A thing a week 2022, week 35, Return of the Dauntless Edition

And now for something completely the same. This is The Dauntless again, in its fully 3d prop form and I can already hearread what you're sayingtyping. "That's not a building." It's not, but it's nonetheless spectacular. If you read last week's post then you probably know that this is the player characters' ship in my current bi-weekly in-person Saturday game. This is the fifth campaign played in that world and at this point this campaign started several months ago.

Like my other large ships, the Golden Sun and Cutter featured in Week 25 of 2020 has multiple decks connected either by friction (top decks) or magnet (bottom decks), and yes, that is my dining room table. This ship is big, ~30 inches and I was far too lazy to clean off my large photography area to take these pictures. Her size posed multiple challenges not all of which I handled well but overall, I think the result is good and she is quite striking on the gaming table. 

We start with patterns. The cross section templates I had from the last builds though they had to be re-scaled to the proper size. The deck template is exactly the template in last week's deck map reference. These were printed to roughly the right size with the cross sections pasted to medium weight chipboard and each deck traced on Readi-Board which is still my go to for such things. The cross sections were fixed to a slab of XPS foam (the high density green shown) and traced badly with my Proxxon. These would be further shaped badly with the wrong-handed OLFA knife in many of the WIP shots. And before you ask, yes, they do come in left handed versions and I didn't know that when I bought it. Deck texture was done with a medium ball point pen that I keep solely for this purpose with grain made by running a steel wire brush over the top. 

Basic construction is more or less what you might expect. I jam things together with a hot glue gun adding crafting sticks to reinforce things that require it. Somewhere before then, I cut the cross sections at a regular height and magnetized them. The keel was laid into carved channels across the cross sections. XPS is naturally flexible which makes it mercifully forgiving to work with. 

The only really scary part in this phase was cutting the keel horizontally with that same OLFA knife after everything had been fixed into place. Note that I had to increase the number of cross sections for strength and because I had concerns about milling planks long enough to run front to back. 

Speaking of planks, I milled them much thicker than usual, right around 1/8" and wider than usual to cut down on construction time. I let the front and back run wild until I got the majority of the planking where I wanted it. This worked fine for smaller pieces but for this build it ended up being really unwieldy. Eventually it all got cut cut down and glued down appropriately. 

During construction I noted that despite the thicker planking, that the whole thing gave a lot more than I was comfortable with. Thus began the laborious process of reinforcing the hull with various off cuts and other bits. This also gave me an opportunity to force waylay planks into closer alignment. The smaller ships don't have this and I think they'd have been better with it even though it was a pain. 

The last step was painting which started as usual with Black Magic Craft foam primer made from Mod Podge and black craft paint. After that I had grand plans of airbrushing the basecoat on it but my airbrush had other plans. I settled for painting the base and my mini photography background. With a trusty 1" craft brush I basecoated everything except the metallics and proceeded to drybrush with a very light tan before washing the entire thing with Liquitex Raw Umber Ink. The penultimate step was airbrushing AK Interactive Matte Varnish instead of the rattle can dullcoat I'd have preferred because it was like a billionty degrees outside and I was hiding in the one air conditioned room in my house. The last step was finishing the metallics, this time with Pro Acryl metallics which I otherwise don't normally use.

All told this was a multi-week effort probably 20 to 30 hours all told. The Dauntless will fill this year's complex structure requirement and despite not being a building, I learned an awful lot that should be transferrable to more conventional buildings.