Ultramarine fort

[UltraHawk]

Hello there guys, I've been following this site for a while now and have never contributed anything myself so this is my debut.

I have always wanted to build a large fort, something that would be a centerpiece on the table and would most certainly capture your attention, but I never got around to it because I didn't want to make just a big box with a slit in it. But a few days ago I had this crazy idea, why not make a fort that is shaped like a giant Ultramarines sign? In fact it was so crazy it just might work, so I grabbed a pencil, a ruler and a large piece of paper and started my schematic.

Now I'm not sure if you will make heads or tales of these pictures since I have no measurement in there and didn't bother to clear many redundant lines of it but I can tell you that the diameter of the fort is 31cm and it will be 6cm high, and the top down view of the fort will look like the Ultramarines sign... so yes there will be a hole in the roof, but I'm gonna look at it as an advantage on the battlefield since you can deploy assoult squads directly from inside :P

I made the drawings yesterday and started work on the fort today. I "accuired" some old bit of pink styrofoam from work and started cutting the pieces out with a hot wire cutter, as you can see from the pictures this is what I ended up with, the arches are 2cm tall and 2cm thick, and will form the base of the firing slit, and the two blocks connecting to the arches are 3cm tall and complete the circle, finally the flat bit on top are at full height, 6cm.

my plan for tonight was to then lightly sand it to make it more even and less scruffy and then to glue it on to a thin masonite board, but unfortunatly the board I had that I thought to be big enough was way too small and I shall have to wait until tomorrow to get some more. And I shall of course update as I get along in this undertaking.

I hope you like my crazy idea and all advice and criticism is highly appreciated.

Cheers Ultrahawk

[MattCrawford]

Wow, awesome design!

 

Is that just pink insulation foam? If so, what cutting tool do you use to get it so smooth?

[verpine]

I "accuired" some old bit of pink styrofoam from work and started cutting the pieces out with a hot wire cutter,

 

 

If so, what cutting tool do you use to get it so smooth?

 

Hot wire cutter. It looks really awesome so far, i can't build anything with foam.

 

It would look cool if you added snadbags and ammo crates, but im sure you will.

[UltraHawk]

Thanx for the compliment MattCrawford! Verpine said it I used a hot wire cutter. Verpine, using sandbags had not occurred to me that might do some good, I am gonna add some extra bolters and stuff in the bunker once it's finished, I might be able to convert some ammo crates from lego's or something small and blocky. any ideas?

 

Well to get more on subject I have found a suitable piece of masonite and have started glueing the pieces to it, I am afraid that there won't be any pictures until on monday when the camera comes back from a weekend holiday, but I'm gonna start work on the support beams this weekend so there will (hopefully) be something new to see.

 

See you monday

Ultrahawk

[UltraHawk]

Ok time to update.. I've got a bit further and it's now starting to look like a proper fort, I started off by raising the two solid back segments by 1 cm because I had made them too low.

then I made the support columns, I made them a little too long so that they would stick out both on the outside and on the inside, this is so that I can make them fit more evenly with the roof section as well as the floor section. it's always better to take a little bit off rather than adding on I always say.

with that in place the only thing left to fabricate was the roof section. By now I think it's right I tell you how I cut these pieces out. I drew the pieces I wanted to cut out on cardboard and using my scissors I cut them out and stuck them on the styrofoam board, the reason I do this is because the hot wire cutter won't melt it's way through it and will work quite well in guideing it, I used the boxes that my spess mahrines came in for the cutouts, except for the roof section, which was so big I had to use a cereal box.

If that's not an Ultramarines signia I don't know what is. (although a little pink :) )

And finally we have a ground view of the fort, I think it looks quite dashing, If I say so myself.

Obviously what has to happen now is I have to do some light sanding and glueing the support struts in and then spackling the imperfections out( and adding some more realistic looking ones as well ;) ) I was wondering how I could do the floor of the bunker, metal or stone? I am leaning towards metal myself, but I value all advice and criticism.

Until next time

Ultrahawk

[Thantoes]

Quality!!! :rolleyes:

[Yogi]

Very cool.

