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<td valign="top">My gaming club, <a href="http://www.gobstyks.co.uk" target=_new>Gobstyk's</a>,
were invited to put on a display or participation game for the
2002 Games Day. The member responsible for the planning (Pete)
devised a scenario based upon troops descending onto a
battlefield and storming a fortification. Being a fan of the
Starship Troopers film Pete asked if I could build a model based
on Fort Apache, which is the fort that the troopers try to
defend against the bugs.</td>
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<td>I borrowed the video of the film and set about researching
Fort Apache. You don't get many shots of the exterior of the
fort, but a couple were enough to get a feel for the
construction. As you can see from this frame, the fort was built
out of a rocky crag face. It is clearly of temporary
construction made principally from bright metal panelling and
raised on legs. There are cantilever supports around the outside
of the walls.</td>
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<td>This shot shows the construction of the fort in more detail.
The bright metal panels and cantilevers are clearly visible.</td>
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I spent a long time reflecting on ways to produce the bright metal
panels of the fort used in the film. One technique I tried was to take
some tin dishes (the sort that takeaway meals come in) and cut out
panels of thick tin foil. I made a former of cardboard to mimic the
reinforcing ribs on the panels in the film and pressed the pattern
into the tin foil. This worked reasonably well but was going to be
extremely time consuming. In the end I abandoned it and used a
different approach, which I will describe below.
Materials
# MDF for the base
# Foamcore for the basic wall construction
# Polystyrene (styrofoam) for the crag
# Thin packing plastic for the wall panelling
# Plastruct tubing for the cantilevers
# Plastruct <font face="courier">I</font>-beam for the legs (so
called because it looks like a capital <font face="courier">I</font>
in cross section - a girder shape)
# Wooden moulding for the curtain at the bottom of the walls (I
chose one with a reeding pattern)
# A single strand pulled out of a main flex for the cabling on the
cantilevers
# Car repair mesh
# Thick cardboard
# Takeaway meal tin dishes (bought new, in packs of 10. You could
always eat lots of takeaways but this could prove rather
expensive...)
# Screw-in eyelets for securing the cables to the MDF base
# Sand and gravel mixture for texture on the base
# Silicon sealant
# Plasticote bright chrome effect spray paint.
# Emulsion (latex) paints for the base
Method
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<td>The basic shape of the fort was constructed from foamcore.
happened to have some black and white offcuts around and so I
used them. Out of choice I would use all black. I left the wall
in two pieces, part cutting through the foamcore and bending it
at the corners. This makes it stronger than cutting wall panels
and gluing them together. Each wall was left over long at the
back to be fitted into the crag face, which would be made later.
The walls were fixed to the foamcore base of the fort with a hot
glue gun.</td>
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<td>The Plastruct <font face="Courier">I</font>-beam was fixed at
intervals around the base with a generous squirt of hot glue.</td>
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<td>The crag which was to form the rear all of the fort was
constructed from 2 inch thick polystyrene, in much the same was
as the crags in the <a href="http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page246.html">trench
boards</a>. I used two layers for the crags, with the back
layer a solid piece, and the front layer cut to butt up to the
over long walls of the fort. The front crag layer inside the
fort was glued down to the fort floor. I used silicon sealant
(the stuff you use to seal the gap between your bath and tiles)
to fill any gaps between the layers of polystyrene and between
the polystyrene and the fort walls and floor. This made the
walls look as though they had been fitted to the crag (but
really the crag had been fitted to the walls).</td>
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I realised that once the fort was glued down to the base it would
be very difficult to paint the sand underneath it. I therefore added a
skirt of black foamcore under the fort, between the fort floor and the
MDF base. I hoped that by leaving this well back behind the fort edge,
and leaving it black, it would still look as though the fort was
raised on legs.
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<td>I now had to decide how to detail the wall panels. I was
hoping that any sufficiently metallic-looking finish would give
the effect I needed provided it had some detail and a very high
metallic shine. I had already tested some of the Plasticote
chrome-effect spray paint on a different model, and had a good
idea of what its final effect is like.
In the end I chose a thin plastic packing tray that had a
ridged construction and glued it to the walls between the legs.
The packing tray had actually come out of a box of test tubes -
you can perhaps see how the troughs in the plastic in this
picture each carried a test tube in a former life. It may not be
possible for you to get the same material of course, but
anything that will add an industrial looking pattern to the
walls will do. In a push you can mimic my material with thin
card folded to a similar profile.
I also glued the wooden moulding to the bottom of the wall
between each leg.
With the basic wall construction complete (apart from minor
detailing, which I'll cover later) it was time to tackle the
cantilevers. I'll describe this in <a href="http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/infopages/page162.html"><u>part
two</u></a>.
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Updated: May 2003