After over four years of work, the fort is finally done! The last few years have been crazy (maybe a few others out there can relate), so I haven't had a ton of time to spend on crafting stuff, but it's very satisfying to have actually seen this project though.
I was trying to come up with a color scheme that looked appropriately eclectic for an Ork fort built from salvaged scrap, but also cohesive enough to look like an actual building that could exist within an environment. So the exterior armor panels of the fort are pretty much split, with half being bare metal, and the other half being painted.
The interior wall panels are mostly just metal, but this is balanced by all the little doodads like mushrooms, pipes, and tools, which are all pretty colorful.
My mob's colors are the traditional Goff colors of black, white, and red, but since this fort is for all the mobs in the campaign, I added the other mobs' colors, which also included yellow, blue, and purple. I mostly focused on red and yellow, since that covers about every old-school Ork clan except Snakebites and Deathskulls, so it gives the whole thing a very orky feel.
I also really like the way my little insignia over the gate looks all painted up.
The whole thing got pretty heavily weathered, which I think works really well with all the chains and machinery. I used quite a few methods of weathering on the fort, including stippling on rust and paint chips, enamel paints, oil washes, and even experimenting with Dirty Down rust. Most of which sort of worked.
I even managed to use some Dirty Down Moss on the sewer pipe to make it look appropriately gross.
The chunk of the 'Ulk turned out really well. In retrospect, I don't know why I left the engine nozzles shiny and silver when I weathered everything else so heavily. I probably just skipped it once during the months of on-and-off painting and then assumed I'd skipped it intentionally. Maybe I'll go back and rust it up later.
The big fuel tank was one of the first ideas I had for the fort and the only specialized wall section that was part of the original version from 2019. It’s pretty cool to see it finally finished and painted up.
The pipes look appropriately busy.
Speaking of busy, I probably went a bit overboard with the storage sections, but I like how all the mushrooms and other supplies turned out.
The electrical panels looked pretty good painted up. I’ll probably do something similar on other Ork buildings in the future.
The workbench also turned out really cool, but I attribute most of that to the Mek Workshop just being a generally cool piece of terrain.
The sleeping quarters changed a lot from my original concept. I kind of wish that I’d stuck a hammock or two in there, but I’m glad I didn’t take the time and effort to model a decent hammock. Maybe in a future build.
I also made little perches for my shoulder squigs.
So at long last, the fort is finally ready for the next campaign. It'll be exciting to play with proper terrain this time. Assuming we actually need a fort. I guess we'll see. If nothing else, it makes for a pretty spiffy Ork dollhouse.
Also, I started a YouTube channel, so you can see the whole painting process if you're into that sort of thing.
Belated fort update: I did, in fact, build one more random structure to the fort, a windmill. Every good Gorkamorka fort needs a windmill for power, so now all the random gizmos I built into the workshop can be put to good use.
I built it to be modular like the rest of the fort, not because I plan on having multiple versions I could swap out, but for ease of storage (a tall, skinny tower with sticky-out bits is just asking to get broken) and because you can move it around. It doesn't exactly spin well, but I still thought it was cool.
I used a bunch of random gears for most of the worky bits, as well as some high-voltage bushings that I think were part of the Mek Workshop that didn't make the cut for that section of the fort.
Anyhow, I think this officially ends the construction phase of the fort. Painting is now well underway and I hope to get the whole thing finished soon. Like soon soon, not a year or two soon. Fingers crossed!
Last summer, Dana Howl, one of my favorite YouTube creators, proposed the game of Shame Golf—a way for miniature painters to motivate themselves to get through their backlog of unpainted miniatures. It's not too dissimilar to the yearly painting resolutions they used to have on the old Warhammer forums back in the day, where you'd pledge to paint more models than you bought in the coming year. The main point was to make yourself accountable to the rest of the community, because it's much easier to let yourself down than let down a bunch of strangers on the internet.
I never really participated back in the day, mostly because my purchases tended to be more along the lines of "24 left arms, a chunk of a broken Chimera, and a sock full of Necromunda bits." Still, I liked the points system of Shame Golf, and the gaminess sort of appealed to me. And I'm always looking for more ways to motivate myself to be more consistent with painting. Besides, these days I play all the weird skirmish games. How often do I even make big Warhammer purchases? Seemed like an easy wind.
Turns out the last six months or so have been kind of weird.
That's not an entirely fair assessment. The last few years of plague, natural disasters, and civil unrest have been pretty peculiar. Still, due to personal stuff, I kind of dropped off the planet for most of last year. Plus, Games-Workshop for some reason decided to stop their tradition of releasing 90 percent Space Marines and instead made a bunch of weird skirmish stuff and Orky terrain. As primarily a Skaven player, I'm accustomed to only getting a handful of new models every decade, so I probably went a bit overboard. Probably.
Anyway, I started trying to tally my Shame Golf score, but I stopped counting somewhere around 400, which surpasses even my worst score playing the old PGA Tour Golf for DOS back when I was nine, so I think it's safe to say I lost. Still, with an even heftier backlog of plastic than before, I decided to start with a clean slate for 2022. Wish me luck.
