Niðavellir Shipyard: August 2015

Niðavellir Shipyard

The Nidavellir Shipyard is a large UCM Shipyard hidden far away from any planetary system.
After the scattering of humans after the first Scourge attack many ships used their ftl drives and made an random Foldspace jump just to get away. Many of this ships found themselves alone in the dark, to close to a star or a black hole and perished but some made it to an empty place in space. And that’s how the Nidavellir belt was discovered. A collection of large rocks, asteroids in different sizes and collection of dust and sand. Exactly how this place come to be, far from any sun, placed in between systems is not known. It is believed it was created after an extremely unlikely collision of two larger celestial body, with no stronger gravity pull in the vicinity this collection of minerals and rocks have held together by their own combined pull of each other. The scatter of large rocks and the natural background radioactivity have created a hiding place. After the survivors made contact with the now formed UCM the area have been put to good use.

Named after the Norse mythology Nidavellir, the world of the dwarves, for its rich mineral and metal resources. Perfectly for foundries and a large shipyard complex.

This is the place to produce ships...

Monday 3 August 2015

Even more sci-fi ruins.

Its a quick build and paintjob but it will do.

I tried to give all the buildings some kind of graffiti or tags. A quick paintjob but the colours lifts the overall effect on the buildings.

Shown here are also some of my Shaltari for scale.
Camouflage are for cowards...

Shaltari Totem Warspire

I had this model for over a year and have had real difficulties to decide on how to paint it. I finally settle down with keeping the overall whitish coral effect on the entire model but painting the larger "gems" on the structure as the same glass canopy of the other vehicle instead of the green gems I usually gives them. This gives the effect of multiple eyes in every direction that I think looks cool on this alien construct.

The Totem is a particularly unusual unit, even for the Shaltari! It has a crew of one Shaltari, who sits within an armoured chamber at the base of the construct. A Warspire is essentially a towering, immobile emplacement. The Totem's primary function is to protect a building by projecting an all-encompassing energy shield over the entire structure. This Passive Countermeasures system increases the survivability of the building, allowing Shaltari troops inside to carry out their mission with a diminished chance of having the building demolished on top of them!
This is not, however, the Totem's only role - it can also focus its vast energy reserves into wild bursts of power, shattering armour and melting flesh. This gives the Totem a deadly (albeit fairly short-ranged) offensive capability. This can be particularly useful to Shaltari commanders late in the battle, when its primary role has been fulfilled.

The Totem also has the rare ability of being able to unleash one of these systems immediately after being Materialised from a Gate (or before Dematerialising - but not both!). This snake-like ability to strike instantly is granted by the Totem's vast power generator and its lack of mobility, since all this raw power can be channelled to weapons.

And here you can find some comparison pictures with the smaller tanks I painted previously. This thing is rather big.

Sunday 2 August 2015

Shaltari reinforcements

Its starting to get hard not to paint Dropzone Commander stuff now, they just draws their attention to me. Latest reinforcements consists of four Yari light scout tanks and one Tomahawk main grav tank.

Niðavellir Shipyard