Frustration

Doors, right. Who the hell do they think they are?

If you're building your own space hulk set then you have certain limitations and certain choices to make.



Limitation: You're working on a grid.

SH works on a square grid, and of course the pieces combine and recombine. That means you have to stick to the grid. You can't have spacers to make things more convenient than the stupid 46.6mm tiles you might be working with, you can't add handy gaps to fit doors in, and you're gonna have to be real damn precise about your measurements. Corollary: WHF modular movement trays are much better than styrene sheet as baseplates if only for the grid.

But why the hell couldn't the city of death tiles be 40mm? I considered trimming the edges off each and every single one of them but then measured and found that the inner square is still like 42mm. Grr. Arg. Again, I'm suffering for a lack of alternatives for the walls and tiles. Back to the point. In SH, doors take up a square, and they may or may not exist on any tile bounded by two opposing walls only. You can't create gaps for doors in between tiles, and they could appear anywhere.

Options.

I could build a highly modular system where each and every potential square had a slot in door. Difficult, wouldn't look very natural (especially when the door wasn't there) even given the STC excuse, and imposes considerable look and feel limitations. Does allow me to build any SH map I want though.

I could add a few doors in a more natural way to certain pieces. Imposes minimal design limitations and if done well I can probably build most maps, but there will always be some (especially non-GW maps I can't account for) that can't quite be done.

I could break the game rules and insert door components as their own single board section pieces. There will be some design consequences to this because it means that I need more shorter corridors, and it impacts how I build rooms, corners, and basically anything which might have a door. I'll need unusual pieces like a 1 tile corner for example. As far as I can tell the only real consequence of changing how the board sections are made is that flamers would have to have a rules change (because the area of effect is tied to the board section). As it goes I really hate how unnatural the flamer rules are and I could happily rewrite those, but having experimented with some more SHv2-like flamer rules I'm not sure my gamer group would accept it. Maybe they would if it was the cost of playing SH3D :) The other major drawback is that this is the most complex option and therefore a lot of work.

Decision: Do you A). Build door capacity into every square, B). Seed a limited number of doors into the build, C). Change the game rules to accommodate modular doors, or D). Other? 

I have no idea yet, but fortunately for me I'm also still waiting on a ton of plastruct to arrive so I'm at a bit of a build impasse anyway. Oh, and neither of the Imperial Sectors I ebayed had any Manufactorum parts in usable states.

At least Luongo found some kind of form again.