Desert mound or missle launcher?

How about punch cards?

[x] Check, yup. I remember those. Never had to use them, but shared the Student Computational Resource Center with kids who were sadly not playing Zork but were instead having to do real work. (They frequently wrote in all CAPS and were sometimes overheard uttering cryptic phrases like FORTRAN and COBOL.)

I was trained in PASCAL. Now I can barely navigate Windows. I write some kick butt programs in BASIC when I was a kid

All this talk about floppies and old hard drives has brought back some memories. I used to work for a small American company called Halliburton doing seismic surveys. Looking for oil and gas deposits in various offshore oil fields. The computer systems were all "state of the ark" with 5 inch floppies and the hard drives that were the size of the old LP vinyl records. I seem to remember having to clamp them in place inside the drum that held them. Not that I used them that much as it wasn't my job. I also remember the navigation computer used to overheat and the only way to keep it going was to keep all the mother boards exposed, sticking out of the computer on "extender boards". But with the vibration of the ship they used to work loose, so copious amounts of "duct tape" was used to hold them in place. I don't think the likes of Shell and other oil companies ever appreciated the fact that their 100 million dollar surveys all relied on a roll of $5 duct tape!!

But hey I digress...

A bit more progress, added a light base coat and a layer of sand stuck (hopefully stuck) with watered down PVA.

I still do. See thread in Off-Topics.

@TheDreamer: Another idea for missiles - the cores from Schrader valves and/or the innards of a retractable ballpoint pen. They both look like missiles ready to fire with a little paint.

That's looking might fine - I'm assuming you have tested that it still opens right?

Just replied to the old BASIC thread too - *sigh* those were the days *drifts off into a halcyon day dream about floppies* ooh err!

djmothra said:

That's looking might fine - I'm assuming you have tested that it still opens right?

Ah, that's actually a slight problem at the moment, its not quite as convertible as it once was! I'll be tackling that shortly if I could only find my crowbar.

Getting down to the wire. Any progress to report? Looking forward to seeing the finished project.

Sorry cprljohnnivey - missus wants the living room decorated so life and model making has had to take a back seat. The worst part was re-plastering part of the walls, something I'm not particularly good at, and if I could turn the wall into a gaming board I would have quite a lot of "rugged terrain"!!

Not sure if I'm going to be able to finish in time.

Cheers

Mark

I think that might be under convertible as its wall to gaming surface - now all you gotta do is persuade the wife not to throttle you

A little progress but I'm conscious of the impending deadline!! So a few short cuts.

Painted the rock outcrops with a brown acrylic with lighter shades of dry brushing. The sand areas started with a lighter base coat followed by much lighter dry brushing. I wanted to show a little difference between the rock and the sand. Overall I think I've made the desert too dark but it'll have to do!!

Missiles - thanks to everyone for their thoughts on suitable nose cones etc. Because time is short I've decided on...

cocktail sticks!!!

Dipping the ends in grey paint, I'll trim them to about 1cm in length and then stick them to a tile patterned plasticard base. I'm hoping to colour the base so that it looks like lots of individual cells each holding a missile. Potentially there's room for 1,056 of them, but not going to be able to do them all, but djmothra's idea about leaving spaces for launched ones will help - though there's going to be more launched than not!!.

Cocktail sticks...

Stupid idea!!

8 hours to go.... aaaarrrrgghhh!

Probably the last update...

Decided on 6 missiles - plastic tube for the launchers:

The missiles are simply wooden plugs put through a pencil sharpener (thanks to whoever suggested that idea!!).

And a quick coat of green basecoat for the cacti with green ink in the recesses. Sorry it's a lousy picture:

Made it with three hours or so to spare!!