****. Have I started something of a commission storm? That was not quite my intention. Anyway let's start with paint related questions first. No stripping, just a repaint straight over the original colours though I did file down the gloss cockpit window and remove mould lines first. I will post a paint guide on my blog later. Actually that one is the standard factory paintjob. I like to include a standard model for comparison Everyone curious about the commission part: Let me start by being brutally honest. I might not be the best option. You see, I live in Sweden, so any commission outside of Europe (and even inside Europe in some cases) can get pricey in terms of postage. As for the above commission, I earned about 13 euro or 18 $ but bear in mind that I am fairly new to commissions (most of my previous commission jobs has been for friends and my local gaming club) so the commissioner got a big discount due to what I perceived as my own inexperience. I suppose I would normally charge about 17-25 euro or 25-34 $ for a job of this size, it's really hard to say.

Yes, as the title states, I was commissioned by another forum user, Stiltman, to paint Kath Scarlet's Firespray. And now I'm going to show you the fruits of my labour:

Someone, somewhere decided that what the Empire needed was a small droid that could be easily scared by a Wookie. Elementary my dear Aminar.

To answer the OP: I don't. I don't give a flying fudge about narrative in my games, which is why I find no problems with Blood Angels slaughtering Blood Angels, Finns fighting the US in Siberia or Rebels dogfighting Rebels. I might point out how absurd it is but I never let it get in the way of playing the game, whatever that game may be called.

I feel that you are all missing the biggest reason. George Lucas obviously wanted the Galactic Empire to be truly and utterly EVIL (patent pending), and one more way to emphasize this, is by letting the rebels be all about cooperation (with other humans/aliens/pets/droids/whatever you can think of) while the Empire is all about the oppressing the masses with faceless military might. Can't have cutsey droids running around in that environment, it ruins the carefully built up image.

When (not if) the Assault gunboat arrive I would not be surprised if Gecko's speculations prove to be fairly close to the truth. The gunboat is basically the Empire equivalent to the B-wing and this mirrors that fairly well. I however would lower the agility by one because I remember flying the Gunboat in TIE Fighter and it was not the most manuverable of craft.

If you had done this with Falcons you would have deserved to get punched in the face. Don't remember the name but the twin falcon build I'm talking about is just pure WAAC ******* gaming. Doing it with Lamdas on the other hand, well thats just stupid.

Murphy's law people, you should be familiar with it by now. I myself has certainly felt His (Murphy is the only TRUE god) wrath. One particular Flames of war session I failed a 4+ test 14 times! The odds of that happening is only 0.0061 %. I am now legendary in my gaming club.

I'm a good painter but I wouldn't touch it even with a Death Star sized pole. Darth Vader was never 'little Anakin'!

I have dabbled with electric lights in some of my bigger models (Much bigger, like Titan bigger) but nothing close to this level of sophistication. I'm really impressed and I find you step by step guide to be very informative. For instance, I've always wondered how to get an even spread of light from LEDs and your simple solution is almost genius. My hat off for you, sir!

I cannot possibly add anything awesome enough to trump what has already been said. You guys are killing me!

There is a line here but I'll be damned if I can pinpoint it for all the grey in way. I suppose it should come down to common sense, something that unfortunately is a precious commodity nowadays. As for myself, I usually spend some time at tournaments looking at other players tables but I seldom linger very long so I don't think I'm 'scouting'. As always there is a caveat. I did notice at the Imdaar event that I was going to meet a player that I had watched playing earlier and I suspected his tactic would be trying to surround me with his Squints (3 of them), with a Doomshuttle going in the middle. Despite knowing this I walked straight into the trap and how I managed to scrape a victory from that is beyond me.

Here are the proper pictures of the Phantom. Enjoy!

I could have lived without the shamless kickstarter advertisment...

My gaming club has two Galeforce 9 starfield gaming mats but I cant recommend them. They get scratched easily, and the edges constantly want to curl up. We plan to put some plastic sheets on top to solve the problem but until then we almost do not dare use them.

Damoel: I dont mind, just remember to post pictures (or it didn't happen ). Oneway: I'm probably going to buy at least one more Phantom when they are released and that one I'm going to paint like the card, with the lightning effect to the front.

Another two layers was added to the cloaking effect, first a 1:1 mix of Old GW Enchanted Blue and Regal Blue followed by a fairly fine line of pure Enchanted Blue. And now it got a bit more complicated. I started adding small amounts of Vallejo Wolf Grey to Enchanted Blue and painted the cloaking effect in several successive layers until I had almost pure Wolf Grey. Sorry, can't give tell you how to mix each layer as I mixed what I needed with nothing more than gut feeling (and my gut never lies!). I also drybrushed some of the previous, darker blue mixes in several layers to the back of the fuselage and the wings and after that I cleaned up the drybrushed areas with some black. However when I was finished with this I wasn't quite satisfied with the model. Something had to be done and in my mind that could only mean more cloaking effects! I went over the model again with all the previous blue colours and added more lightning tendrils. After that I added some final touches in the form of Vallejo Scarlett Red inside the engine exhausts, Vallejo Hot Orange to the tips of cockpit mounted laser cannons, a thin black line in front of the cloaking effect and, after varnishing, some gloss varnish on the cockpit. Now it looked much better! I will upload proper pictures in a couple of days, until then take care!

