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Sci Fi Habitats
So, this is a pretty basic terrain project. I have some left
over containers, 6"x6" thin card bases, a bit of miscelanea,
and a couple hours to kill.
Mounted the miscelaneous containers on base boards and then started
adding stuff to them.
I like the bottlecaps as generic fittings. They could be vents, hatches, storage tanks, sensors, really whatever you need. The caps have enough detail to be interesting, but no so much as to be distracting.
I put a diagram in the upper right of the "door" I made from thin card. The solid lines show where to cut and the dotted lines where to fold. The two little grey sections are removed and thrown away. The door is fitted to the slots on the container. The slots are tapered, so that's why I cut of the bottom of the sides. I just fitted the piece until they were snug, then marked that to be cut off.
Here they are with the doors on.
These are primed with a glossy black, which I actually liked for the buildings,
so I left it as the base color, too. With such a bold and dark structure, I
needed something to lighten it up. So I filled some of the grooves around the
piece with white, then went over that with glow-in-the-dark (light/neon) green.
I think you can also just see the little holes in the roof, too ... more about those in a minute.
This one is a different shape, but the color scheme should unite them. I put
a streak of silver paint all around the contours of this one. I will go over that
with green highlighter. The paint will soak it in a bit and give a shiny green
glowy effect.
There's what the holes in the roof are for ... turrets!. Just basic black and
silver with green highlights. Scifi utilitarian is what I had in mind, and I
think this pulls it off.
Also sand and grey paint around the base for "concrete".
Spartan and utilitarian is one thing, but I felt they needed a a little bit
of "zing". So I put Mongolian numbers on the door. This works well with
one of our postapoc worlds where Mongolian becomes the lingua franca
for a devestated Earth since they have altitude and a working radio transmitter.
Here's a (really bad) picture of the whole set out. 28mm Mongolians are for
reference. I made two different types of yurt there in the lower right from
the domed containers. Not sure which one I will keep and replicate (it's the
bottom of a container for pears, so we'll get more) and which I will trash.
And bottom left is a (very washed out) complete concrete bunker. It's actually seated on it lid (inverted), so the building lifts off the base and you can put surprises inside.
The rest of the buildings have solid bases, so the interiors are not accessible. If I have a need later, a craft knife and about five minutes can take care of that.