Federation Commander

I too have slept since then, but IIRC there were some issues that required the minis go back to the sculptor. After that, I don't know...

Matt? ....
Matt? ...

Low sales potential (omega sales are half of non-Omega products, so assuming that the same applies to minis, they were not going to pay for the mold making), difficulty with the casting people we used at the time, issues with the way they were done. If they had been "ready to go" we might have done them (even though we would certainly lose money on them) but pumping SVC hours into a money-losing project just wasn't a good plan. Basically it just did not seem to be a productive use of my time to work through the fixes. I don't have time to do everything that somebody wants, and I pick the ones that have the biggest bang for the hour of SVC time.

Ah fair enough. Well if the opportunity ever comes up again, count me in!

What about a limited resin run, like that Juggernaut a few years back?

When I spoke to Steven Petrick and SVC about the Omega miniatures at Origins in 2010 there was only one slight problem. The Probr CA had been dropped by someone at ADB and one of the wings had fallen off, which need to be fixed. Steven Petrick had brought the miniature to Origins for me to pick up and fix. I was also working on a Demonhawk at the time. SVC was happy with the Demonhawk conversion, but Steven Petrick said that some of the phasers needed to be moved (due to arcs). Both miniatures were corrected and mailed off to ADB within weeks of Origins

I am sure the sales potential of the Omegas is what lead to the ultimate decision. I always felt like working on the Omegas was kind of just a fun sidetrack of extra green stuff all along.

You can read where SVC originally requested Omega ships and some pictures of the miniatures here.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/federatio ... php?t=1637

Personally, I'm hoping that, once Mongoose have spent a few years rounding out the Alpha Octant, they might consider adding one or more of the non-Alpha settings to A Call to Arms: Star Fleet; and open the door to potentially adding these settings to the Starline 2500 range in the process.

Of course, it may be as forlorn a hope as most of my other SFU-related ones, but how and ever...

Gary -

Rather than staring wistfully out the proverbial window, I'd highly recommend you take a try at kit-bashing and scratch-building what you want.

It takes some time and effort to build skills up to deliver results you might want but, it's not as hard as it might seem, is quite fulfilling creatively, and you can have anything your heart desires.

I started doing it specifically because ADB was never likely to produce minis of certain oddball/rare ships that I wanted in my collection, or because I was not happy with where design/sculpting decisions on a production mini went.

Last time I tried that, I had a go at putting together a Baduvai Strike Cruiser; the results were, well... enough to convince me to leave it to the professionals going forward.

Mine sucked royally, at first. Like anything worth learning, it takes time to build the skill set up. My best recommendation is to just "make stuff". The more you do, the better you'll get.

Honestly, I've sculpted more chests, coffins, and barrels for D&D, and dinosaurs and flowers for my wife, than I have anything else. Those were all practice, to get a feel for how putty behaves, brass bends, etc. A dozen or two of those, and I could deliver what I wanted on SFU ships.

That is literally how the sculpt for the FedEx happened. I'd used the putty for other things, had some mixed up to repair a big gap in a mini and the left over lump made me think "FedEx courier". Next thing I knew, I was sculpting it into that ship and liking what I saw.

I'm not happy with my scribing work on that one, as it was just about my first time trying to scribe on putty. Every project teaches something new.

hahaha.
I lost count of the crates, barrels, chests I sculpted for WH40K, followed by dungeon details for AD&D.

And yes, every single thing thought a new lesson.

Well what are some of the materials that you can use for masters? Does it have to be out of green stuff or aluminum for the casting process? Can you use styrene or does that not go over well for the pewter molds? I mostly have been doing props for the last few years, doing kits and scratch building, I've been thinking of giving a shot at trying to do some minis, maybe see theoretically if one was good for casting, but I just never got the courage to do it haha.

For the spin-cast metal minis, you have to use materials that can survive the high-temperature vulcanizing of the rubber molds. That narrows it down to metals (pewter, lead, brass, steel), epoxy puttys ("greenstuff", etc.), glass (beads, etc.), and epoxy glues.

Anything else (plastics, cyanoacyrlate "super" glues, etc.) just turn to goo.

Even the recommended stuff usually gets destroyed during the process (its an "investment" casting, in a sense).