After contemplating for a while, and trying out some free paper terrain and the FL demo, I decided to get the Mars Station, for it's resemblance with the atmosphere in some good movies and video games. This afternoon I finished the first building, and promptly the previously downloaded terrain looked a bit like...well..what pong looks compared to quake.

I don't have my camera here, so no pictures yet. Anyways, so that you'll have an idea about the basis of my views, the building ended up being a simple 5x7 room, with the twist that it's elevated one level above ground. The top level hasn't been glued onto the bottom, it's just stacked onto the pillars, for storage and gameplay purposes (I have some ideas of kitbashing the crawler into something which can lift and carry building modules. And some others, which I'll reveal as soon as they've been realized.)

While building it, one thing detracted a bit from the fun. The sheets with the parts are often than very sparsely filled, so about half of every sheet printed is pretty much wasted (some of it can be used for extra tabs or other modeling purposes, but filling up the sheets a bit more would save trees). Now that I have a general idea about the system, I'll probably just photoshop some sheets so that a building will require, say, 4 sheets instead of 7, and the white space will be filled with little bits and bobs instead of white and fancy captions.

Well, finally I must say that the texturing is beautiful, that of the buildings even more so than that of the red sand terrain imho.

In short, I'm satisfied with the purchase and even more so when I find the time to start kitbashing.

-Norm

Thanks for the kind words Norrmeister! Paul did an amazing job on Mars Station and the set has a ton of replay value. In terms of how many pieces we fit on each page, it's really a matter of us having to set safe printer margin limits. Because not all printers have the same margin tolerances some of them tend to cut off the image if it extends beyond these safe limits. It's not really an issue with newer printers but many old printers don't print edge to edge.

Well, the first thing is a simple pillar mod - the corner supports of the Mars buildings changed in a way that there's a bottom bit, which is wider than the rest, so that a building can be elevated one level above ground. In my first build (without the fancier pillars), it's possible to park the shuttlecraft from the First Light set snugly under the building.

One thing which needs some additional thought is some ramp or staircase leading from the building to the ground floor, though I could imagine having an extended system of catwalks connecting the higher level buildings if several of these elevated structures are built.

Another thing which is under construction in ps is a monorail system. The tracks (and again the pillars to put them on - hey, I like three-dimensional tactical options in my games), aren't too much work, but the challenge at the moment is a car to put onto the tracks. This is something where I'm using some non-worldworks textures, as the Mars textures aren't very suitable imho for it.

Currently have some walls of the monorail train done, the rest will follow eventually.

Wow D7, I just realized you live in St. Pete also! You just doing sci-fi modeling or doing some of the others?

Right now, I've only been doing fantasy, but own most of the others, just haven't had time to work on anything else at the moment. Anyways, post pictures sometime, I'm sure everyone would like to see your work.

Skunk

Check out my fantasy campaign, Wizard Quest, a world using Wizards of the Coast’s 3.5 DnD system by visiting .

Check out the NEW IMPROVED flash teaser for my sci-fi campaign, , coming Jan 2007. I’ll be using D20 Future for the rules.

Check out what games I’m working on and their status by visiting .

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