At long last, the final behemoth: going with the Lion build as it’s the more interesting looking of the two.
Casting issues; the tips of the ‘fingers’ were rough, and one of the guns has a bit of a blob in the middle of the top barrel. The former was mostly fixable, couldn’t do much about the latter, but it’s minor enough. Otherwise the only other problem was some moldlines on the front legs I didn’t notice until the final painting touches, and probably couldn’t do much to repair anyway.
Luckily, Shaltari crap paints itself through the wonders of science fiction bullshit! Pictured here is the model mid-self-assembly.
Didn’t realize until I had everything glued up but I built it with a similar pose as my Chronus, with the right gun pointed straight ahead and the left gun down and to the side.
And all together. The Shaltari Dragon needs a bit more touching up repair work after an unfortunate drop onto a tile floor, but otherwise the collection is as complete as I want it.
I also entered a station painting competition run by some Dropfleet community person, and took this as an opportunity to also finally build and paint up the lone UCM cruiser I’ve had laying around since not long after Dropfleet hit retail, when I picked up the two player starter and traded away everything but this cruiser.
The main thing I wanted was some way of representing the gravity control rules of the station. My first attempt was to have a rod connecting the cruiser to the station, and use paperclips and cotton swabs to have some sort of swirling energy tube thing. This failed miserably as the only way to have the station/ship balanced was to either have the cruiser directly above the station, or far too close and looking terrible. I gave up on the idea and decided to bring back the ol’ reliable plastic mesh screen, cut into strips and painted with various blues and whites to give the impression of Shaltari tech messing with a grid-like structure of space to alter gravity.
Ended up winning a set of TTCombat paints with the station/cruiser. I’m happy enough with that; I would likely only ever get some if I happened to be placing an order with them that was a few dollars short of free shipping, so getting to try out a different set of standard acrylics from my usual Vallejo fare is nice.
The bottles come with a narrow tip, and the bottle itself is fairly firm. The Vallejo bottles are opposite this, with a more pliable bottle (actually not a huge fan of this) and fat tip. Squeezing out the paint through the thin tip was fine on most, but two of the bottles required a good amount of effort to get flowing. I’m a bit worried about exploding bottles if paint dries in the tip and you’re accustomed to having to squeeze hard, but that’ll remain to be seen. Another note is that the TT bottles come with child-safe caps, unlike the Vallejo ones.
I did my best to color match with my existing paints for a comparison. Some are better than others, with my woeful lack of greens and yellows showing through here!
TTC paints on the left, Vallejo on the right. They seem to perform quite well in this quick test! Also, I’m going to have to say that bottle of Vallejo yellow paint has always been shit, but it’s the only non-contrast yellow paint I have. Going to dump it immediately now in favor of the TTC one at least. The gunmetal was much thinner than the Vallejo one as well, the latter of which I did admittedly glob on a bit as a result. The white did a great job as well, and I’ll probably switch to using this bottle too. Otherwise, the rest did perfectly fine, and I’ve got no real complaints other than concerns over the bottle design that may or may not come to fruition.
I’ve been painting mostly Dropzone things recently, but I wanted to dip back into Dropfleet to finish up the Resistance fleet. First is rounding out the cruiser and frigate lineup! I wanted some of the CAW ships, and build a pair armed as such along with a vent cannon turret. I realized I didn’t have any actual broadside gun cruisers, so I built the last one as an all-artillery build, which can be run as the heavy cruiser famous admiral.
For the smaller class, I didn’t have any heavy frigate builds, so went with two groups, one CAW and one standard gun. Lastly, wasn’t happy with only four strike carriers, so built two more to bring it up to six total. After this, I have a few heavy ships in the queue, along with lighters and cutters, which will bring me to what I’d consider a complete fleet once they’re finished.