In my youth, when Mastodons still roamed the Prairies, there were games
not made of pixels, ones and zeros. This was one of them-
DSCF0799 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
One of a series of 'Microgames',
Hot Spot was a two-player tactical board game that featured the fleeing rebel Technocrats pausing to
raid a Corporate Mining planet for fuel and supplies. The wrinkle in the game was that the entire surface of the planet was molten, and the temporary floating platforms of the Technocrats would melt after four turns. (The Ziegler Corporation's main platform, or "Crustal" as the game calls them, has some kind of force field that renders it impervious.) So the Techs have superior equipment and a time limit, while the Corpos have terrain, numbers, and a bit more mobility. In the game descriptions, the Technocrats have a couple of AFVs-the "Heavy Beamer" and the "Crawler".
I built a 1/72 Heavy Beamer back in the 80's when the game first came out, but only bits of it survive here and there in the spares boxes. I had long wanted to revisit the subject, and when Frank sent me the recent double kit of the Objekt 279, I found the inspiration. In the game, the machine looks like this-
DSCF0796 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr - which was my jumping off point.
There's not a whole lot of WiP pics-apart fro mthe trackwork, it was a fairly straightforward build that started with the turret and main armament.
DSCF0788 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
A small hull, then on to the tracks-
DSCF0789 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
turret interior-
DSCF0792 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
DSCF0794 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
I had originally wanted to go with white, but the paint I was using wasn't exactly the best, so I did a little polishing and went with a light grey blue (WW 1 German undersurface color) overall. The tracks, despite being link and length with
tiny individual links went together with ease and alacrity.
Last was to seal it all up under the very sci-fi bubble canopy, which while it will do for now, needs a little tweaking. But I'm off to the mountains
of Tennessee to cat-sit for my eldest step-daughter for two weeks so I won't have much opportunity for posting.
DSCF0806 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
DSCF0804 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
DSCF0807 by
VileDr.Yo, on Flickr
