Alternate Weapon Ideas For A Strike Rouge

Still fiddling with Gundam kits at the moment. I had recently bought the Strike Rouge and Skygrasper/Aile Striker set. A month or so later, I finally completed it in a state that I'd consider "partially acceptable". There's plenty of reviews about the kit, so I'll spare you the crappy assault of "build progress" photos and "poseability" photos demonstrating how the articulation works. This is the Vortex! Only useless information that no one wants will be shared here!

For the inquiring minds, the PG Strike (and presumably all other Perfect Grade kits) stand roughly 12" tall, which conveniently is the same scale as a 1:6 scale figure. Unfortunately, their hands are quite large and don't translate well to a 1:6 scale figure, and feel more like 1:5 scale hands in size. While off scale, this does provide an opportunity to all you PG Strike owners who want something more desirable in their arsenal than the included beam rifle, shield and shiny sword. What if you wanted to give your Strike Gundam something more... interesting?

Let's put on our thinking glasses and brainstorm! Where else could we find some crap to give our Gundam to use? Stuff that's roughly 1:6 scale, and would be used by a military fighting robot? 
 

 To the gun rack!

 Since the hands are a bit larger than 1:6 scale, the Strike is limited in gun options. Guns like the M-4/M-16 with small thin grips are almost out of the question. Even if you happen to have one that sort of works, the fingers tend to overhang the trigger guard, so you end up like the Heavy Weapons guy holding... practically anything other than the minigun. My solution was to cup the grip with just the fingers, and that placed the trigger finger around the right area so it doesn't look oversized.

Guns with a stock work well, as the grip occupies more space in the hand, allowing you to use the thumb more. So if you want to give your Strike some 1:6 scale guns, stuff like hunting rifles, shotguns and the like work well. Pistol grip weapons, not so much. I'm certain that a MK23 or a desert eagle would fit nicely. A Tokarev... not so well. I also tried out the MGL, and that didn't work. The fingers just didn't want to work with it.

Now, what about heavy weapons?

The Strike's hands seem to fit a Dragon Browning M2HB quite well. All four fingers fit around the rear handles and the thumbs are close enough for the trigger. However, the main issue with giving your Strike the M2HB is that you really need to put your Strike in a trench. It can do some prone poses, but not enough to make the M2 work without putting the gun a little higher. Not quite a satisfactory addition. It's acceptable if you wanted to make a support gunner out of your Strike. 

After a long while, I finally found a use for my ZACCA bazookas. They look great on the Strike Rouge, and the size fits nicely. However, there's a significant problem with giving 1:6 scale bazookas to a PG Gundam, and that's related to how their hands work. They don't have enough wrist articulation like you get out of most 1:6 scale human bodies. They're on ball joints, so you have a limited cone of range whereas human figures get wrists that can almost go 180 degrees. That makes most bazookas unsuitable for a Gundam.

I tried out most of the bazookas/rocket launchers I had and found a lot of not-at-all surprising results. I took photos of the ones that worked best.
 

Soldiers of the World/ZACCA M20A1: mediocre. Hands fit around the trigger perfectly, but the limited wrist motion prevents you from holding them correctly. Shoulder armor interferes with the shoulder rest, so you'll need to be creative with your poses.
 

ZACCA Panzerfaust 3: Great.  Nothing interferes, and there's enough range of motion to hold it properly. Can almost look down the scope as well.

ZACCA M136 AT-4: Great. Since you hold it with one hand on top, the oversize hands for the Strike work well. The front grip's easy to hold. The shoulder strap should be glued together on the AT-4, but otherwise a good addition to the Strike. It's one of the more elegant rocket launchers you could have in your collection.

 ZACCA Panzerschreck: Mediocre. You're going to have to hold this with one hand like the M20A1.  No chance in hell you can get the second hand to hold it in any decent manner. Looks great, but you just can't hold the thing. This is where a better wrist motion would help a lot.

Other notes:
I couldn't get the FIM-92, FIM-43 or the SA-18 to work due to the wrists. If you wanted a Strike Stinger combo, it'll look awkward. Don't even bother with panzerfausts. Other models from the ZACCA collection simply didn't work due to the shoulder armor interfering.

There's one outlet left for 1:6 scale weapons: Melee!

