Custom Dropfleet Commander 3D Sectors - How To

Hey folks, a short (ish) post today. Whilst waiting for UCM's finest, fleet TARP led by Admiral MacBar, to arrive I have been knocking some custom 3D sector tokens together for fleet on fleet action. After seeing the lovely Hawk Wargames 3D Sector kits available in the Dropfleet Commander kickstarter I thought "damn I want me some of them." So I came up with the following, they aren't going to win any style awards but as far as tokens go they look ace on the board.

Homebrew 3D Sector Tokens for Dropfleet Commander
Some key things I wanted when making these was firstly to be very simple and quick to make. I didn't want to spend weeks building 30 of these guys, something I could knock out fast was going to be top priority.

First push molds of Dropfleet Commander space station sprue
Secondly, paint jobs. I just wanted to quickly cover them, tart them up with 3 highlights and give them a wash.

The orbital platform is a missile sprue from gates of antares
So I started looking at the lovely Dropfleet Space Stations sprue that I had lying around after last years Dropzone tournament and it got me thinking. Before I put the space stations together I should probably make a press mould of the surface details, it would work really well as city, industrial, military scape. So I did and here was the result.

Nuclear power station anyone?

The images show the first set I did, they came out pretty well. I had a few sprues from other systems leftover so I started chopping up some bits that resembled buildings or silos. 

They came together pretty well and most importantly they are very fast and cheap to make. 

Close up on the push mold
Then once they had set I used some very fine grain sand and flocked the edges, this aided with the transition and made it less harsh. Here's what they looked like after sanding.

Post sanding the city tokens
As you can see they look pretty rough still, not to worry. The detail in the dropfleet sprues is awesome. I gave them all a base coat and did a quick pass. Took no more than 20 minutes to do the five above with a simple black coat in areas, drybrush metallics, blue, red, green, black wash then highlight with white. Simple's.

Two Nuclear stations read for action and an orbital defense platform
Finally I tidied up the base edges with the colours recommended in the book for each token and I was done! 

City-scapes completed.
There we have it, cheap (if you have a detailed dropfleet sprue to push mold) 3D sector tokens for Dropfleet Commander. Enjoy.

Craig McNicholas

Some say he’s half man half fish, others say he’s more of a seventy/thirty split. Either way he’s a fishy bastard.

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