'Defensive Terrain' from ByronM - 'Tower & Bunker'

I had so many plans for this week’s theme entry, having a laser cutter and all, it leaves it pretty open to do whatever I want.  I cut myself a whole wild west town to paint up and thought it would make a great entry.  Then I went back and re-read the theme…. Defensive Terrain.  DOH!  Not the same as Defensible, where buildings would count.  A quick check with Curt, and it confirmed my fears, speed reading caught me again, the theme of the week was purpose built defensive terrain, not necessarily something you could defend. 

Back to the drawing board.

This is where it gets interesting, after a bunch of thinking, I decided that a guard watch tower that I designed to fit with my Infinity (Sci-fi) line of buildings would probably work great, as it is a defensive building.  So off I went, assembled, painted, and weathered the building to match the rest of my Infinity stuff. Here it is:

Before anyone asks why the ladder rungs are so huge, it is so that figures fit in them on bases so that if you do not have enough move to get all the way up or down, you can still leave the model in the right place.  Not scale, I know, but a good gaming compromise in my mind.

However, being a terrain guy, I just didn’t think this was good enough…  It was done after all to fit in to a whole pile of buildings I did up very fast so that I have a table worth of terrain to show off and loan out to tournaments in the city.  There is nothing fancy since it gets used a lot and handled roughly.  So, I decided to break out something I have been meaning to do for years.

When I ran a large GW tournament here in the city a long time ago, my wife and I had made a number of bunkers from Hirst Art molds and bricks. We had made many more bricks than we needed so I have had tons sitting around since then.  The bunkers though were pretty trashed after 10 years of tournaments and rough packing and handling, so went in the trash a few years back.  With doing WW1 stuff lately, I kept meaning to dig out the bricks and remake them again, now seemed like the time.

Being as I decided to do this on Wednesday though, I only got 1 done, but have plans to make at least 2 more this week.

Since the bricks don’t really match real life designs, and since it will be used for sci-fi and historical games, please give it some lee way.  It is not meant to be exact to any real life bunker from WW1 or WW2, just a representation of a bunker, overall I think it turned out pretty good.

The base is simply pink insulation foam covered in sand and glue (so that I could spray bomb the primer on), The roof is just foam core with strips of plastic card on it with pin heads to look like rivets.  The door is the same, with a T head pin as the door handle.  Inside I used plastic weave to give an industrial floor look.

None of the figures shown with either terrain piece were painted for the challenge this year, they are just to show the pieces with figures for scale.

The bunker is more representative of terrain I build for my own use, so I thought it was a much better piece to submit as my entry for the challenge.  I included the watch tower, simply because I finished it as well and wanted to share pictures.

Hope everyone enjoys.