[TheDarker]

Consider the basis of the idea stolen. In fact, i think that an U-shaped senatorial chamber would be very cool, being the U part the seat of "lesser" rulers and the - - parts the site of the important dignataries (Calgar, Master of the Forge, etc). Or also just a fortified position like the one of plastic, with the "O" in the center of the ultra being the silo of missiles.

 

Damm you, ideas, ideas!!!

[the akratic]

At a local hobby shop I found some plasticard that was textured like treadplate. I think that'd look really spiffy for the floor. If i can find some pictures I'll try to link some.

[spjaco]

Awesome job. Here is an idea....

BFM - The polar fortresses had surface bunkers right.....

What would the Command Bunker look like....

[kernmist]

That looks slightly more awesome than something that's already fairly awesome :(

[Dr. Maniac]

Nice building. :)

[RADU LYKAN]

that is really good, if i had any plans for some ultra marines at some point then several of these bunkers would appear in my terrain collection. shame that out of the 4 marine armies i have planned none of their chapter badges fit such an awesome idea. unless i made one shaped like a chaos star? ...................

[UltraHawk]

@ The darker: I would love to see someone do some u shaped buildings and halls, if you decide to do something like that or even copy my fort entirely I would love to see some pics.

@Radu Lykan: A chaos star is actually a awesome idea, it would probably be an even better fort than the ultramarine fort because it would have a firing slit all around, my fort has a blind spot on the back :)

 

Thanx for all the comments guys, but now I need some advice. The time has come for some surface treatment to make it look like stone in stead of styrofoam, and I'm not really sure how I want to accomplish that, it occurred to me I could smear spackle all over it ( I was filling in the joints) but might that look too rough? Does anyone have better a better idea for surface treatment or even a link to a good tutorial?

 

Until next time

Ultrahawk

[Skirax]

That looks slightly more awesome than something that's already fairly awesome :)

Win :)

 

Awesome bunker, and I never say that to an Ultramarine, so there you go!

 

I might do one for the Wolves, but how do I do it? If I made a GH symbol one, then it would be impossible to truely make like yours. Once again, amazing work :cuss

[UltraHawk]

Hello guys, I am sorry about the long wait but I have been very busy lately at work and have often been way too tired to do anything when I get home other than eating dinner and falling asleep under a gaunts ghosts book. But now I have found myself with some spare time so I think I should complete this fort.

There was a step that I forgot to photograph where I cut the support beams to the correct length and fixed a part of the roof where it didn't go even with the walls.

But after that it was time for the surface treatment, I started out by picking out some blast holes on the walls and roof.

On the center picture you can see where I added a little foam to the roof section where it turned out to be too short. i've cut it to correct length since then.

After this I took out an old bucket of professional grade spackle ( Normal spackle or even some plaster would be much better because it dries faster but I had this lying around at home, takes ages to dry out though ) and started lathering it on, the idea is to put a good goop of it on and then sand it down to a smooth finish, then it's texture will be very similar to a concrete wall. that is as far as I got since the spackle is still wet ( 24 hours ladies and gentlemen, 24 hours) but here are the pictures of the work in progress. Once again I apologize for the lack of updates and have a good one.

[blackbabyjesus]

consider this topic watched, what an awesome idea.

[Garou24]

Fantastic idea! Thats going to look very nice once it defended by some Ultramarines. Keep up the updates, I want to see this bad boy come along.

[Doghouse]

Fantastic work! Really original design for a fort and it works brilliantly. :P

[UltraHawk]

Hello everybody and thanks for the compliments, it's time to update my work.

To start off where I left you I sanded the spackle after it dried ( doing it whilst wet would have been silly) and it now looks like a concrete wall.

when I had sanded it some pink showed through in places (should be ok) and there are a few shallow indents in the spackle but I think I could pull that off as battle or weathering damage.

