A Mighty Fortress is our Goal...

Eric has finished the l;atest and hopefully semi-final rfevision of his Vauban's Wars siege rules. I hope to run another playtest of those rules within the next 3-4 weeks. For the last game, I knocked together the components for my Fort very quickly to have it more or less ready for the game. In the time I have had since then I have upgraded the components and added some new elements.

    When it comes to a Vauban Fort in 25/278 mm size, there aren't many great options, especially in the US. Scott Washburn/Paper Terrain makes a really great collection of  Vauban Fort sets in grey stone or brick, but even in paper, to get everything I needed would cost over $150, not to mention the time to put it all together, which I didn't have. Resin, if even available,  would be even more expensive, especially if shipped from the UK. Thus, scratch building it with simple construction was the only viable option for cost and the need for it to be ready within 10 days or so!

The trickiest part would seem to be designing the Bastions. 

Fortunately, our fellow blogger Rafael Pardo provided a nice template in his blog post a number of years back

I edited the diagram to just give a basic template for the bastion, and experimented with some of my figures to get an idea what size I wanted the bastions to be; it worked out that printing the template out about as big as possible on a sheet of standard 8.5 x 11' paper worked out about right. 

The bastion shape was cut out of 1/4" thick foamboard, which I had a lot of from a sale at  Michael's several years back. A little trial and error lead me to make the interior walls about 1.25" tall, and set back about 1 inch from the edges of the Bastion footprint. 

 The interior walls were added using white glue and straight pins. 

During construction it became obvious that I needed to mark the reverse side of the base with the 1" set back as well, so that the pins would go into the walls from below properly (you can see the pinheads if you look closely!). 

From the same sale at Michaels, I had a bunch of 2 inch wide sheets of ? basswood.

My original plan was to use these for the s,loping exterior of the bastion. 

However, it rapidly became evident that this material would be rather a nuisance to work with... so back to Foamboard for the sloping exterior. 2" wide strips wound up being about right. These were then rough fit and cut to size and shape. 

More glue and straight pins... not bad

I then realized that instead of the 2 bastions that I had planned upon, I needed at least four; fortuinatley, once the method was figured out, they were pretty easy to duplicate. 

For some reason, Vauban Fort scratchbuilding has been popular recently; below are two far better efforts than mine:

Peter:

https://gridbasedwargaming.blogspot.com/2018/03/building-star-fort-part-2.html

Anton:

https://antonswargame.blogspot.com/2017/06/further-progress-on-28mm-starfort.html

Of course, 3_D printing for thopse with the equipment, time, and patience is another, more modern way to get to the goal. I certainly had neither time, money, nor patience for that approach, either!

The straight wall sections were made in the same fashion, as well as triangular foot prints for the Ravelins, and everything spray painted dark grey. 

Far from perfect, but functional, and the whole thing was finished in 10 days, and ready for the game last month, which was the key parameter. However, once the game was over, and knowing that I would probably want to run at least one more play test, I started to consider how to improve upon the looks with minimal expenditure of time and money!

During the game, Barry commented that adding some stonework "wallpaper" would be a simple enhancement. I agreed, and found some free images of, well, walls. I liked this one the best, and used it to print my stonework pattern. 

Overview of the Fortress, ready for ther next game!

Zooming in a bit...

The stonework paper is more visible closer in. 

Another view.

I dry brushed the interior parts with some light grey and medium brow paint.

I also needed a quick and inexpensive way to represent the Covered Way and the Glacis, which I didn't bother with for the earlier game. I had bought an 8 foot long length of 1/4 round, 1" molding, figuring I would use it for the Ravelins, but that quickly proved top be a no go. So, I resurrected the idea for the covered way and Glacis!  I sawed off 8" lengths, spray painted them dark brown, glued them to the 8" long by 2" hitherto unused basswood pieces, which were first themselves spray painted medium grey. To add some interest to the interior, I cut craft sticks into 2" lengths and glued them to the inside of the molding pieces to suggest a retaining wall. They were then suitably stained, dry brushed, etc. 

I used lengths of sponge pressed into thin smears of craft  paint to print a stippled effect on the "earth" of the exterior of the "Glacis", using first tan, then a medium orange-brown, and finally a bright green to suggest recent earthworks. I toyed with using flock, sand, water putty etc to texture this, but finally decided any of those would be prone to flake and chip off, and went with durability and functionality first. Still, I think they look pretty respectable.

    Finally, I saw on TMP that Acheson Creations in the US was having a 20% off sale through November 15th. Their range includes a lot of siege suitable items, especially lines of Gabions, so a number of them have been ordered last week, with arrival still pending. Thus the next siege game should be a considerable notch up in style!