May The 4th Be With You 2023 – DIY Epic Star Wars Reinforcements

I think we may be in danger of starting Yet Another Skinflint Tradition here… over the last couple of years, regular viewers will have seen me appropriate the granny grating techniques that Dan picked up to scratchbuild some Epic scale Star Wars armies, in a somewhat ambitious attempt to recreate one of my favourite old RTS games, “Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds” on the tabletop. It’s also served as an incubator for our “epic scale” version of the Apocalypse: Earth rules, nd believe it or not these are actually in a pretty good state, albeit existing as stapled together Post-It notes and scattered pages of A4 paper!

So this year I figured the Galactic Empire And Rebel Alliance might fancy having a crack at Outpost 44 again, after a pretty tasty fight last year, but this time with some extra support. In SWGB everyone gets basically the same units, albeit with different sprites and different upgrades to differentiate them, so I’ve been building each force to be symmetrical – we started with an infantry company, a pair of speeder bikes and of course Luke & Vader to lead them, and since then they’ve had reinforcements in the shape of a support platoon with heavy blasters and a squadron of mechs each.

This time I wanted to add an aerial dimension – so what else but a flight of TIE fighters for the Empire and X-Wings for the Alliance? And if you’re going to have air, you need anti-air assets, so that meant infantry packing SAMs.. and while I’ve got the granny grating out, why not add infantry packing personal mortars able to provide indirect fire support? Well, it would be rude not to, right? In fairness, I’ve no idea if this is “canon”, but Star Wars lore seems infinitely malleable depending on who owns the IP – and let’s not forget George Lucas was making it all up as he went along anyway – so I decided to stick by SWGBs template!

Right, enough talk, let us get to business – I won’t go into the infantry because it’s pretty much the standard drill now, granny grating & hot glue, granny grating lengths cut to represent SAM launchers and mortar barrels and bipods, 20mm wine box cardboard for basing, you can read all about that in innumerable posts on this blog… and, well, I clearly forgot to take any pictures. Whoops.

But the interesting stuff is here – the ships! X Wings first:

Fuselage crafted from sprue lengths (approximately an inch in length), whittled down with a craft knife to create the X Wing silhouette

Wings cut from cardboard and glued to the fuselage with a mix of PVA and superglue, eyeballed the angles with the help of a ruler

Another view

Drinking straw thrusters

And there are the TIE Fighters! Blobs of greenstuff with cockpit details etched in, wrapped around cocktail sticks chopped down and cardboard wings added with PVA/superglue mix

Bases! These are 30mm squares of Foamex (ePVC to some) bevelled down, and sanded the edges (right hand side)..

Tactical rocks added for cinematic style – and stability! Cocktail sticks driven into the Foamex and glued in place.

The lads take to the skies! Paint scheme was the same as the mechs and for the moment I’ve bodged the bases with Blu-Tack to keep the X Wings in the sky…

Providing air cover to the Rebel Scum (TM)

Close up on the mortar platoon

Rebel air defence team

And from the best angle – two feet away – the army on parade!

Stormtrooper support assets

Slightly better angle here!

TIE Fighters on patrol, overwatching the Galactic Empire – painted black and some edge highlighting done with thinned Duck Egg Blue house paint

Lord Vader leads the troops forward – there will be no-one to stop us this time…

Tune in next time to see how the battle went down, and stay thrifty out there!