YV-666 Repaint - Darksun 25

Screw your meta

So, in less than 12 months this ship has gone from being the laughing stock of the meta to something that many Scum players value. It's a pretty tough ship, with many options that have certainly seen play in our local area. Thanks in no small part to Shane :) I've repainted mine, and completed the following vlog for all to see :) I hope you enjoy it!

X-wing mini tourney pre Double Trouble

By now, some of you may have read the from the gang blog post that talks about me running an X-wing hunger games event the night before double trouble. It'll be free to enter, and everything you need will be provided. I may have to cap the numbers but we'll see! Hopefully it will cater as an intro event but also a nice way to experience new forms of playing X-wing, beyond the competitive scene. There may be a prize for the winner, thou it depends on numbers how that will iron out!

 

Without giving the game away too much, a Hunger Games style event copies some of the battle royal feel of the films and books. You, in your single spaceship will go toe to toe with others in similar small plastic spaceships. In the centre of the battlefield there will be a cornucopia where you can grab upgrades to attach to your X-wing, tie fighter or y-wing. These updates will be random and may be something you couldn't normally put on your ship type. For example, a mangler cannon on an x wing or some torpedoes on a tie fighter.  Ships will be deployed around the edge of the board, facing inwards. The winner will be the last man/woman standing. 

 

I'm hoping that the event will allow those who haven't played before to learn the ropes and also test themselves in a swirling cross fire of events. I think the unfocused nature of it will help people get a taste for the game. They can just take things slowly whilst others destroy each other, but they can also dive straight into the thick of the action. For the experienced player it offers a chance to prove their mettle in a new form of space combat. No practised formation flying here!

So, if you're around the night before and would like to get involved, let me know! I know that some of us from Leicester will be there, along with some of the usual suspects (Mike, Dave, henni?). Comment on this post or email me at: lightningmuppet(at)hotmail.com

EDIT- provisionally putting the start time down as 7.30, but this does depend on when people are available! 

How to: Magnetize X-wing bases

Dear readers! This is what I've been working on for the last few days. A suprise project that makes my ships look great! Magnetised flying bases. This one in particular is for large base ships. I'm still working on the small base ships, that'll follow in the future. I can't take any credit for the idea, I pretty much got step by step instructions from a good friend (George), even to the point of checking I was buying the right things on Amazon! Here is a suitably dynamic pose of the two jumpmasters I've done so far!

 

Whilst I've been doing a lot of Vlogging recently, I wanted to go a bit old fashioned with this and write a blog instead! Plus, it was so quick I didn't have time to think about recording it! So I've got a few steps written down here for you to follow. 

To complete this hobby adventure you will need the following:

• 10mm steel ball bearings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TIG8JNW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Z2Sqxb7WMGBK2 ) 
• 10mm countersunk rare earth magnets. (They basically have a dip in them to allow the ball bearing to rest on them snugly).(https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007UOXRY0/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_y4Sqxb6E8TH7A )
• 10mm metal tube. I picked up some aluminium admonished tube from wickes. (Top tip, straight copper tube doesn't seem to available in that size)
• Some way of cutting said metal tube
• Green stuff (other cheaper vareities are available)
• Hobby clippers 
• Some files
• Decent super glue
• Black spray paint
• A loving and understanding spouse who will be impressed that you have magnetised it correctly

Step 1 - the prep work

Select the length of tube you want, and cut to size. I wouldn't go above 6 inches if I were you (but that's for another time). File off the ends to make sure they are smooth. Then using your hobby clippers cut away the two smaller squarish bits on the large ship base. If you're unsure which bits I mean, look at the shape of the peg hole relative to the bits I've cut off. In the end, I didn't take the peg triangle out btw. 

 

Once you're happy that both these bits are smooth, get some green stuff and fill the holes in the flying base. 

Step 2: the flying stand

In addition to filling in the holes with green stuff,  I added enough that when I put the tube in the green stuff supports it on either side. So about level with the remaining raised circular bits. 

 

Using the tube, gently create a groove for it to sit into the green stuff. Then remove the tube, add a decent amount of superglue and re-apply the tube. This step is really important, make sure that the tube is at the correct angle (dead straight). Once you've done this leave it to one side an let it dry. 

 

Step 3: the ship

Get whichever large base ship you are using and  either remove the peg insert by pulling it out, or clipping it off. Either way, in the same spot where you just removed the peg, make sure you've got a nice flat surface corresponding to the approximate size of the countersunk magnet. It's important that it's in the same spot as the old peg insert because that's where the ship is designed to balance from. (Note: I think the ghost may be different due to its size, you may need to mess around with where you put the magnet).

