One project over a new one to begin and the start of this one came about quite out of the blue (milk?). First came the excellent Star Wars project from Akula over on the Lead Adventure forum http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=94361.0 with his 1/2256 scale ships, which is an inspiring read, but the tipping point was Rogue One as I came out of that film with the need to play Star Wars space battles.
It was at this point I started looking into what was available out there, obviously I was aware of X-Wing and Armada and for me there was never really any doubt about which scale of ships I'd be going for because who doesn't want to fly a Star Destroyer! However what was possibly more important was the rule set to be used, I'd seen games of X-Wing and I didn't like the rules so automatically ruled out both it and Armada thinking they'd both be pretty much the same so my next stop was Full Thrust. Now Full Thrust is a mighty fine rule set I've looked into before and I thought that it would be perfect for this (which it would be) but in the mean time my starter set for Armada arrived so I gave the rules a quick flick through and I must say I was thoroughly impressed. Simple rules where the complexity comes through how you equip your fleet and victory relies on your long term tactical planning thanks to the command dials.
Fast forward a month and I was now in possession of the entire range for Armada (with multiples where "needed", in for a penny in for a galactic credit chip as they say) getting plenty of games in and thoroughly enjoying learning the rules. One of the big things going for Armada, for me at least, is the quality of the pre-paints for the capital ships however I'm not too keen on identical copies and the squadrons aren't painted at all so it didn't take me long to decide on what was landing on my painting table next.
To start with I've not painted anything at this scale before so didn't want to go too crazy, simple colour changes were the order of the day for my first efforts and though subtle I think they work well enough.
As I have another of each of these ships I may go a little further with my next paint jobs and see how they turn out.
Next it was time to tackle the squadrons starting with the TIE fighthers. For those not familiar with the miniatures they start out in a dark grey plastic, which is serviceable enough but do let the look of the gaming table down when you have painted capital ships.
Naked TIE Fighter
With the size of the squadrons I'm not planning on doing anything other than a simple basecoat/wash/dry brush with some details which I'm hoping will do the trick and allow me to get through them quickly.
Three finished squadrons
Next up will be another batch of TIE fighters and then on to the X-Wings before moving on to some of the squadron expansion boxes.
It's great being able to paint Star Wars miniatures and I hope you enjoy the project as it goes on.