Let's say you felt the Grand Slam sword was a bit lacking, and the beam sabers were pretty dull. We can fix that with a Moonfire/Bloodberry! I did find that the fingers worked well to hold the hilts for my Bloodberry and Moonfire, but unfortunately the Moonfire's weight was too much for the fingers to handle. I had to play with the fingers to get them to clasp shut around the hilt. I could use some blue tack to attempt to hold the sword in place, but you will need to use quite a lot to hold it in place. Moonfire's the heaviest sword I have currently, almost twice the weight of the Grand Slam, and without hand pegs to hold it into place. The hands are capable of holding thin objects such as polearms, so it's feasible to have other swords (much like the Red Frame Astray) without relying on the hand peg.

It's convenient to know that a PG Strike can use about half of the possible 1:6 scale stuff on the market. The biggest problem is the wrists. I would recommend experimenting with other melee weapons than guns or rockets, as they offer the best results. Don't settle for energy blades when you can use a slab of metal to impale your foes.

Gold Paint Looks Terrible

Here's those pictures of the painted Sledge's Shotgun I semi promised I'd get around to taking. Perhaps one of my worst paint jobs ever. The front uses a mix of gloss black and copper to get a brownish tint that's barely noticeable. The wooden stock uses a mix of "rubber", red and some peach paint. Happens a lot when I have no paint handy that actually resembles the color of wood.

I'm quite happy with this photo, since there's only so many ways to showcase a break action gun. I've already had to photograph this feature three different times. You can only prop up the gun with clear tubes for so long before giving up.

Sledge's Shotgun is a very big shotgun. About twice the length of the Scout's Force-a-Nature. There's a lot of discussions out there noting the similarities between the two guns, so I won't bother discussing them here. I unfortunately discovered that the Scout's Shia LaBeouf body cannot actually wield Sledge's Shotgun. 'Tis a pity. Looks like only a select few of my TF2 collection will be able to wield the power of a Jakobs. I was looking forwards to using the Scout's Bonk! action button to slam the blade into things.

There's only one discussion around here in The Vortex, and the topic is "who's got the bigger gun". In this case, it's who has the bigger knockback. Unfortunately for the Scout, he drew the short straw on who goes first.

And with all discussions, there can only be one winner.

The Legend Lives On In 1:6 Scale

After a whopping four playthroughs of Borderlands, I've net me one weapon that I'd actually bother glorifying as a 1:6 scale weapon. So much for a game with a bajillion guns. They failed to mention that 4/5 of the guns are ones you'd never want to use ever. I originally shied away from shotguns since they were rather inferior to 70% of the game's enemies (and I still do, as they are still inferior to 70% of the game's enemies) but one shotgun in particular stood out.

Predictably, it's Sledge's Shotgun: the most ridiculous/interesting/fun shotgun added into the game. It's always sitting in your backpack since you get it so early and it is very underpowered until your 2nd playthrough, but you keep it around because the knockback effect is completely hilarious. The gun's blatantly a close range weapon, and the +150% melee bonus is just rubbing it in. In addition to the fun I had with this weapon, I chose it because it's one of few guns in the game that never changes its appearance no matter how many times you get one, thus making it a very consistent build.

Like all projects, I started off with a side profile trace of the weapon from a screenshot. This allowed me to determine what monstrosity I was going to deal with. It's a simple, yet complex shotgun with lots of unnecessary details on it. (A pump action break action revolver shotgun? Yes, your character does indeed pump the shotgun when you take it out, despite it being decorative.)

This gun pretty much is a project with prerequisites, requiring some prior experience to tackle successfully. For instance, this shotgun involves:

• A revolver chamber (The Ambassador, the TF2 Grenade Launcher)
• A break action mechanism (The Force-a-Nature, the TF2 Grenade Launcher)
• A locking mechanism with no visible locking mechanism (TF2 Grenade Launcher, as this one doesn't really have one either, but more on that in a bit)

Granted, the break action mechanism is nothing hard. Just a hinge and pin. However, like the Grenade Launcher, there's no visible mechanism, just a latch and MAGIC! Naturally, I have to fight fire with fire and bust out my Magic. I had to cheat with the Grenade Launcher by adding some extra elements to lock the mechanism, much like I'll have to do here.

Behold, the most simple-ass mechanism ever. It's just a slider pin that slides into the revolver chamber axis. The two shot "cylinder" is built from two 5mm OD 3.175mm ID x15mm long tubes stacked around a 1mm diameter paper clip functioning as the cylinder axis of rotation. However, I left a 1mm diameter through hole between the two chambers and halfway filled it with a paperclip. This left me with a ~7mm hole to insert another paperclip rod into, or in this case, my locking mechanism!

