With our foray into All Quiet on the Martian Front we are now beginning to get sight online of the various larger toys available for the game. Unfortunately as I don’t partake of the offer to buy these at the big discount during the Kickstarter I’ve pretty much resigned myself to not buying into these given the recently revealed prices. The new American Land Ship is currently retailing at £150 through North Star! I appreciate that given the propensity of on-line retailers to discount this will be available more cheaply, but even at 20% discount the land ship will still come in at £120, still too rich for my blood.
It was with this in mind that I decided to have a go at making one for myself using my junk box and copious amounts of card, foam board, tape, and glue. Whilst I’d love the finished product to have the same fines as the commercial model I do have to be realistic about my own talents, and the limits to which empty paint pots and gaffer tape can be presented.
So I set out to make my own land ship, the HMLS Bodger. My desire was to get the model to look as close as possible given my material constraints to the commercial model, whilst meeting some of my own design requirements. The main one of these was that it had to fit into a 9 litre Really Useful storage box so that it would conveniently fit within my limited storage. The second was that the model had to be robust enough to be handled as a game piece so that I didn’t become too precious about it. The third was that the model was to be as light as possible (having previously made some beautiful Greek city walls with the help of Simon from Blotz I am now well aware of the issue of carrying significant amounts of heavy resin around to shows!)
I started out with a paper model which gave me the rough shape and dimensions to test the principle and simple aesthetics of the model. I then used the paper model to design changes by simply marking out adjustments to the paper ready for the next card model.
Once I was happy with the size and shape I marked out the design onto some heavy mount board. I also created a template for the bottom and top of the main hull for future modelling opportunities (or simply to make another if the first was a complete cock-up).