{"id":8750,"date":"2018-03-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hntdaab.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8750"},"modified":"2021-10-29T02:59:42","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T01:59:42","slug":"operation-dragons-hoard-march-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hntdaab.co.uk\/blog\/2018\/03\/07\/operation-dragons-hoard-march-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation Dragon’s Hoard: March Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month saw Vapnartak and the first run of Operation Dragon’s Hoard for 2018. As you can see from my last post<\/a>, there were one or two things I wanted to tweak after that run. Originally the plan was to spend the rest of February prepping the game ready for its run at Hammerhead and then have a full day giving a different crowd a chance to play it.<\/p>\n

Well that didn’t happen. So instead, here is the update on what I managed to tweak coming into March.<\/p>\n

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You’ve already seen most of the detail on these buildings in my impressions piece. As much as I like the adobes, they are a little bit generic. These new building should help to give the OPFOR a bonus by giving them a height advantage. To fit the buildings in to the setting, I shifted the location slightly from random village in the desert to the outskirts of an abandoned oil facility. Much like the rest of the board, there was a lot of tan spray paint applied to give it the “dusted in constant sandstorm” look.<\/p>\n

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The bigger change was working on the plane. Up until this point, the only structural change I had made to it was the initial cuts to break it into five pieces (main body, nose, tail, wing, fuel tank). This was effective for gameplay purposes but it did give it the look of having just applied a hacksaw to it rather than ripped apart in flight. I’ll admit, battle damage is something that I always worry about – from my airfix days, it can be quite easy to go over the top and ruin it. Seeing as this had already been an expensive process already, the idea of having to redo the plane didn’t appeal. So, the plane was to go minimal – show off the impressions of lots of damage without completely shredding the plane.<\/p>\n

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Before applying dremel to plane, the first task was roughly working out the planned destruction I was going to cause. The background to the mission was that the plane went down in a storm. However, I decided to tweak it to make the downed plane a little more interesting. The new idea was to have it go down to a burst of cannon first stitching its way along the wing (possibly from the ZPU I have sat on my desk). The action plan was to rough up the broken edges of the plane with semi-random cuts, rough up the wing tips, expand the break on the wing to include a shell hole and then add additional damage to the right wing and right tail.<\/p>\n

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This was my first time using the dremel so took me a little while to get 100% comfortable with it, especially getting used to the safety concerns (always wear eye pro) and making sure not to run it late into the evening. However, it did make the job ridiculously easy. I managed to get all the cutting done really quickly. I would definitely recommend picking up a dremel for hobby projects – I’m going to be looking at some other cutting surfaces and tools to assist with it..<\/p>\n

So key bits of cutting are:<\/p>\n