Kraag for a King - part one

This is the the soon-to-be-Great High Martian King Antevaxx. He lives on Mars in the world of Space 1889. Antevaxx is an unhappy king. He stands alone on the dust swept Martian plain when to be a truly great king, he needs a mountain fortress - a Kraag - of his very own.

Only then will he amass an army worthy of his rank and ambition!
Only then will he lead his glorious hordes of flying warriors down upon the poorly defended cities of the soft and weak Canal Martians to loot and burn and capture slaves for his great war galleys!
Only then will he be able to launch Holy Crusade against the befouled Red Men and drive their filth from the sacred Mother Planet and rend their.....

Well, you get the picture....

 This project has been kicking around my head for a while. I had done some preliminary work months ago, but I could never get a round tuit. I was cleaning up my garage /  games space this week and decided I better get on with it or throw the stuff out.

In the image above are the base components.  The tubes are the paper core from a roll of industrial plastic film given to me by a friend over a year ago. I ran the core through a bandsaw to produce the half pillar sections shown. In front of these are some half-circle pine blocks. These will glue into the pillar sections to support the internal MDF floors. The floors are the lumpy looking things at the bottom of the picture and underneath those is the MDF base plate. The base plate was leftover from cutting out the monorail track sections.

Next up is test fitting the pillars on the base plate. A similar process was used to create the floors by marking the curves on a template then using the template to mark and cut the floor material.

Antevaxx signs off on the basic architectural design while incidentally acting as a height gauge. I put the higher pillars on the outside to create some relief and I hope to give the top of the Kraag a nest like appearance.

The floors were then test fitted into the pillars and the support block positions decided on. There were two considerations at play. In Space 1889 canon, the High Martians generally enter and exit their kraags from above or through openings high up on the structure. Lots of little entrances scattered up the side seemed out of character for an impregnable fortress (the ground level slave entrance will be dealt with later). Secondly was the practical need to get ones hand in to move figures around. As designed there will be one ground floor, a lower storage floor, a throne room / high level entrance and a castle like top floor.

The floor levels decided,  I glued the support blocks in place. I am contemplating running nails or screws through the face of the tube into the support blocks for added strength. The tubes were distorted a bit in the cutting process so there are gaps between block and tube in some places. Antevaxx reviews the progress so far before heading off to look at wallpaper sample books.

More to follow.

Part two is here