Dropzone Kitbashing

The folks over at TTCombat have launched a kitbashing contest this winter on their Facebook page (you’ll need to be a member of their group for that link to work). The concept sounds fun and since I’ve been messing around with Dropzone so much, I’d take a stab at the contest as well.

There are more details in the post but that gets most of the gories out of the way.  I already have my Optimus Prime custom up but this contest sparked a few ideas that I’ve been mulling over for the past couple of months. With a deadline and an organized push, I think this has galvanized me to making at least one of these ideas a reality.

One of the things that has fascinated me about the Resistance army is its reliance on hovercrafts. Specifically, large and unwieldy hovercrafts.

I’ve played with the Thunderstorm on the table quite a few times and it is a pretty large model.  It takes up a lot of table realestate and can be challenging to maneuver.  The wide open deck seems built to haul around squishy trucks and technicals but I started to think, what if they used the open bed to do more.

With this heavy-handed image, I give you… The Behemoth. This is the lovechild of a defunct Orbital Defense Laser and an overclocked Thunderstorm.  It is a building’s worst nightmare and maybe it will have some template damage capability as well.  It lost all of its ability to transport anything as all the power has to go into either moving or firing that massive laser.

As for actually kitbashing it, it will be tough.  I don’t want to buy a $50 terrain piece only to tear it up on a $40 hovercraft model “just for fun” so I may need to get creative or try to quick mold an existing laser.  Maybe I’ll just scratch build something similar looking.  We’ll see.

My other thought has been a running joke for a while in these games and then only recently had some outside influence:

Cities! On wheels! Yes, Mortal Engines, the upcoming Peter Jackson film based on Philip Reeve’s novels, has me thinking… why not?

So here we have The Nest, for lack of a better term. The hovercraft’s footprint is almost the size of a small building.  It has the armor and damage points almost matching one too so why dance around the subject any more.

At this point, the Resistance are pushing the hovercraft chassis to the limit by constructing a mobile living barracks, complete with garage for their Jackson transports.  This thing would be slow but could hold a garrison’s worth of infantry and ground transports to be a mobile infantry nightmare.  Maybe it has “infilitrate-18” or something so it can start deeper in on the battlefield.  Honestly, I just want a floating building running around with tons of dudes firing out the windows to make everyone’s life hell.

All fluff aside, this should be relatively easy to kitbash.  Lots of building options are out there to marry the pieces together and scratch building buildings is a bit easier (in theory) than scratch building a laser.  I could make it more complicated but more believable if I ditch the hover aspect and replace the base with tank treads but I don’t have a cheap source of those and I won’t be buying a ton of UCM light tanks to make it work either. Plus, it is sooo like the Resistance to tell the opposing player that, yes, the hovercraft rules do grant a shooting penalty like small/agile skimmer tanks.  Yes, my hovercraft is the size of a building but it just moves so much faster than you expect that you have trouble adjusting.

Oh! And I put my water tower thingie up on Thingiverse:

Water Tower base and roof for building damage counters

Damn, I am sexy with the naming.  Let me know if you try it out!