AN ONGOING NEWSLETTER | August 2001 |
When you're dodging bullets, a dustbin can be your best friend. The more 'clutter' on the table, the happier the combatants will be. They like cover. A trip to your local Craft Shop will provide you with supplies that you can turn to good use. It will carry wooden sticks & shapes, and lots of miniatures that can serve in various capacities. Most of what I'll cover today will be various containers: They are useful as cover, and as objectives in scenarios. (Resupply, search & sieze...) It's also wise to look at what's IN the container you are using as cover. It may be worse than the bullets! DUSTBINS These are simply a length of doweling with a disk of wood for a lid. A scrap of wood serves as a handle. I could also have added handles to the sides.
SHIPPING CANISTERS These are made from a 3/4" turned wooden milk can. They are quite versatile, even if only painted differently.
Painted as metal and dirtied up, they make fine waste containers.
You can colour code the tops of supply containers so that various supplies can be sorted out easily.
Paint them in brand colours & add labels, and you have commercial shipping canisters. Mmmm... a load of Klam Kola concentrate? A worthy prize for a raid. Numbering the cans allows you to tell them apart, for those games where a team is searching for one particular can in a warehouse complex! |
KEGS These are made from a 3/4" turned wooden barrel. They can serve easily as metal casks (above) or plastic kegs (below.) Mind you, the brightly painted barrels could be painted metal. You could always paint them as normal wooden barrels!
FUEL CANS
So called because they resemble propane or freon cans, they are made from 1/2" turned wooden 'jars'.
I painted them in various colours and added warning labels printed on my computer. They are rather fiddly, so I glued them together in 3's: That way they will stand or stack and they don't roll about. I did leave a number as singles.
I used a pair of them as fuel & atmosphere containers for an 'Alien transport case'. TRANSPORT CONTAINERS
Also known as boxes. Simple wooden blocks of various sizes, painted as metal or plastic containers, with various labels added, and the chalk & felt pen markings added on loading docks everywhere. The crates range from 1/2" to 1", the largest being suitable for equipment or (in this case) a alien-carrying bio-container.
Although they may not seem very SF, boxes painted as cardboard are also very effective.
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