cylindric.net

Well, we've finally managed to persuade, cajole and browbeat the management into accepting that having about 20 physical servers for under 100 staff was a little excessive and expensive, and that virtualisation could offer us the benefits we need for business continuity, disaster recovery, energy efficiency and last-but-not-least cost savings.

The solution we selected as pretty much the only viable enterprise-grade option at the moment was VMWare's vSphere.

We'll be obscuring some of the roads and livening up the larger areas of the board with a couple of well placed craters. After a little discussion about size and dimensions, we're going to make them of a size that equates roughly to that of a Space Marine drop pod hitting the ground. The reason being that this is a reformed Imperial world and you'd expect those power armoured pansies to be on the frontline of bringing about compliance, plus Eldar are a little more graceful and my Orks haven't a clue how they arrived there.

MDF is great to work with, as you don't need to worry about the wood grain, and so can cut it in any direction as shape required. Try not to get too much of the dust into your face though when working with it, as it creates a particularly fine dust.

The two sheets of wood I bought were relatively large 2' x 4' boards, and getting a straight and consistent cut with a hand-saw would be very difficult. The solution to this was to clamp the two sheets together, and cut through both at the same time with a circular saw. All four halves were then clamped together in a big sandwich, and the slightly irregular edges cut back. This ensured that the four 2' x 2' halves were all the same size. One of the squares was then set aside, and the remaining three squares cut in half to create the six smaller boards.

There's only so much time you can spend actually painting figures (or in my case procrastinating about painting figures) and playing wargames on a floral table-cloth, so Kuriyama and myself decided it was way past time for us to create a more suitable gaming surface.

It soon dawned on us that this was a non-trivial task, and as is the way of our people, that did not discourage us in any way, it just prompted the taking of photograps and the writing of blogs...