Another half-cloaked Phantom to show. The idea came from another forum user called Keffisch. As always this has been copied and pasted from my blog. I was lucky enough to end up second at the Assault at Imdaar Alpha event and secured a TIE Phantom as a prize (my opponent chose the E-wing). The Phantom is damnably cool, both as a model and in terms of rules, but I couldn't very well leave it at that, now could I? Not after I had seen Keffisch's excellent Phantom. The credit (or is it perhaps blame?) for this project goes to him. Unlike my other X-wing repaints, I didn't bother with stripping the paint this time. Removing the paint was fairly unnecessary to begin with, I was just keen to the see if it mattered. First I started with spraying black primer directly on the factory paint. This was followed by painting Vallejo German Grey on the cockpit windows and the solar panels. The cockpit struts was painted with a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Cold Grey and German Grey. Everything else was painted with Vallejo Stonewall Grey. Something that should be painfully obvious from the picture is that I did not paint the entire model. As I had planned on painting my Phantom as if it were decloaking, there was no need to paint the rear. Indeed, I probably covered a bit too much of the model with base colours. I washed the entire model with undiluted Army Painter Dark Tone ink and after that I cleaned up the model with the base colours. I highlighted everything painted with Cold Grey with a 3:1 mix of Cold Grey and Stonewall Grey. The idea was that pure Stonewall Grey would have made the model too bright in comparison to the cloaking effect, but as it turned out this mix was unnecessary. In fact, the highlight is somewhat hard to see on some edges. Learn from my mistakes, kids! Before I forget to mention it, I also added a very hard to miss highlight on the solar panels by lightly drybrushing Cold Grey on them. And now for the fun part! Decloaking! While I may have taken my inspiration from the previously mentioned Keffisch, I wanted the style of the cloaking effect to look similar to the artwork found on the Advanced Cloaking Device card that comes with the Phantom. To achieve this I started by painting pure Vallejo black slightly randomly on the edge between the painted and unpainted part. Next I painted a fairly broad area behind the black edge with a1:1 mix of old GW Regal Blue and Vallejo Black. Inside the previous mix I painted plain Regal Blue and I also drybrushed the rear with some German Grey followed by very light drybrush with Cold Grey. I reasoned that nothing is truly black, not even in space, and therefore the grey added some well needed definition.

When calculating the cost of any wargame, I always calculate how much you need to pay to be able to play a tournament sized game. This actually means that X-wing is one of the cheapest in existence as you only need the starter set and two more expansions to reach that level and even at its most expensive level (8 Tie Fighters) you are still not paying nearly as much as most other wargames. Of course that doesn't stop us from buying more plastic crack than we actually need, now does it?

Please don't go there. Buying minis without rules/cards is Games Workshop territory and we can all see how well that is going for them. Besides it is often the cards you want, not the miniature.

Anything with turrets are going to be its nemesis and also any pilot that can shoot before the Phantom while it is decloaked will probably murder it. The Phantom is a true glass cannon.

Killmaimburn: Could you please post a link to Gemcat?

Similar post has probably been written but I do not get any results when searching the forum. Of course, that is mostly due to the face that the search function don't allow words that are 'too short'. Bah! Humbug! In any case, this is another copy and paste from my blog, since it seems to work so well. Enjoy! A couple of weeks ago me and my gaming buddies decided to get some laser cut acrylic templates for our X-wing games. Seeing as we live in Sweden, we didn't want to deal with the fairly expensive US customs and postage costs, so instead we looked for something closer to home. And after some searching on the web we found a British company called Cog 'O' Two that produce and sell gaming aids for X-wing. Imperial Green, Rebel Blue, Rebel Orange and Imperial Red I chose the Imperial Green set with it's lovely neon green colour (reminds me of laser cannon fire from TIE fighters) but there are three more colours to choose from, as you can see in the second picture. I must say that I really like the design of these sets and the price was not too bad either at 12 £ for a set. They arrived well protected by bubble wrap and the templates themselves had a plastic covering on the back and a paper cover on the front. You can actually see part of the paper cover inside the cog-symbol on both the orange and red template because two of my friends thought it would be a good idea to leave them on. As for precision, I sat down and compared my green set to the default set I got from the starterbox using a calliper. There are indeed variances between the sets but the biggest difference I could find was only 0,5mm. In my book that is perfectly within acceptable limits. All in all a good substitute for the starter set. The only complaint I have is the range ruler as the divider between ranges is perhaps not as clear as it should be. On the other hand Cog 'O' Two has a handy solution to that as well. The Short Range ruler cost 6 £ and contains only four pieces compared to the twelve in the other set. On the other hand they are so damned versatile that I have a hard time imagining playing without them. The first two pieces are just what the name suggest, shorter versions of normal range ruler. The longer piece cover range 1-2 and the other one only cover range 1. Ever had trouble getting the normal ruler between ships? Tired of knocking over your precious fighters? Having problems seeing if that important shot is range two or three? These two pieces solve all that and more! I cannot stress enough how convenient it is to have shorter rulers. The other two pieces are perhaps not as useful but they are still quite good. They represent forward move 1 and 2 but with notches cut into the sides. Why would you need that, you might ask? Well those notches correspond to the guides on small and big ship bases, making them excellent for marking the position of a ship. All in all, both me and my friends are very happy with our purchase. Indeed, we are so happy, that in the future we might very well replace the normal paper tokens with products from Cog 'O' Two.

Yes squints are fast but they are also more manoeuvrable than a normal TIE and has more green move options so the problem is not staying in formation due to speed constraints but rather the Ints outmanovering her when the dogfight begins.