I'm not too found of Hawk Wargames: I wrote about this before but I'm not sure where or when anymore, so here I go again (feel free to skip the next paragraph, the good stuff is underneath)...
When I first heard (well, read probably) about Dropzone Commander I
was very eager: air-mobile-centric game, beautiful and original
models (the Post Humans and United Colonies, that is; the Scourge goes from OK to "hey look, evil flying CD-rack at 3 o' clock" and the other aliens gear looks like a mix between Native Americans headgear and BDSM accessories)... And then I found out it was all going to be
10mm-scaled! I came over to 15mm for the sheer pleasure of freely mixing and matching whatever toy form whatever manufacturer, so
I'm not about to buy into another scale that's compatible with pretty
much nothing else, thank you very much! I'm sure there are plenty of arguments for that
specific scale (air-mobile tactics need a lot of space; but then why not
go 6mm, another widely accepted standard?), but that choice of scale
seems a very GWish "let's make sure if they taste our product they can't
go anywhere else to get their lead - or resin or whatever- fix" move to
me. Not meant as a compliment. End of ranting.
Recently I read a blog post about using 6mm proxies to try out Dropzone Commander rules without taking on a new mortgage... Nothing new so far, I thought about it before but the idea kind of broke down with dropships (and other flyers): they are a key component to the game and each faction has several different very specific ones; not that easy to source in 6mm. But Raskal just used suitably sized Firestorm Armada ships (he had, I assume, laying around) for the different dropship.
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| 6mm not-UCM proxy army by Raskal over at Raskal Central. |
Sure they're not the correctly scaled next to the 6mm infantry and ground vehicles, but...
- Visual scale clues are usually pretty limited on spaceships model;
- A bit of scale wiggle room is apparently allowed when two scales are not in the same plane (i.e. air versus ground à la Flames of War 15mm ground forces with 1/144 airplanes).
I think Raskal intended this experiment as a crude placeholder (he ended up buying the official stuff), but I think it could work as a permanent solution... Especially if you go for spaceships that stylistically match your ground vehicles and blend them further together with your paintjob...
So here we go with yet another project (as usual just a gedankenexperiment, I probably won't go very far with it)!
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I'll call this project Delta Zulu Six: "delta zulu" for "dropzone", off
course; "six" for 6mm but also for the commander call sign in military
radio procedures, so "DZ6" can actually mean "dropzone commander";
the triangle is both the Greek letter delta and the APP-6 symbol for a
dropzone... I'm quite proud of this ;-) |