When you're happy with the place where you are going to put the magnet, superglue it in place. You may need a tiny bit of greenstuff to give it a good surface to bond onto, but use that sparingly. 

Step 4: spray paint and ball bearings

Whilst the superglue for the magnet is drying, take a can of black spray paint and spray the base that you've made. Once the spray paint is dry, spray some varnish ontop of it to make sure that the paint doesn't chip off. 

 

When this is dry, get your ball bearings and superglue them to the top of the tube. With that, you're done! The really handy thing is hat you'll only need to make a handful of bases for standard play. More will be required for epic play or flying swarms of ships of course. I'll leave you with a couple of shots of the jumpmasters flying at fancy angles!

 

 

Milton Keynes regionals today!

Sorry for the lack of posts this week guys! Please forgive my sins on that count. I've been practicing hard for the biggest X-wing event i have ever been too. If I've timed this right, it should come out on Sunday afternoon, whilst I'm flying toy spaceships and making pew pew noises. 

 

I've spent the last couple of weeks practicing hard for this event. I'd really like to finish top half, maybe even top 32 at a push. My stretch goal would be to make the cut, and then get some dice. Obviously my aim is to win the whole thing, but there are around 127 other people there and I'm sure at least one of them might have something to say about all of these things!

 

I've decided to go with jumpmasters, although as I write this on Friday I can't decide between 2.5 fully loaded jumpmasters, or 2 fully loaded ones with a Bumpmaster and feedback arrays. It's a tight call, I've not had any practice with the Bumpmaster list but I think it's a better counter to imperial aces, and I think they'll be a lot of them. It also has adaptability ensuring my ps2 bump, and putting the R4 agromech on both other the ships with torpedoes. 

I think, on reflection I probably prefer the extra set of torpedoes. They're just too good. So I think that's what I'll roll with! Hopefully they'll be a vlog soon after with the results! Wish me luck!

Tournament Performance Review - X-wing Spring Tourney at Weekend Warlords

Good day to you dear readers (imagine I'm saying that in a very British accent). Following on from my last post I thought I’d review the Jumpmasters. In the previous post I declared that I was taking them for three reasons. They were to see if:

A/. I could fly them

B/. If they were any good

C/. If I liked flying them

 

the real jumpmaster 5000 that everyones raving about

I'm going to review at least at first on those broad categories. So here goes.

A/. If I could fly them

Well, the short answer is I was a lot better at flying them by 6pm on Sunday than I was at 9am! That’s not the reasons solely for my defeats, but I was managing to get more sets of torpedoes of by the end of the day. I think that’s part of what makes a good xwing player a great xwing player, is that you can plan 2-3 turns ahead. So you know where you need to be to do the next thing, based on what you assumption about your oppenant is.

So I think I can fly them ok, but the natural turrets make them quite forgiving. You don't always need arc or your enemy that way. One game I only got off two sets of torps, but the others it was usually at least 3. 

The other measure that I'd use for that is bumping. Making a strong initative bid meant that I could use my intelligence agent to look at an opposing ships dial right before I moved. This was really helpful in allowing more blocks. Having said this, one of the games I lost was lost before the blocking really began. I am considering a fully fledged Bumpmaster, but it does lower my damage output. 

B/. If they were any good

Yes. They are good. I think everybody knows that by now. That I managed to lick half a ghost with two of them is proof enough for me. It's also a reasonably forgiving ship to fly in some respects, with a turret and two evade dice. 

The crux is that you only go green in one direction, so stress isn't good for you. It's one of the reasons I don't like the overclocked agromech, its just got the potential to leave you wide open positionally. The thing that I like is that they can just about do what you want with a standard build, but that if you want anything fancy or different you have to compromise elsewhere. So I had an Intel agent, but I sacrificed my 3rd set of extra munitions for example. 

C/. If I liked flying them

Hmmm. A tough one. There are aspects I really do like. These would include blocking your oppenants ships (probly my face thing in the whole game), causing grievously large amounts of damage, and the dial. The moves that they have available make them really fun to fly. They were reasonably fun to fly, but have a triple list with plasmas is a bit jousty, and I can't decide if I like it or not. In fairness, the main time I didn't like it was when I was flying against jumpmasters. Not because I was bothered by the powerful nature of them, just that it's a bit boring to look at! We all turn up to make pew pew noises and it's nice to see variety. But I am definitely partly to blame for that I suppose!

I'm debating dropping the torpedoes on one to have a ship fully devoted to bumping. My other option my be to trade one out for YV-666, and use that to bump with. However, I don't know if that's as powerful. I think in the end I may well fly them at regionals, if only because I haven't time to practice with anything else! 

