Fighters and missiles - oh my

 Missiles from Shapeways, mounted on number counters to show how many:

Drone missiles play a large part in Star Fleet Battles, especially the Kzinti, so here's my solution. I also thought about doing the same thing with fighter squadrons, but decided not to:

I just like the look of lots of fighters all together. These ones are from The Plastic Soldier Company's Red Alert game; I purchased a few extra to produce two twelve-fighter squadrons. The raised detail makes them quite nice to paint, and I have opted for the scheme of white on blue that Federation and Empire uses for neutrals. The sort of square section at the rear of the fighters just before the engines came with a sort of dome thing that just looked odd, so I sliced them off. They could work for a sensor dome or maybe a droid like R2D2, I suppose; I just prefer the cleaner look.

I know I haven't posted here for a while

 ... but that's because I've just moved continents. No gaming where I am now, except solo, which is why I was practicing with a solo version of Star Fleet Battles. Unable to bring my main ancients gaming with me, I've opted instead for lightweight plastic spaceships:

Kzinti logistics moving through asteroids with a fighter escort

The fighters and Tug are from the Star Fleet Battle section of Shapeways, 3788 scale. The freighters are by the Plastic Soldier Company, and come with the Command & Colours Red Alert spaceship tabletop game. I've painted them as Kzinti.

The asteroids and planet come from the Armada Scale items sold by Combat Zone Scenery.

The sensor arrays have been treated with children's UHU glitter glue to make them stand out a little bit. And why not, eh?

Some more Star Fleet Battles

 I've been mucking about with various ideas for Star Fleet Battles using items from their Shapeways store and elsewhere. First up is a Kzinti Battle Station:

This is a really nice little model, from their "Omni-scale" range. It works very well with the counters I am using at the moment for my solo fleet games, but it will be far too small when I eventually get my fleet together. Now of course stations, plants, asteroids etc. will always be out of scale when compared with ships, because otherwise you couldn't play the game in your average house, but even so this is far too small. I have cunning plan for that, though. In the meantime, I wanted to see how this looks, partly because I wanted to try the Jupiter IV decals I bought earlier - I'm hoping you can see one of them on the model above.

Secondly, here are some fighters from The Plastic Soldier Company, for Richard Borg's Red Alert game:

It's not a great photo - just about the best I can manage in what is supposed to be late spring light here in the UK - also known as hammering rain. Believe it or not, the hexes are actually mat black, but the colours have gone a bit weird. The fighters look rather washed-out in the photo, but they are actually quite nice. I have painted them to do service as neutrals or perhaps Orion mercenaries, with a blue on white colour scheme. They are a bit larger than the Shapeways Kzinti fighters I bought previously which is why there are two to a base, but they'll do the job.