Looking down the line

With the new year already well underway, I thought I would take a little time to make some notes about some upcoming plans and projects for 2014. My right arm is still recovering from the shoulder surgery in December, but I’m hoping that won’t prevent me from doing some hobby work.

I plan to work on some modern ships this year. I recently ordered a 1/700 scale Chinese Navy Type 56 corvette from the Objects May Appear… store on Shapeways (in addition to some 1/144th scale air racers). One thing I’ve noticed about the Shapeways figures I’ve seen is that the basic strong & flexible printing turns out with a grainy look and feel. Since this ship will have fit in with my resin and plastic ships, I chose to get the ship in the polished strong & flexible material (the mid-level price option). I’m hoping that will make the whole figure smoother, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. I do expect there will still need to be some detailing work done on the ship, but since no one else makes this model I should have something unique. I will post my impressions of the ship and material once it arrives.

The Type 56 image from Shapeways website

I also want to get back to a couple of projects that I set aside. One is the 15mm Age of Sail stuff. This project has been languishing for years and I really need to do some work on it. I’ve got enough ships and figures to do some small battles and figure out the real direction I want to go. I want to do some U.S. Navy vs. Barbary pirate actions and maybe follow that up with some War of 1812 actions, but my slow painting has been holding up the whole project.

Barbary Pirates (still) in progress

The other project I want to get back to is the Vietnam War air rescue scenario that I started a couple years ago. I was going to run a game for Enfilade, but the project stalled and I went in a different direction. I want to use the AirWar C21 rules for the game, since the rules cover both air-to-air and air-to-ground stuff, but I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to do a turning template that fits with my stands and the game. I’m probably being too anal retentive about this, but I’d really like to have some good tools for players to make movement and turning easy. 

Planes waiting for completion

In addition to gaming projects, I want to make that I do more blog posting this year. My postings fell off a little last year and I want to change that. My goal is to get out a minimum of 30 posts in 2014. That isn't really much compared to most bloggers, but my posts tend to be long so I think that is a good compromise.