What I did next was I found this:

To be perfectly honest with you have a very limited idea of what this actually is, and I don't even know what it is called in my native tounge, let alone english. All I know is that electricians use it, it smells funny and it has a lot of holes in it, whitch makes it perfect for a grated floor. I used this once before on a smaller bunker and it came out brilliantly so I'll use it again:

I started off by making templates out of cardboard, I planned on having the grating in the firing slit sections and the open area in the middle will later be dominated by an imperial eagle:

I attached the templates to the "plate-with-no-name" and cut it all out with a scroll saw. The reason I used a scroll saw are twofold:

1. It's VERY easy and quick ( kids let you parent do it for you)

2. The "plate-with-no-name" is brittle and quite hard, so cutting it with a knife is time consuming and difficult. I didn't use a jigsaw because of the brittleness, but if you decide to try this material out a jigsaw might work if you use a new blade and go about it carefully.

What I ended up with was this:

After this was done, using a ruler and a knife I cut some grooves in the grating to make it look more like grating sections, I apologize for the quality of the picture but the camera wasn't very willing to take this picture properly:

And to end this post on I glued on a lot of sand:

What's next on my to do list is to make the imperial eagle for the floor, make some sort of door for the entrance ( I'm thinking removable) and general experementing with bitz and junk to make it look better, especially on the outside, I don't fancy a plain featureless landscape outside the bunker, it needs some bling, like barbed wires, sandbags and broken weapons. And if you guys have any ideas I am keen to hear them out because you might think of something I haven't.

Ultrahawk

[celes]

Looks like one of those moments when an idea just comes to you fully formed and you have to do something with it before it loses its momentum. Very well executed, atmospheric and extremely characterful, nice work indeed.

[jester_prince]

I love this its a well thought through design thats actualy quite defensible, thickest points at the door, 360 fireing slits, looks freaking awsome for a last stand! I mucho aprove, its stuff like this that makes me wish i still had an ultras army, mabey when my current army is finished.

 

It kinda looks like it should have mountains of Tyranid corpses around it alla starship troopers movie with ramps of nid corpses where they have crawled over each other to get at the marines inside. Though that may be too specific to one race, though quite cool considering ultras and their history of nids. The other thing you could do is make on dowels so its removable scenery for whatever race your fighting :D

 

Or just generic sandbags and some rhino chassis sized tank emplacements would be cool. You need some huge thick doors on that thing to make it look as sturdy as the rest of the bunker.

 

I really like this bunker and no other chapter iconography would lend itself so well to such a smart design.

[UltraHawk]

Hey guys sorry for the delay, I've mades some progress, not alot but some and I thought I should show you what I've done so far.

Tadaa!!

Yes this is an imperial eagle, I like it a lot, but man it was a hassle cutting it out, although the method was pretty simple: I printed out a picture of the imperial eagle and glued it onto a tactical squad box and then cut it out with a hobby knife, gluing it down with wood glue was no problem and Voila!! An awesome Imperial eagle.

After this I felt the absence of a door was getting annoying, so I painstakingly cut a groove in the walls in the opening to fit in a sliding door:

I made the door itself from foamboard to give it some bulk and cut the details out from 1mm plastic card and glued on to make it look like two seperate doors that slide together. I then finished it off by gluing some cardboard on top to hide the gashing wound in the walls I made to fit the door in ;)

Once I finished the door it was time to pretty the entrance up a little, I made a very simple threshold from sprue and lined the small hallway with the grating I used before:

Now we get to the reason I took so long in updating. I simply hit a creative block and couln't think of anything cool and/or appropriate to place on the ground in front of the bunker. I didn't want to place any dead enemies there beacuse It would bother me If I were using this bunker against Orks and there was a dead tyranid in front.

I dont have any green stuff and have never used it so I couln't make sandbags, (although I am gonna order me some greenstuff soon and start experimenting) and all my attempts at making barbed wire had gone haywire.

Until I found this

I have already tried it and production of some cool barbed wire is in production. double T on dakka dakka has unclogged my creative block and has my grateful thanks!

Until next time Ultrahawk

[Skirax]

This looks so awesome!

[Master Ciaphas]

Hail!

 

This looks entirely, and utterly awesome!!! Kudos and well done!

 

Regards,

Master Ciaphas