Come back next time, when I'll be reviewing my hobby process so far this year, and looking at what I might need to paint for the double trouble 40k tourney. 

Hobby hack: bases for X-wing

I got frustrated very early on in X-wing with the way the bases skid around the board of you breathe on them. I wanted to do something easy to fix this, that was nice and simple, but most importantly - cheap. 

Whilst whiling away a lunch break in wilkinsons (for my international readers it's the sort of place where you can get similar stuff of a decent quality without having to pay outrageous prices for a label. It's not a thrift store or pound shop, it's just pitching somewhere above that) I discovered some small rubber pads that might be quite useful. As you can see from the below picture, they are clear, and small enough that you can have 4 per base. 

I decided to give them a go and have since bought a second set. They are quite good, giving that extra bit of traction and helping stop things knock around when hit by a dice or nudged by a template. What's really good is that the are self sticking, so you can just drop them straight on.  However, my personal tip would be to secure them with superglue. They do tend to fall off otherwise. 

The main potential concern (although it's not come up ever) is the raised profile of the base. As you can see from this picture, it means that the base is slightly off the ground. Now, thankfully we aren't playing a true line of sight game, so I'm clearly not modelling for advantage. However FFG's rules state that you can't change the ships or base in any way. So there is the potential for somebody to call you out on it. 

Having said that, this game is Not a games workshop game and has a totally different community vibe. People are much more relaxed and agreeable than most of the other systems ive played. I suppose I'd just reccomend taking spares with you that don't have the feet on, just in case!

Overall, I'm gonna give this  4 out of 5 stars as a tip. It's massively cheaper than some of the other non slip stuff I've seen and is very simple to do. As noted, the only real problem is the raised height. 

Steele open X-wing Mat raffle!

Some of you may be aware of the Steele open. Run by Aaron Utley, it's a fantastic event in the USA for X-wing and armada and some other bits and bobs. 

Aaron was recently on the 

Nova Squadron Radio podcast talking about the Steele open and all things related to it. This included the swag and prizes! One thing that caught my ear was the custom X-wing mats that are event exclusive. And then it really caught my eye when I saw it!

It's Jakku! A commission piece of art, there was no way to get this mat short of flying to America and going to the event. Which, for me made it a very expensive mat. I mean it's nice, but it's not £1500 nice. 

Until now! Aaron has been overwhelmed with people wanting this thing, and has agreed to raffle 2. You can 

buy your raffle tickets here, and for a 1 in 500 chance, $2 isn't too bad. If he sells all 1000 tickets, he will raffle a third. The proceeds go to the event, and considering the effort he's putting in I don't mind shelling out a few beans. It is open internationally as well, which is a massive plus for me. 

Id love to win it! There is nothing wrong with the mat I have, (something that's kept me from buying another one!) but to have one that relates to Jakku, now that would be cool. I doubt I'll get one, but I can dream! 

X-wing wave 8 musings

With wave 8 imminent, I've been played around with what I think I want to try out when the new ships come out. I thought I'd pour out my thoughts onto a blog post! 

get ready wallet!

There's a couple of lists I'd like to think about, and this is the first: 

Ghosting around (98)

"Chopper" (47) - VCX-100

Enhanced Scopes (1), Extra Munitions (2), Sabine Wren (2), Bombardier (1), Ghost (0), Ion Projector (2), Ion Bombs (2)

Ezra Bridger (28) - Attack Shuttle

Push The Limit (3), Ion Cannon Turret (5), Phantom (0)

Bandit Squadron Pilot (12) - Z-95 Headhunter

Bandit Squadron Pilot (12) - Z-95 Headhunter

It's not perfect by any means, but it's working off the idea that the Ghost is a big old ship that's likely to get in the way! With a 4 straight move on a large base ship, you are guarenteed to be able to reach your oppenant quickly. And by reach I mean bump. Or get him to bump you! And that's where the fun begins. 

You've got enhanced scopes, which means if you choose, you can be PS0 in the activation phase. You then move first and jump right in where you think they'll be. If they hit you, they may get ion'ed. they will defo get a stress from choppers ability. Then you shoot something that isn't touching you, but may have got stacked up behind. Then you ion that because you can shoot the attack shuttles' turret! Hopefully if you're facing something in formation, you've really ruined thier day. Potentially, if you play your cards right you can block 3 ships, with maybe only 1 shooting you. 

At this point I have to give complete credit to a friend (Shane hibbard) who showed me who devastating the ion projectors really are. Shoving it into the middle of somebody's formation is horrible!

