Thunderbirds are Go!

Gaming of a different kind.  When we were in the UK this summer I introduced the kids to Thunderbirds.  Mini-Me Minor loved it, so Grandma bought him all the toys, of course.  The other day Mini-me Minor wanted to play a Thunderbirds game so we set up a nice little city and had a bit of a disaster

A tragic accident, the monorail has collapsed

 Fires rage through the city

 Emergency services can't get close enough to fight the fires

 Thunderbird 5 picks up the radio traffic, time to call International Rescue

Thunderbird 1 is the first to arrive

 TB1 surveys the disaster

 TB1 lands

TB1 takes off again, it launches cables to stabilize the train

 TB2 arrives

 TB2 flies around a bit, you know, just because...

 TB2 drops off a pod and lands

 Virgil straps on an exo-loader to clear debris

Virgil doing his thing, clearing debris

 The fire engines fight the fires

 Fires fought

 TB1 starts to pulls back the train

 Pull...

 TB2 comes to aid TB1

 Yeah! the train is saved.

 Zooooom

 TB1 and Virgil work together to repair the monorail

 F.A.B. job done

Virgil heads back to the pod

 TB2 swoops in to pick up the pod

 Whooosh, TB2 takes off

 And Zooooom.  TB2 heads back to Tracy Island to get ready for the next mission

 Mini-me minor had a lot of fun with 'dad's toys' and his Thunderbirds.  The next question : "What's the next mission Dad?"

Going Macro

Heavy Gear, its been a weakness of mine for a while, I like the idea of gritty sci-fi stompy mechs.  I have picked up a few Gears cheaply on Ebay but I never really jumped into HG as the Dream Pod minis are expensive.  When I saw the HG Kickstarter I jumped in at a modest level, I was delighted when it took off so dramatically.  The kickstarter arrived not long ago with a box full of mech kits.  Its been fun building up the armies.  It has, however,  restarted another itch...
...this

A Votex Landcruiser from DP9, the Vortex is a full-on fleet carrier for use in the equatorial badlands on Terra Nova.  I really like the idea of a model landship as a patrol base to use in campaign driven scenarios.  Why? well, I saw this on Starship Modeler

This is a scratch-built gear-scale Vortex Class Land cruiser model, its HUGE!

(www.starshipmodeler.org/gallery6/se_vig.htm)

However, while I can admire the gear-scale vortex, there is no way I'm going to build something like that, I need a smaller-ship that can actually fit in my gaming space.  More like this, a Destroyer-class ship

But while a Destroyer, is OK for troops its not too great for carrying gears or aircraft.  Instead, what I need is an Escort Carrier. Fortunately, inspiration struck and after a bit of careful Ebay-ing a parcel arrived from the UK. One CVE Landship proxy, a Captain Scarlet Skybase.  

As a CVE its pretty big, at about 22" by 20" by 4" high deck.  Its perfect for my purposes as a CVE for gears and light aircraft.  Its going to be a fun toy to use as a patrol base.  As for the toy aspects, one below-deck is for storage (deck 02), the other (01) has two working lifts and an a rearm/repair facility.  On deck here we see some ships we had to hand, a couple of Battlestar Galactica Raptors (one on a lowered lift) and Jedi and UFO fighters.

As a bonus the control tower opens to reveal a command space which is as close enough for 15mm as you get for a toy.

This was all great, until mini-me minor found out about it and wigged out over how amazing its is...  ...Mini-me major arrived later and the pair of them are running carrier ops off it as I type.

Mmmm, looks like I'll have to ask the kids if I can have my toys back so I can have a play with it myself  =8-)

As a note, we see one of Armies Army's VTOLs on deck, we don't normally play with unpainted toys, but the kids think these are cool and wanted to play with them