For modern skirmish gaming, harbors, freight terminals and similar industrial
environments offer a good and logical place to have your firefights in. I'm not a big
fan of the bombed out ruins so prevalent in sci-fi gaming and even the Jones farm
gets a bit old after a while.
When I was a young lad, I used to work at a freight terminal unloading trucks, containers and even the occasional boxcar. I like to think I have a fairly good idea what a freight terminal looks like, and it is not a single semi-trailer or a container.
For a long time I've been on the lookout for cargo containers that both look like real cargo containers and are cheap enough to be acquired in sufficient quantities to create a reasonable image of even a very small freight terminal or similar area.
There are some offerings out there, but some of them have wrong dimensions and almost all of them are too expensive (for me) to buy in bulk quantities. I even thought about building my own, but before I managed to actually do anything about that I stumbled upon the offerings from Plast Craft Games
So I promptly ordered a bunch of their sci-fi containers as a test. I got both the large and the small containers and some of their small cargo cubes.
First Impressions
The stuff arrived pretty fast. It is delivered as a flat-packed kit, made from 2mm sheets
of foamed PVC with accessories depending on the exact kit. The parts are still attached
to the sheets, you need to cut them out and assemble them.
Yes, as their title says, they are sci-fi containers so don't expect true blue cargo containers. However, their dimensions look pretty correct and their general shape is also correct, so I'm happy to use them in modern games. I'm glad they didn't make them overly futuristic hexagonal shapes or something.
I had no previous experience with foamed PVC as a material so I was also curious to see what it would be like to work with these kits. The sheet has virtually no surface texture, but it does take embossing which has been used to give the parts some detail.
To give the kit additional three-dimensionality, ribbed cardboard panels are provided. You are supposed to cut out holes from the PVC panels and glue the cardboard in place.
The parts are not numbered on the sheets, which is really not a problem for the containers but the cubes have several very similar but slightly different sized parts. Mark them with a pencil on the backside before cutting them out.
In Use
Cutting the parts out is pretty simple. The only slightly difficult part is
cutting out the centers of the side panels, but you don't have to do that if you
really don't want to. In that case, I would run some glue into the panel cutout.
The parts can be carved with a sharp knife, but the knife needs to really sharp.
A dull knife will just tear the material. You will also have to watch out
for leaving marks, as it is relatively easy to accidentally emboss new detail
on the panels.
Foamed PVC does have some flexibility, but it will snap if you bend it too much.
The instructions say you need to use superglue to glue the parts. I took this at face value and it worked fine, but you will use a lot of superglue. Forget the tiny tubes and go get yourself a family sized bottle, otherwise you can easily double the cost of the kit with glue expenditure.
There are no locating tabs or similar, but the parts are straight, the cuts are clean and the
2mm sheet just thick enough to help in getting straight angles. Pay attention to the instructions
and dry-fit the parts to see how they fit together so you won't end up with embarrassing 2mm offsets
somewhere. You will have to hold the parts in place until the glue sets, which is another
reason to stick with superglue.
The finished containers are closed boxes. There is no provision for opening doors though it would be a relatively easy modification to model one with a permanently open door. The PVC is also pretty light, which I solved by glueing a bunch of washers inside the containers -- remember to do this before you glue on the final panel or you'll be sorry.
Painting the containers is simple. Foamed PVC seems to handle spray paints just fine, so I ended up spraying them in base colors, giving a liberal brown wash and a medium gray drybrush. One downside with the ribbed sides is that it's hard to put company logos or similar there.
Verdict
This was a positive experience for me. The kits are not super-detailed, but they
are well worth the price and fill their purpose nicely. The subject matter fits
the properties of the material pretty well, e.g. the containers are clearly
built from panels but so are real containers and hiding the welds is not
a high priority in their construction.
Plast Craft have a lot of other offerings, but I am not so sold on the suitability of this material for all subjects. As I said, it has virtually no texture so e.g. wooden cabin built from these kits will be very flat and featureless unless texture is added. You will also have to do something about the joins between parts unless you're striving for that "built from concrete slabs" -look.
I would definitely like to see Plast Craft do more modern and sci-fi kits.
Sucks!