If not, and they can break away, then you've got ion bombs that can go and speed two away from you. Both the ion projectors and chopper trigger every turn. So you could keep a ship there for a few turns, piling up its stress. When you eventually pull away, you can choose to drop the ion bomb before you move (screwing them again) and then parachute Ezra out if you as well, staying behind them and picking off what's left. The ion bombs help with this because they keep things going slow that extra turn. 

The z95s are useful filler. I'd debated a bwing with a tractor beam, but it's a slower ship and one less ship.  I'll see thou. I do love b-wings!I'm looking forward to trying it out on the tabletop. Do you have X-wing? What are you looking forwards to about wave 8?

Poe dameron and T-70 X-wing repaints

Dear reader! Today I'm sharing my paintjobs for my T-70 x-wings! For those not in the know, they are the ones used in episode 7: The Force Awakens. They are a slightly updated version of the older models used in the ironical trilogy, and this bears out in the X-wing miniatures game. 

Being a sucker for punishment, I really like painting fantasy flights ore painted models. (Even if I could be working thru my back catalogue of things to do painting wise!)

I own two T-70s and normally paint a duplicate fighter to signify that it's an ace. I've done it with the B-wings, A-wings etc. This time, I couldn't resist the chance to paint up Poe dameron's ride. A lot of people have done the same, in fact id go so far as to say that it's the most common repaint I've seen. 

I went for a reasonably classic look here, lightly drybrushing skavenblught dinge over the black to pick out the raised areas. I then used a couple of base coats of games workshop orange before following it up with blazing orange. And then I highlighted the orange with a mix of white and blazing orange. 

The engines are a breakaway from my normal orange glow (there was already enough orange!), with an ice blue through to white effect taking place in less than 5mms. Doing t quickly whilst the paint wasn't dry meant that it all blended in quite well. I added shiney gloss to the engines and the cockpit. 

For my second T-70 (although it was painted first!) I used my now standard paint scheme. Bleached bone all over, tin bits on the metal bits and then wash the whole thing in nuln oil. Following that, lighten back up with tyrant stone (basically a bone colour) to give a rugged, well loved feel to the hull. 

The red was a mecharite red base coat, the blood red, then inked, then brought back up with blood red. I ended up putting gloss varnish of the little wing markings as well :)

For the engines I used the standard red/orange/yellow/white combo that goes on most of my repaints. I'm really pleased with how this turned out, I feel like I've got painting small base ships down quite well now. Really excited about wave 8 now! Will be doing some repaints and vlogs of those bad boys, so keep an eye out for that!

Support your local author: world book day!

Hello readers! 

Just a quick one today. One of my friends has written a sci-fi book called "intrinsic". Recently released, it's been a passion of his for a while. And on top of that, It's world book day today, so why not buy it! At the moment it's only available on kindle, but I believe you can get a kindle app for iPhones. 

I've read part of it so far, (he gave me a script to read about a year ago and I couldn't put it down!) and I really enjoyed it. I only meant to read a couple of pages and ended up reading a couple of chapters! 

When the hard copy comes out later this month, I'll be snapping this bad boy up, and also doing a proper review of it.  For now we can "make do" on our electronic devices! 

Darksun Life Vol 12: Xwing Store Championship Vlog Report

Here it is! A new vlog for a new year. Can't believe it's taken me until March to do one. But at least it's a cracker! Enjoy :) 

The blog write ups of my games will follow sometime in the next few days. For now, you'll have to make do with the soothing sound of my voice. 

Achievement unlocked: win a tournament

You may be able to geuss what this blog post is about due to the title. Whilst it's not a goal on my hobby resolutions, it's been an overarching goal for some time. Indeed, on the "mr & Mrs" video that my wife and I did for when we got married, it was one of my stated aims, instead of things like kids and the like. One thing at a time I say!

In summary, yesterday I went to an X-wing store championships at Titan games in Lichfield. I ran the 4 scum ywings with tlt and unhinged astromech. For this that don't know, that means each ship has a turret that fires twice a turn, as well as being making the ships much more manoeuvrable. 

I went undefeated in Swiss, (despite having 1 z95 take out 2.5  ywings on its own!) and then went all the way after the cut. In my semi final/ top 4 game I was very fortunate, and got the drop on my oppenant, who should have had me dead to rights. And then in the final, I played a Biggs/wes/keyan build that is beaten in round 4, and successfully managed to broadside them one at a time. 

Further in depth reports will follow as well as a vlog, but I couldn't contain my excitement and had to blog about it! 

Darksun Life vol. 8 : The Lost Fleet Review

Good Evening.

Action shot!

This Monday, please enjoy my review of the Lost Fleet Series. Should you be particularly interested, please comment and i'll send you one of them!