I still need to set up my airbrush to start painting the fort, but why do productive stuff when I can get distracted by random side projects? To that end, I decided that my towers needed to be more towerey, so I made a little watchtower out of plasticard.
In contrast to the main towers of my fort, which are pretty solid, this little guy has more of a ramshackle scaffolding sort of look, supported by a couple of steel beams. I managed to get the beams mostly symmetrical and at the same angle, but found it was pretty hard to attach crossbars to all those weird angles, so the crossbars are basically just long pieces of junk stuck on to hold it all together.
Speaking of my main towers, I made the base of the watchtower slightly smaller than their tops so that it can be set up to overlook the walls. It can also be set up on the ground or another flat surface, so this piece might get some use beyond fort scenarios.
Also, gotta have a ladder so that da boyz can get in and out.
My fort now has an appropriately orky front gate. Astute observers might notice that this gate is substantially different than the original one that I created and isn't actually made of foam. You would be correct.
My original gate was built from XPS foam and had a drawbridge-style gate that was essentially just held in by friction. This severely limited what I could do with the gate, since I couldn't really add any additional detail to any of the parts that had to fit together, nor could I really add any sort of hinges or mechanisms for actually opening the door. As such, I decided to abandon the pressure-fit gate altogether and start out with a new one.
Since I couldn't really make the foam any thinner without compromising its already weak structure, I opted to build the structural framework out of some aquarium filters. Although they're not made of the most rigid plastic, their grid structure made them pretty stable, except at the joints. Still a definite step up from the foam.
Also, the grid made it super easy to add the magnets!
The doors themselves were also based on the aquarium grating. I built some hinges out of plasticard rod that both allowed the doors to swing open for my vehicles to exit or to be removed if a band of Muties decides to blow them up during a siege.
I also added a nice bulkhead door from Necromunda, since I wouldn't think that they'd want to open and close the gates every time a mobster came in or out.
I made the doors look especially ramshackle, with big sections that looked like they'd been damaged and then hastily patched over. I also made sure to run some wires to that light so that the guards can see who's knocking at the front door in the middle of the night.
The framework of the door can be seen from the back, and I made sure to add plenty of bolts as well. I also added a few big chunks of detail in the corners to help shore those joints up against shearing forces.
Again, since the fort is modular and meant to be used by all the mobs in our group, I didn't want to put any specific identifying details to tie it to my mob. Instead, I added some magnets above the gate so that whichever mob is using the fort can have their insignia showing.
I'm quite pleased with how my mob's sign turned out.
Finally, I decided to add a bit more detail to the bare walls on the inside of the gate. I modeled some big mechanisms with chains and pulleys that were probably once used to open the doors, but were now clearly broken. I'm sure the spannerz have jury-rigged a temporary solution to operate the doors that has become the norm now.
This makes for the eighth and final wall section of the fort, which means I'm really going to have to hook up my airbrush for real one of these days. Hopefully it won't take me a whole year to actually paint it.
I've now magnetized all the wall sections of my fort because of course I have. They were quite a bit easier to magnetize than all the fiddly little gubbinz I made for my vehicles; however, I was pretty surprised at how tightly they hold together. They also snap together in a very satisfying way.
Each wall section and tower got three quarter-inch magnets on each side. I also ended up adding a few extra lead weights at the bottom for some extra stability. The whole thing is pretty solid once it's all assembled.
Another big section of the fort is finished. This one is the spanners' workbench and tools, including some nice hydraulic arms. I probably went a bit overboard with the cables and the ductwork, but since the workbench itself was so detailed, I wanted the rest of the room to look like it matched.
As you can probably tell, most of this wall section is just built from the Mekboy Workshop terrain set, though it did take a bit of work to take the freestanding workshop and build it into the existing wall of the fort.
The biggest part was flipping the main wall of the workshop around and installing the bench on the wrong side. I decided to make the more detailed side of the piece face forward, since the other side would be glued to the wall. The piece is fairly symmetrical, so I really only had to carve some holes for a couple of wires and pipes to get the bench to sit (mostly) flush with the wall.
I ended up grinding off the back half of the wall to better attach it to the fort, so the workbench is now at a slightly odd angle. Plenty Orky, though.
Nice to see that the Orks keep their workspace as tidy as I keep mine.
Since the Mekboy Workshop came with a big hydraulic arm and I already had another as part of the gubbinz for my big trakk, I wanted to make some spots around the workshop where the arms could be installed. I went a little overboard making the mount for the arm, adding as many motors, compressors, and gears as I could fit into the tiny space I'd allotted myself. Though I guess going overboard is kind of on par with the rest of the workshop.
I was originally going to mount the second arm on the floor right next to the workbench, but that didn't give me much space if I wanted to make sure that this piece still fit together nicely with the other fort walls. Also, there was already more than enough detail crammed in this little section, so it couldn't hurt to spread it out a little bit.
I ended up making a little freestanding platform for the arm to sit in. I modeled it mostly on the assembly line platforms you see in car manufacturing plants, which seemed appropriate. I also had to pack more lead weights into this little thing than any other part of the fort just to keep it from tipping over when the arm swung around. Turned out pretty well, though.
Only a few more sections and this thing will be ready for some paint.