The rest of the construction is nothing new to you readers. Stack Magic cards, Dremel the crap out of them, and stack some tubes. A miracle occurs, and you get a shotgun. This gun has a lot of varying thicknesses, so I'm taking advantage of the various thicknesses of printer paper, 110lb cardstock and Magic cards to flesh out the varying layers. You probably could care less about how that works, since you're likely not ever going to build 1:6 scale guns out of cards. So onto the semi-finished product!


Here is the un-primed Sledge's Shotgun, with almost all the details completed. It's a fairly long model, spanning 15cm.


There's annoyingly a rail on the top of the gun, which was completed by a layer of 3mmx3mm squares from an X-Men TCG card. The odd sight on the far back of the rail sits close to the break action lever. Unpainted, the mechanism is camouflaged with the rest of the gun. This gun also has no hammer mechanism, for you sharp eyed ones out there.

Interestingly about this model, the way it's designed, the revolver chamber needs to rotate 90 degrees in order to allow the gun to break open. This is the result of a small stub near the hinge that acts as a hard stop for the front of the gun when it swings back into place. This also provides a point of interference with the chamber when it swings open. GREAT DESIGN!

Once you get past the horror of video game weapon design, rotate the chamber and pull the lever back, you get the joy of being able to load in your two shells! Finally! Mine sit fairly loose in the chamber so they sometimes fling out when I fiddle with this gun. All the more joy of not having to manually extract the shells with my fingernails.

This gun was perhaps one of the most enjoyable models to make so far, due to the features, overall looks, and sheer easiness of the mechanism. Far simpler than the Force-a-Nature, which involved a special locking groove that translated rotation in one axis into a partial impedance on another axis of rotation. This one's just poke and pull.

I have since painted the model, and I must say, it looks actually better unfinished and unpainted. It looks much more interesting as a prototype model than a poorly painted mess with terrible colors. Once I figure out how to properly present it, I'll showcase the completed shotgun.

Nothing Says Thanksgiving Like Killing Tools

It's good to be back into the ranks of obscurity again. This week's completely random and forgettable weapon is the Lovekeeper axe from Drakengard 1 for the Playstation2. I liked the weapon for the flavor behind it:

"A young couple, blessed by fortune, were to be wed. But on the night before
the wedding, a small, shining spirit appeared before the young bride.
The ghost whispered in her ear, speaking straight to the weakness in her heart
: "Do you wish to make him all yours? Do you wish to ensure his heart is yours
for all eternity?"
When the girl recovered her senses, she found this gore-splattered axe in her
hand, and before her, the bloody head of her beloved. "Now he is yours
forever..."
Even now, the ghost of the young bride can be seen wandering the village,
garbed in a blood-splattered dress and clutching the sightless head of the
man she was to marry."

-Drakengard Weapon History for the Lovekeeper Axe

Pretty messed up stuff. Glad I have a blog post tag for decapitations. Now, onto the weapon!

I've scaled the axe to 1:6 scale, based on the handle width. It's quite unwieldy for a girl, based on the size of it.
Luckily, the blade fit the face of one Magic card. The axe blade was made by laminating two 2-card-thick outer layers with the decorative bits drawn and cut out onto a 4-card-thick stack. The spike was made from a simple cone, used from my cone maker. The axe-head block was made from many laminated layers of Magic cards, making it a solid piece. Unfortunately, I forgot to cover the blade edge with a layer of printer quality paper to hide the rough layers made visible by sanding.

However, the Lovekeeper isn't this week's highlight. The actual piece of interest is a more-popular weapon, the Bloodberry from No More Heroes. First, I present the schematic for the major portions of the Bloodberry.

The detailing for the Bloodberry is sparse, made sparser by scaling it to 1:6. It's personally not a very challenging item to make, since it's mostly revolved objects. If you're going to use this drawing, keep in mind it's scaled according to a game screenshot, and NOT the concept art floating around. The concept art has a shorter overall length.


Right now, unpainted and devoid of the blade, it's a very unexciting model.

The Bloodberry is held together by a bamboo stick running through the hilt. The only issue so far is rolling a 2mm diameter tube for the Bloodberry's extension rod that extends the tip. That was constructed by straightening out a paper clip, then rolling printer paper around the paperclip rod until it reached 2mm in outer diameter.

