Painting a fleet of spaceships has been on my to-do list for a long time, but the complexity of a fleet and the sheer variety of ships I saw in most ranges were baffling. Luckily, GZG’s Ravagers seem to be a manageable challenge: there’s a Light Carrier, a Cruiser, two types of Raiders and an Attacker (these are approximately the equivalent of destroyers and frigates or torpedo boats) and that’s all. Experienced players might find this range of ships insufficient, but for me, it seems to be the perfect starting set.
After removing the mould lines and cleaning the ships with washing-up liquid, I base coated them with white, and to speed things up, I used spray paint this time. Next, I drilled a 3mm hole to the hulls and glued there the transparent caps of TT Combat’s Widgets pack that can fit tightly on the top of the standard black stands.
I wanted to use a simple paint scheme for these models with a limited range of colours, but I still wanted to make them look similar to the Ravager ships of Firefly and Serenity. With these in mind, I decided to use GW’s Blood Angel Red and Basilicanum Grey contrast paints for the base colours. To represent the chaotic nature of the Ravagers, I made sure that no two ships are painted the same way.
The Red surfaces were highlighted with Wild Rider Red and I used to pick some of the parts with Troll Slayer Orange. On the grey surfaces, I used Vallejo’s Neutral Grey for highlighting. The weapons and the nozzles were painted gunmetal.
The side sponsons are covered with square panels and there are many of them on the hulls too – in fact the surface of the ships are so busy that I kept finding more and more of these square panels. I considered them some kind of cloaking device and tried to add some visual interest to the spaceships. I painted them Kantor Blue, highlighted two edges of every square with Teclis blue and further highlighted them with Temple Guard Blue. The result was too bright for my taste but I could fix it with Guiliman Blue Glaze. The engine glow and the hangar lights were painted with Guiliman Blue Glaze over a white base.
If you are familiar with GZG’s Ravagers range, you may have noticed that something is missing: Where is the smallest ship, the Attacker? This ship was too small for my go-to basing solution, Widget from TT Combat, so I have to find another way. Glueing them directly to the stands doesn’t seem to be a good solution, because the stand’s plastic pins would break very quickly. Most probably I’ll use magnets, but I haven’t decided yet.
What rules will I use? I don’t know yet, but there are plenty of options:
- Full Thrust is free to download from Ground Zero Games.
- The Starmada Unity Rulebook seems to be another good choice and they also have a supplementary book with the spaceship datasheets of GZG’s Full Thurst range!
- A Billion Suns has been published recently and the reviews were very positive.
We’ll see. One thing is for sure: more space pirates are coming soon.