Venusian Bombards

I haven't played any Victorian Science Fiction games lately, but at the GameOnGw terrain day a weekend ago, Chuckaroobob and myself started talking about old times and it seems that the Lizards are restless on Venus again. Once again Capitan Jean Val Jean must lead his Foreign Legionaries to defend the citizens of French Venus against the Lizards.





Since the last bout of hostilities the lizardmen have a new patron who has provided an equalizer(of a sort) to the French guns. The guns are crude but they will still throw a shell and fire grapeshot.








I have had the idea to add some guns to my VSF lizardman force. To make them double duty I planned to also use them as salamander proxies in my warhammer fantasy lizardman army. The funny part is after looking through my Lizardman box I found I already have three salamanders I had forgotten about. The idea to use dowel rod finial came to me at a local craft store's 50% off 4th of July sale last year. I went with SWMBO and had picked up some odds and ends when I saw the finials and got the idea to use them as gun tubes. Later I picked up a couple clearanced bags of wood scraps at Hobby Lobby. Then the parts set in the Hobby room till last this week. After the talk with Chuckaroo I was motivated and set out to see how hard the build would be. About an hour later I had the first one done except for some detailing. The build went well so I prepped to use the remaining five finials to build five more guns.





Here is the test build gun. The barrel is a dowel rod finial with a 1/4 inch hole. The sides are some scrap piece of thin wood with some bass wood strips for the cross pieces. It is all pinned together with brass wire and the edges are cover in 1/8 inch styrene angle. I need to add a few more detail and fill some gaps but this is close to the final shape. The base is a hardboard off cut I had left over from making some Flames of War bases.

A simple tutorial. Drill a hole in the finial and glue in a piece of brass wire. Drill a hole in the base and glue the barrel to it.

I made a template from the first gun so the rest of the guns will be close to the same size.

I used the template and cut out the sides. The glue the sides to the side of the gun. I then glued a strip of basswood in the front of the gun between the cannon sides. Then another piece of scrap wood was glued behind the gun barrel and finally a crosspiece was glued between the rear of the cannon sides. Then I used some 1/8 inch styrene angle to cover the edges.

Here is a group shot of the new Lizardman battery. After looking through my Lizardman box and finding the three Salamanders in the blister I forgot I picked up at a local store's closing sale, I am still glad I built the guns. They will still work with a change of crew for several different genres. I also thought about using them as mortars for my empire army, plague mortars in my skaven army and switching worlds to use them with Martian crew for VSF gaming on Mars. The more I think about it the more uses I can come up for them.

Now I just need to detail them a bit and a quick paint job to get them table ready.

ColKG