Here is the painted and completed Bloodberry. For the blade, I had spent a good deal of time looking for a blue drinking straw to use to create the glow effect. Somewhat worked. I had to use a clear drinking straw covered with a layer of 3M Polyester 8992 heat resistant tape. Except mine was blue. Great what you can find at your workplace, eh? Some elements required some thin sections, best remedied by bending and painting paper clips. Strong, and versatile! The paper clips were attached with some Loc-Tite adhesive. The small point of contact made gluing a tricky ordeal.


The project was fairly simple, but the biggest problem was finding the right way to convey the beam without actually having a blue plastic rod. That alone stalled this project a good month.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll find some winged animals to slice in half with my new toys.

Labor Day Spoils: Building a Moonfire Sword

I've had a fondness of exotic weaponry. Drakengard will always have a place in my "Stuff to Build" pile due to the wonderful assortment of weapons and great lore behind them. One of the long swords I liked, appearance-wise, is the Moonfire.

The Moonfire sword, according to Drakengard's weapon history, is a granite blade that burns hot except to those under the protection of the moon god. My Moonfire is a sword made of a $0.76 bendy plastic ruler I bought at a local drugstore and some X-Men TCG cards that burn if you take a lighter to it. Not quite as exciting, but when you're building on a budget, it's acceptable.
This sword had the main goal of a translucent blade. Painting a sword red is pretty easy. I could have done that and been done in a few hours. I wanted something that was a bit different than the other bladed weapons I've built. I needed a blade approximately 20cm long for the Moonfire, so that limits a lot of raw material sources.

The above image shows stages of the Moonfire's construction. The first stage involves cutting out the materials and preparing them to be structurally sound. I've made cutouts using leftover 6-ply X-Men cards from the Devilscale for the guard. A notch was added for the bamboo stick grip and the blade. The blade itself was cut from a Penway "Megaflex" ruler. I remember the days when school supplies were solid plastic objects that splintered when you tried to slash at someone in school with them. The good old days of consumer safety. As a side effect, I have a really limp blade to work with at the moment. More on that in a bit.

I've hidden the notches with two layers of card on each side, then added two more to define some details in the guard. The third image shows the primed guard with the raised details. I created those details using a sheet of 110lb cardstock and cutting out the lowered parts. The thickness of the paper was sufficient in making the details stand out. The bottom image shows the details painted. I first painted the black details first, leaving the raised parts unpainted. What I should have done was paint the entire thing black first. Gold paint isn't good if it's thinned, and in some cases, the enamel paint thins as you use it, leaving light spots that show a bit of primer. If I had painted everything black first, then gone over it in gold, the gold would have stuck better to the layer underneath. I'd also know quickly which spots were underpainted. Oh well. Lesson learned.

So far, I've barely made use of my four month investment building Aelia. For all that work that went into building her, she's been photgraphed less than the minigun. I figured what better way to make a sword interesting than an armored girl using the sword. I'm experimenting (or better yet, just now bothering) with enhancing the photos I take, since I'm not going to wait until the weekend where there's better natural sunlight to take photos. They look a lot different than my usual darkened desk photos. Anyways, some opportunity to use Aelia in some photos!

Where You're Going, You Won't Need Hats

Decided to deviate from the usual merry weapons making and revisit the simplicity of bladed weapons. The task isn't too difficult: it's nothing harder than gluing a cutout of a blade onto a stick. I've yet to devise a standard for melee weapon making as I now have for firearms. So far, I only have a rough guideline for grip diameters and blade thicknesses. I'll iron out something formal in the coming weeks when I experiment with different weapons.

"My, what a big blade you have!"
"The better to cleave you with, my dear..."

This week, I decided to build the Devilscale from Drakengard. Loved the weapon in game, and decided that some variety in my projects was needed. For this, I worked around in-game screenshots and a standard handle width of 4mm to scale up the polearm. The blade is rather massive and required stock material of a length of two card lengths. I tried to use some of the X-Men TCG cards I acquired for this task, since I'm never going to get rid of those otherwise.

Regarding material properties, here's a quick comparison:

Magic seems to be a bit less resistant to bending than the X-Men cards. Slight difference, but it's noticeable. The thicknesses are however equivalent. Further testing is needed.

I pretty much half assed this weapon since the references weren't too helpful in determining details. Can't really see much from a polygonal PS2 model built for quick renders. However, the staff part turned out better than I thought.

