The scale-down

Well, this would be the nearest i ever got to 15mm sci-fi. The ultimate classic - Colonial Marines in 1/72.

The murky interior of Hadley's Hope..

After seeing the movie, looong ago, i was dying to possess a squad or two of those guys and, not being much of an internet user back then nor realising that somebody might be actually manufacturing them, i decided to put some together myself. DIY was always great fun :P

The last shot from surveillance cam no. 426, level 3, before all contact was lost.

The Smartgunners were the absolute favourite of course, so i kicked off with watching the pre-drop , insertion and combat scenes in slow-motion for half a day to draw out the design. A pair of old ESCI British WWII Commandos have been promoted to be the basis. They required some stripping of the original webbing and Brens, as well as a bit of arm-twisting. One got his sleeves scraped off and muscles sculpted. Then on went the harness, headset, back flashlight and finally da big shoota herself.
All this was scratchbuilt, mostly from paper, card and wire. Plus a slice of plastic sprue for the ammo drum. Funny times these were. I didn't have a hobby drill, but wanted the barrel to boast some serious calibre real bad, so i rolled a strip of thin paper around a paper clip and soaked it with superglue. I also remeber making the headset cable out of a piece of salvaged lightbulb filament.

Try to spot the mistakes in the gun ;)

My painting skills were mediocre at most, as were the paints i could afford, so the guys look like crap at close-up. Not much to say here. I didn't brave lettering the original guns' names (besides, Drake’s sense of humour was way different than mine), but added the danger stripes to one of them and a troops slot symbol from 40K to one of the breatplates.

The original plan to recruit a whole team came to nothing in the end. I just got as far as preparing tvelve flashlights and cut M41-like card roughs. Same happened to the attempt at the paper APC, found here some other day:

Khurasan arrived since then, so i guess i'm going to get those marines after all. Watch this space.

Thanks for visiting!