinking about and building Burp and more to the point, my 6mm stuff now has some new terrain to battle over. Thanks for looking and, to use the Burper farewell, "May your gases be contained".
