So first off, there's a bit of preamble to this, you might want to pop the kettle on first or something.

I work in a store that sells toys and games. Every thursday we stay open late so people can come play X-Wing in our upstairs games room, and a few weeks ago we held our first ever tournament. It was a great success, with 16 players in all blasting the heck out of each other and having a rad time. I've played X-Wing for a month or so myself now (mainly with my girlfriend who got dibs on the empire, the cheeky minx) and I want to participate in our next tournament in June, but because I work there, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of playing in the tourny.

So while I was browsing the threads here for things to add to my growing pinterest board of X-Wing stuff I saw some threads about asteroid bases and/or space stations that folks were building. I'll be honest, I fell in love with them pretty much instantly. I wanted to possess one. Of course that's easier said than done, and so I had the bright idea to make my own. Having done precisely zero modelling in my life (well, okay I made some stuff in pre-school out of cereal boxes and toilet roll tubes but I'd hardly say that warrants me as even an amateur). Then I hit upon an even better idea! I would make one, and then I would award it as the super special awesome secret prize to the winner of the next tourny.

TLDR;

This thread is the chronicle of the build of a total amatuer who doesn't want to spend a lot of money and who's previous experience is limited entirely to adding warpaint to his rebel 'Burgundy Squadron' (I like to imagine them as all being old drunken WW1 ex-imperial pilot types).

Here we go, images to follow as soon as I get dropbox to stop having a strop and get itself together.

images....?

I'm excited to see what you come up with. Some of my friends and I use some of our X-Wing minis to help visualize space battles in our Star Wars RPG. I've been thinking about building a station and gifting it to a friend who has a birthday coming up.

Apologies for the delay on this, I had a full day of work followed by an emergency trip to the hospital.

So to begin with I needed to construct a base, my partner is an artist so there's always plenty of leftover mountboard lying around, so I liberated some. Then I went on the hunt for a styrofoam to use as the asteroid itself, for some reason I found locating high-density styrofoam in my area very difficult, so I opted for another option- expanding foam filler. I laid it down on two bases, one with two layers of the foam, one with three, to test which would work better. Turns out the three layered one came out hollow which, while cool, was not what I was after.

Following that, I took an electric sander to the flatter one to carve out a two-level sort of thing, and then I sprayed it with black enamel.

The next step of the build was figuring out how to construct the structures. I'm not remotely skilled at building, so I elected to cannibalise old (and broken, fret not I didn't break anything just for this) toys.

Among the items I've used include the top of a fibre optic lamp (the round thing), the trailer from a toy oil tanker (the long thing), the ramp off the back of a military transport truck (the rampy thing), an engine from the captain scarlet cloudbase (the enginey thing), and a few little bits and pieces like a small borg cube and a large gun thing of unidentified origin.

I primed them all with Humbrol miniatures paint primer (all the paints I've used in this are humbrol, because I can get them super cheap at work). The next step was to add greeblies and work out the placements. For the greeblies I bought an airfix kit of the german battleship Bismark.

I also started painting up the structures in a ruddy red-dwarfy red because I love that colour (seriously, I used it for my 'burgundy squad').

The next problem was that while the base I'd made was mostly flat, it had rather more 'craters' than I would have liked. I grabbed some milliput and used it to flatten out the surfaces, cover up the holes I didn't want, and figure out the rough final template for the structures.

Next up I realised that I couldn't leave it as red and primer, I needed to find at least one more colour for the greeblies. I thought a nice grungy orange might work well, so I applied that to most of the greeblies, although I knew I still wanted a different colour for landing pads and support struts. I've tried a couple of different colours, most recently green, which I'm not sold on and may yet just revert to metal grey. I mixed up some brown and yellow paints for the base coat of the asteroid, I still have to figure out how to weather everything, but this brings us up to present with the build. I still have three weeks to change and fiddle and figure stuff out, but the layout is pretty much set in stone, and the red and orange colours I'm very happy with. From here on all I have left to do it weathering, touch-ups, and any small changes I want to make.

Don't sell yourself short, that's a top first effort! As you said, you need to weather it. Wow, they still make Humbrol in the metal tins?! ****, I remember using them decades ago, though they had different labels on them. lol

It looks pretty good man, you just need to add some little things to make it look like it is in the same scale, and it needs a lot of dirty too.