Friday, June 15, 2018

Moon Base Klaisus and Sector Mechanicus

I've been meaning to post this for a bit now. I picked up the Moon Base Klaisus set with a gift certificate my brother gave me for Christmas, and it's pretty groovy, even tho it has some flaws for my specific needs.
Specifically, I don't have a big enough table to support a (roughly*) 4x6 cardboard foldout, and not enough room around my table to allow for actual play if I put a 4x6 chunk of plywood or something on top of it. Here it's folded down to an approximate 4x4 for a 1250 point Game. It looks good from a distance, but if you zoom in, you'll notice that there are four areas, most noticeably the one in the lower left, that don't fit in. That's because the remaining panels that I'm not using had to get folded up on top of the section I did want, which kind of messes with the layout, and keeps it from being flat. I'm trying to decide if I just want to deal like this in hope that I'll eventually have a place big enough for a 4x6, or just cut off the extra panels and make it a dedicated 4x4.

Speaking of the layout, I really like that the street grid is set up at an angle to the sides. It makes for more interesting games when the Terrain is at angles to the Deployment Zones, and it's easier to avoid stuff just getting blown away as the streets provide open fields of fire in the directions that everyone needs to go.

I had thought we were going to have to rule that the Stanchions on the Sector Mechanicus stuff blocked LoS, but it turns out that when it's at odd angles and all mixed together like this, it actually blocks LoS pretty well. My Sector Mechanicus stuff, as you can see, is in a variety of different stages of completion. Most notably, I don't have any of the railings done, so we just played that all the walkways provided cover to anyone standing on them. The walls that came with the Moon Base mix really well with the rest of it, and even line up perfectly with the pipelines. My opponent was amazed that a bunch of it was just clipped together. It was solid enough while his Drukhari were swarming across it that he'd assumed it was all glued.

The one real negative to the set is that you have to be super careful when re-folding it. It's really easy to get a finger inside of the fold, which causes the cardboard to start tearing and delaminating.

Fluff-wise, my idea with this layout was that there had originally been some sort of nondescript installation here. Hab blocks, Admin buildings, stuff like that. Then someone attacked and blew it all up. That's the ruined walls that came with the Moon Base set. Then, quite some time later, the Adeptus Mechanicus found promethium deposits or something like that, and set up a facility to extract and process it. Recently, all contact with that facility was lost, resulting in the Jade Serpents Space Marine Chapter being sent to investigate, and clashing inconclusively with a Drukhari raiding force.

*The dimensions of the board are kind of odd. As near as I can tell, they're based on being folded down into A4-size stacks, minus a bit so you can get a finger in between the boards and the edge of the box and actually pull them out rather than having to dump them out.

4 comments:

  1. I have to say - that table looks bloody awesome. I can only hope that my eventual Sector Mechanicus stuff looks half that good once it's done. Keep up on the updates as you paint your way through it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! For some reason, I didn't get notifications for comments on this post, so I didn't see this until just now.

      I was very pleasantly surprised at how well it all came together. Now I just need to finish actually painting it all.

      Delete
  2. Weirdly enough I packed away a Sector Mechanicus board at a recent tournament and was surprised to find that it all just clipped together. Its solid when set up but packs away into a very small box when disassembled. I was so impressed that I split a 'Renegade' box with someone at work and agreed to let him have the Knight upgrade whilst I got the scenery. Looks really cool (the skull claw/crane thing is awesome) but I might have to block mine out with plasticard to prevent "I can see the corner of his belt buckle" shenanigans at tournaments.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The way it clips together is amazing. The designer, Ray Dranfield, has a bunch of great commentary and tips for it on his Twitter.

      The skull crane is absolutely awesome. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate one into an Iron Warriors-aligned Renegade Knight as one of my next projects.

      I was very pleasantly surprised at how well it did end up blocking LoS. The Pipelines and Plasma Regulators really help (as would the Munitorum Shipping Containers if mine weren't over at Nathaniel's place, where we more often play), but even the Stanchions are pretty bulky, and easy to set up so they're not all lined up together.

      Delete