Behind the scenes at 18charlie, we’ve been talking about creating a Kickstarter to fund some of the more complicated ideas we’ve had, and bring them to the public. This is just one of the ideas we’ve had, and we would like to share it with you while we iron out the details. We have been lucky enough to get access to a 3d printer recently, making this all possible. Having individual pieces 3-D printed would be expensive, but our plan is to make a mold of the printed masters and sell the casts.
Bridges make for great terrain pieces. They are natural choke points and consequently are frequently fought over. Unfortunately they also have to be big (REALLY big) to be fun center pieces for a battle, otherwise they would be impractical and delegated to the sidelines. They need to be wide enough to support the many infantry and tanks we play with, while still funneling the action. we plan on making it just as easy for people to make these large bridges as it is for them to make small ones. This is something that we have been thinking about doing on a large scale for a very long time, but always lacked the resources to do.
Most of a bridge is simply flat, featureless roadway; that part is easy to make! The hard part is the detailed railings and superstructure. What we want to do is make a collection of bridge “bits” that can be combined in many different ways to make whatever size bridge you want.
Starting from the top left and going clockwise, we have a center piece, a span extender, an end piece, and a riser. They all have the same generic design, so they will fit seamlessly in a variety of wargame settings.
The plan is to make these four basic railing pieces (to start with, at least), where each piece has a mirrored version. Pieces will be about 3” long with the center piece being 3.5” long due to the extra post.
By combining these pieces with something flat (hardboard, foam core, cardboard, or something similar) you can easily make a bridge of any size you want.
The smallest possible bridge would be 9.5” long and would be made of only six pieces: four end pieces, and two center sections. To this basic bridge you can add span extenders which would add 3” to the length for every pair used. Each set of four risers would add 4/5” in height, and another 6” in length. Keep in mind that the bridges in these pictures are all shown with varying road widths, but the railing pieces are all the same size. It would be as simple to make narrow bridges as it would wide ones!