With an assortment of scatter terrain ready to go, it was time to build some of the larger elements of my refinery layout. Since my campaign takes place in an analog of the local area, I wanted to take some inspiration from the actual nearby refinery (shown here on fire, because most of the other non-flaming pictures of it are taken at night to hide all the stuff it’s spewing from the smokestacks):
First off, this place is big. Anything resembling a real scale model of it at an appropriate size for 28mm gaming would take up at least the downstairs of my house. It’s not just a sprawling complex built along the shoreline; the stacks and storage tanks are massive.
So true-to-life scale goes completely out the window here, and the goal becomes to make some “kinda big looking” items that give the general impression of a refinery without overwhelming the available space on my table. I chose to go with a row of tall standing tanks similar to the ones in the upper right of the above photo, plus a concrete building inside which some sort of refining process takes place before spewing exhaust into the atmosphere via a smokestack on top. I wanted something more, and an idea presented itself when my wife threw away a big fish-food container.
Tanks a lot
For the row of big upright storage/processing units, I started by eating a lot of Pringles. (In my defense, I had help from teenagers.) Three empty tubes were glued to a piece of chipboard. I’d saved some of the containers from the plumber’s putty I use for making some of my mini bases, and I glued a pair of those onto the back just to have some more smokestacks in the scene. A couple of drinking straws were added as pipes, and the whole assembly was sprayed with grey primer.
I also made a simple ladder from thin dowels to attach to the front of one of the tanks. I walkway spanning the whole unit would be a useful place for waiting enemies to fire down from, so I cut a piece of embroidery mesh to fit around the smokestacks and super-glued some wood dowels underneath it as supports.
Ladder and platform were spray painted with the same metallic (paid link) as the pipes, etc. from an earlier installment of this build, then set aside as I wanted to later rust up the individual pieces before attaching them. The tanks themselves were painted with a tan color. Flocking would wait until after rust and wash were applied.
The big fish food container would be another storage tank, vertical this time. I glued on the lid and attached a strip of paper along the length to look like a welded seam. I originally planned on gluing a cardboard disc onto the outside of the lid to hid the embossed word “Tetra”, but I decided to leave it and if anybody noticed I would explain that in my game universe, Tetra had branched out into the petrochemical industry. A spray coat of primer was topped with a light blue.
A pair of supports for it were made with super glue and balsa strips, stuck to chipboard bases. These got the metal spray as well. Then the tank was glued into place, and I added a few pieces of the pipes I’d assembled previously to the ends of the tank.
Not my first choice of office space
For what would be my first model of an actual building, I wanted an industrial look. I’d found some modern-looking 3d printable door and window pieces that were sized to be fit into foamcore walls, so I printed some of those. The doors were a little smaller than I expected, but I went with them anyway. Black primer went onto the windows and grey on the doors, and the strips across the front of each door were painted with a dull silvery metallic. A black wash dirtied them up a little.
I cut some dollar store foam boards into shapes about the size I thought would work for a two-story building where the upper floor is slightly smaller than the lower. I rolled tin foil across them for texture, then used a brick-texture roller across the surfaces. These texture rollers don’t typically press in deep enough on foam to leave a good impression – when I’ve used them on it in the past I’ve had to follow up by tracing the lines they left behind to deepen them – but as the look for a cinder-block pattern with very shallow lines between the blocks, these results were perfect.
Holes were cut for the doors and windows, walls were glued together, and a chipboard base was added. At this point I realized I probably should have waited to attach the base so I could mod-podge inside the assembly for added strength, but… <shrug> missed opportunity.
I added some drinking-straw “pipes” and used a few foam scraps, decorated with cardboard pieces and a bit of a plastic break-off shim, to build a roof hatch, a switchbox of some sort, and an industrial A/C unit, which I glued into place on the model.
The resulting building was given a coating of black-and-Mod-Podge, making sure not to leave any foam exposed because I wanted to spray paint it without the paint’s accelerant dissolving anything if I sprayed too close.
A while back I picked up a light grey paint/primer “Ultra Matte”, which at the time I thought meant “really, really flat:”. It did not. Instead, it was a high-coverage satin sheen, and I hadn’t found any use for it… until now! It seemed like it would be a great finish for a painted industrial cinder-block building.
With that base color applied and dried, I brushed some metallic color onto the pipes and greens to the other fixtures.
I wanted to add a smokestack as well, but I decided to do it as a separate item that could sit on top of the roof in the empty area. Rather than use more of the plumber’s-putty tubes, I turned to the long and slightly wider plastic tube that had come with the fishtank filter set (paid link) I used for the walkway build. With a shaped cap on top and a wider rectagular base on the bottom, it was perfect!
I did want to add some weight on the bottom to help it stay upright, but there wasn’t a good place for my usual ballast go-to – glued-on washers. So I found another foam scrap, added some glue, and crammed it into the tube. I added in a couple of other scraps attached to that and the base, then found a big washer to hot-glue to those.
The only other prep for this until the rust phase of the build was to spray-prime it grey.
Now I had a large collection of terrain (shown in part below) that was ready for finishing… but that will have to wait for the next post!
