The Source of my Scratchbuilding

Star wars came out in 1977, when I was 5 years old. I was immediately hooked, and by the time I was about 7 or 8 I had a huge collection of the Kenner figures, an X-wing fighter, a snow speeder, a land speeder, an AT-AT that made noises and a bunch of other stuff.

What I did not have was a Millennium Falcon. I remember distinctly that a friend of my brothers had one, my Friend Paul had one, but I didn’t. After a day of fighting the Empire with 3.5 inch figures, I remember telling my dad that I wanted, indeed I NEEDED, to have a Millennium Falcon. Now, it wasn’t my birthday or Christmas and there was zero chance of one spontaneously appearing, so my dad said “Lets make one”.

We found a suitable cardboard box, about 12 inches square, and a fizzy drinks bottle. Back in those days these bottles had a removable plastic cap on the bottom, which left a rounded base. The bottle was cut at an angle and parcel taped to the side of the box to create the glazed side cockpit. A shoebox was glued inside with a door cut into it for the cargo hold, a ramp cut out of the bottom of the box and margarine tubs glued on to make landing gear. Another smaller box was parcel taped to the bottom and a hatch cut into the cardboard box to make the smuggling compartments. Rectangular sections of carpet underlay were glued in to make bunk-beds. I even roped my grandfather in to help me draw keyboards, circuits, cables and other details onto the pieces of card that would become the control panels around the ship.

It actually looked nothing like the Millennium Falcon, but that collection of plastic, card, glue and ink gave me hundreds of hours of fun, and when I did eventually get the plastic Millennium Falcon for Christmas, I was a little bit disappointed that it didn’t have all the things my home made cardboard-box version had.

New Blog

The Wayland Sector

New blog. Lets see how this goes.

This blog aims to be a little bit of a few things, something about my gaming hobbies, something about my modeling hobbies, something about my attempts to write and something about things I find interesting or amusing.

First of all, the map above is maybe for a new campaign for the excellent Future War Commander created using the spiffy downloads from here. I'm probably coming at this from the wrong direction, starting with a not terribly ground combat friendly map and trying to wrap some fluff and rules around it, but the tools at the Court Jesters site were easy to use and the results so nice I needed to justify them to myself somehow.

We've played a few games of FWC now and I've really enjoyed them. The rules are not too overbearing, and they encourage combined arms, so we've been able to play with infantry, tanks, AFV's, gunships, snipers, recon troops and all sorts of other fun toys. The only slight dissapointment I have is that they don't feel especially sci-fi at the moment, but we have only played with two reasonably vanilla forces so far. I'd like to see some sort of C3 warfare as well, drones, hackers, jamming and so on.