Friday, March 20, 2015

New Terrain Project - Sink Holes - Part 1

If you follow my blog you can see that I've been playing a little bit of BattleTech: Alpha Strike lately.  To spice things up a bit, I thought it might be fun to build some terrain boards based on some of the more interesting BattleTech maps.

The set that I always thought was interesting are the sink hole maps.  As a function of how our hobby works we take our game tables and add terrain on top of it.  This works well and we get to have a pretty wide range of terrain types, but what about if the terrain fell away.  The idea of moving down into the table seems like a challenge and I'm going to work on bringing the sink hole maps to my table with 3D terrain.  Of course, this is primarily for BattleTech, but I'm sure I will be able to use these boards for other games.

To start with I pulled out my collection of map sheets and found the sink hole sheets.  As far as I can see the lowest terrain is sublevel 3.  So my plan for now is to only go that deep with my design.  I however, want to be able to cover a 4' x 6' table so I need to expand the maps a little.

I sketched out some ideas on graph paper and game up with this.


This involves making 6 2' x 2' terrain tiles.  The benefit of 2' x 2' tiles is that I will be able to move these around and turn them in different directions and I will be able to make lots of variations.  They will also be easier to transport than larger sections.

I'm not sure you can see it in the picture, but I have marked the sketch with depths for a rough guide as I start to construct these.  This is of course just a guide and I can tweak the design as I start cutting if things don't look quite right as I progress.

I plan to construct these out of 1" pink foam insulation.  I picked up 3 sheets of foam at my local building supply store.  My next step will be to start cutting these.

Stay tuned to hear more as this project progresses.

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