Skunkworks - Homeworld:Full Thrust

"100 years ago, a satellite detected an object under the sands of the Great Desert. An expedition was sent. An ancient starship buried in the sands. Deep inside the ruin was a single stone that would change the course of our history forever. On the stone was etched a galactic map and a single word more ancient than the clans themselves... Hiigara... Our Home..."

- Homeworld Intro Cinematic

I'm not going to mince words here. I loved/love the Homeworld series. 

In all honesty, when I played the first one back in college, it blew my little mind. It took all the Warcrafts and Starcrafts, Age of Empires, and anything I had played beforehand, wrapped them up into one tiny little ball and then squashed them. Don't get me wrong, I am still a pretty massive Blizzard fan, but Homeworld was a groundbreaking title in PC gaming. 

For me, I geeked out pretty hard about the ship designs in the game and the attention to detail the designers had. The fact that I could play a PC game and create a massive, Star-Wars-Endor scale space battle unfurl before me and then stand back and watch it unfold, standing back as a god or literally snapping my camera to a little fighter locked in a dogfight between massive capital ships with huge turrets that would independently rotate and fire was pure, unadulterated eye candy of the first order. Add in the fact that everything was to scale and it was the stuff of legend.

I've always wanted to try and play a space miniatures game that had that same "wow" element to it. It's one of the reasons I began playing Firestorm Armada (beautiful ship design, good mechanics, etc). Only, I've never been a fan of the movement mechanics. 

Full Thrust's movement mechanics are very enjoyable in terms of space combat, but honestly, the official miniatures for the game are woefully tragic and uninspired. Really, if you don't believe, go see them for yourself - Full Thrust Miniatures. I'm not down on the whole range, but when you compare them against Firestorm (see here, here, here), FT's miniatures look a little plain...

Regardless, I got an idea in my head to start developing a Full Thrust game using the ships from Homeworld. Generic fast space combat game mixed with excellent ship designs, what could be better? In truth, the mechanics for the game pretty much are writing themselves. Unfortunately, due pesky issues like intellectual property, etc and the fact that I'd like to run this at GASP's next convention, I can't really post the rules I'm working on. 

Rules aside, though, my thoughts went to the thought that "wait, what do I put on the table?" 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I found a couple folks out there with some great 3D printed miniatures, but I am a father of two kids and pretty poor in terms of expendable cash. Then I remembered I found a website a couple years back where folks were building Homeworld ship models in something called Papercraft. 

Well, I decided to try a little proof of concept test. I found a site with a sizeable collection of Homeworld ship models in papercraft. Better still, they are all pretty much in scale! So I decided to try my hand at building two models - the Taiidan Qwaar-Jet Heavy Cruiser and the Kushan Avatar Heavy Cruiser. Essentially two of the Homeworld's poster children.

The Heavy Cruisers side by side

 First up, the Qwaar-Jet! (you can see the in-game model here)

 

Port Bow view

View down the spine

Below the port side

And the Avatar! (in-game model)

Starboard Bow view

Starboard view

Overall, they weren't incredibly difficult to assemble. In all, I used a hobby cutting board, x-acto, tweezers, and basic white glue. The Qwaar-Jet model actually had internal bracing per the instructions, but I had to beef it up. The Avatar had no internal bracing though. Overall, both are fairly sturdy, but not enough to to use in a mini-gaming scenario.

Time-wise, I'd say each took me about 6 hrs of fairly distracted construction to complete. If I were focused, I'm confident I could cut that time down significantly. Overall, though, I like the look of them. The Avatar had some bizarre angles and I don't think the Ion turrets fit right, but overall its bulky look is great. The Qwaar-Jet, on the other hand, looks great! It was fairly easy to manufacture too and the creator was brilliant for suggesting bracing.

In my roll-out versions of each model, I intend to add foam bracing as a skeleton. Both for strength and to help with mounting it to a flight stand. Then I'll have a set of ships that look great on a table!

What do you guys think? Leave a comment below!