Bob's Battletech
Map Terrain
And now for my experiment!
Map terrain For battletech!
After today I have 3 days off, so intend to have a go at above. One of the problems with the mapscale hill terrain (not buildings, 6mm from various sources will cover most and if model is bigger than a hex its a big building) is that most I’ve seen try to do them to cover the vertical scale, as in 1/285th and to me they look frankly stupid. I see where they are coming from in it helps with line of sight, but that i feel was never really a problem with the maps, often the problem was actually telling what height level things were. The newer maps are better on this and levels are easer to see, though I brought the latest desert set and there were still odd bits hard to spot. Some of the old Fasa maps particularly the Solaris set, some hex maps are virtually unreadable.
Really all I want are hills that I can easily determine the height levels. Now if you scale your height levels to fit in with the hex map scale I think it will look better plus still make it easier to determine levels for movement.
The hexes are 30mm across and if I remember rightly represent 30 metres in scale so 1mm to the metre, most mechs are between 8 and 10 metres tall. A level is suposed to about waist high on a mech so 5-6 metres appox , or in map scale 5-6mm .
now how to do it?
The thought of trying to accurately cut the ape boards out of any type of material was a no no, and I don’t have a laser cutter to hand , so I thought use hes bases, as it happens Warbases do pre cut 3mm thick 30mm hex bases, at about £1.50 for 15 so I brought 10 packs to start with.
https://warbases.co.uk/?term=&s=hex+bases&post_type=product&taxonomy=product_cat
As a base to stick them to and get the correct 6mm height I found Amazon did bundles of A3 and A4 3mm mdf sheets.
Ok this still will involves some cutting but figger That if I stick the bases on top of the sheets in the hill shape I want I can use the cut bases as a template to cut the the lower sheets if I have a sharp enough knife.
Plan is to try making the hills form the Game of Armoured combat maps boards as a start, so will hopefully post pictures tomorrow!
I’ve tried something similar by cutting 1″ XPS foam into hexes and stack them. Kind of worked but since I freehanded the hexes they are a bit “wonkey”