Anyways, what does one now do with a 1:6 scale of a giant bladed polearm?

"I'll teach you to hit on me via teamchat!" -Hotaru

For this photo, I decided to make use of a technique I saw in a LEGO diorama: use of the aquatic red bushes as an excessive blood spurt effect. I actually love that effect so much that I've stocked the LEGO parts close by for quick access. It's conveniently the right scale for a 1:6 scale decapitation... (Is it a bad sign I have a blog post tag for "decapitation"? Maybe...)

I've also kept around the sprues from my Gundam kits, in the event I need some thin plastic rods. With the clear ones, you can use them to suspend random body parts in the air. I've jammed the rods down the clothing for the Sniper and Scout to help support the heads hanging.

Anyways, next time: I'll attempt to make a simple task of sword making idiotically difficult!

This Weekend's Project: Playing With Switchblades

Bit of a long overdue Spy update: finally made a knife. My Spy has been forced to go "Revolver spy" since September 2008 since I never made him a butterfly knife. No backstabbing for him.

Until now.

Naturally, what fun is it if the Spy's knife is static? Of course it works! It's perhaps one of the most fun melee weapons I've made in 1:6 scale next to the Soldier's entrenching tool. I'll go over the finer elements of the butterfly knife if you feel compelled to make your own for your Spies.
With all projects, we have the obligatory schematic. The knife is made of three main parts: the blade, and the two halves of the handle. I've taken care of the hard work of designing the parts for you. All dimensions are in millimeters, since Imperial units are for things made by Texans with large wrenches. The handle is made of the usual Magic: the Gathering card, created by folding a card in half and gluing another folded card over the first. An additional two layers were placed on both sides of the handle half for extra rigidity.

The blade, this time, is actually made of metal. I opted for metal in this case for simplicity of a strong and thin blade. You can use sheet metal bought from a craft store, but it should ideally be 0.05mm(0.002in) thick. I used the aluminum sheet that comes from electronics breadboards that I had obtained from my college days. No idea why they package a sheet of aluminum with them, but hooray for me! Draw out the blade with a marker and trim it out. You'll need a 1/16" drill bit for the hinge holes. For the hinge pins, a paper clip will suffice.

The silver paper circles are actually there to hide and retain the paper clip pins. They won't fall out normally, but it's nice to know they won't later on. You can optionally try to dull the blade so you don't do what I did and accidentally stab myself with it. But hey, if you're smart enough to make this, you have every right to make it as functionally sharp as possible.

Now with his own knife at last, he can do what all of us have been doing since the Sniper/Spy update: camping and trying to stab snipers and katana wielding girls. (The katana is incidentally from Final Fantasy VII Advent Children's Sephiroth figure, if you wish to obtain your own. It makes a surprisingly great 1:6 scale item despite it being 1:8.) Happy stabbing!

I'm going to gut you like a cornish game Aeris.

Monday's Project: A WWII U.S. Entrenching Tool

Meant to build this over the weekend, but I decided to make a revolver instead. The U.S. Military Entrenchment Tool, better known to us as a "shovel", is one of my favorite melee weapons in Team Fortress 2. It's so silly, is wielded by one of the slowest classes, and plain old embarassing to see people get taken out by it.

The shovel was made from 110lb cardstock, a bamboo stick and one Magic: the Gathering card.

The shovel folds up from a bludgeoner's length to a slightly inconvenient length for "concealed carry". Why a shovel needs to be folded for transport is beyond me. It's still a big shovel but now with a wobbly head. Guess soldiers back then needed to have their shovels with them at all times in a convenient bag. But it's the modern era without wars, so why does Hotaru need a shovel?

Some time during your life, you may have intruders in your home, rummaging through your things. If you happen to come home when they're still there, you may need to fend off the invaders with whatever you have handy. And sometimes, the closest thing to use is your trusty shovel.

Here, we can see the shovel's effectiveness. The head has been extended fully, allowing the more massive head to be near the end of the moment arm. Other effective dispatching techniques involve the "Roman Shovel Jab" and "Divine Shovel Swing From the Heavens" and "Pound the Victim on the Head Repeatedly but Ineffectively with Light Taps". And most of all, as you can see by the surprised Sniper and Spy, no one expects to be beaten to death by the silent and not so swift shovel.

And as an added bonus, your entrenchment tool can be used for its primary purpose to dispose of the subjects/evidence.