We got two 3D printers, how many work? Just one.

Hello everyone!

We thought we’d peel back the curtain on the TTCombat offices today, and talk a little about our 3D printing.

3D Problems

The short of it is that our 3D printer has been having problems recently. The kind of problems that hitting it with a spanner wouldn’t solve.

Unfortunately that’s meant that our release schedule has taken quite a hit. It’s why we haven’t have a Carnevale release this month, and why we’re waiting on our first wave of Dropzone releases (bigger Starter Armies with a couple of additional resin models). Also why we haven’t put out more Resistance fleet miniatures!

Essentially the 3D printer is a choke point in production, as we cannot make master or production moulds until the models are printed!

It’s been a painful few weeks of technicians trying to fix our printer, to no avail. However, it’s been sent off now, so hopefully we should have our big 3D printer up and running again soon.

3D Solutions

The good news though is that we have a brand new 3D printer while we wait! We invested in this beauty, and put it straight to work.

Coupled with this new printer, we’ve also invested in a mechanical roller for mixing the 3D printer resin, which means finer details and fewer mis-prints. Not something you’ll necessarily notice on the models, but hopefully in the speed of production!

We’ve also upgraded our resin production with vibrating plates to shake bubbles out of the resin, meaning better quality sculpts getting out to all our customers!

Anyway, we put the 3D printer to work, and got a bunch of prints!

Put on your tin foil hats, and get guessing about what you can see here! Some might be more obvious than others, and I see a couple of models that we’ve actually previewed at events recently. Speaking of events…

Gencon 2019

So with with these 3D printer problems, it does mean we won’t have much new stuff for Gencon this year.

We were hoping to get some new Dropzone Starter Armies previewed, as well as more Fleet (we wanted Monitors), and even a new resin cast of a Behemoth. Unfortunately those things won’t be able to be previewed this time round. Even though we’ve made a lot of progress on all of those things, we don’t have full models we’re happy to show off yet.

That said, we will have new Halfling releases at Gencon in the form of two big army deals, fresh from their Kickstarter success. More on those later in the week.

We’ll also have all our regular products on sale, including a bunch of the newest official Infinity terrain, and Gencon guests will have the opportunity to order some of our infamous Event Boards too!

Louis is flying out to Indianapolis for the last couple of days of the con, and if he’s got any room in his luggage, we’ll be filling up the space with some new previews – whatever we can get off the printer and get cleaned up in time!

New Releases

What does all this mean for new releases?

Well we’re not slowing down sculpting just because we’ve been unable to print! David Lewis has been sculpting furiously, getting new and alternative units for Dropzone done. He’s also been working on a new little class of ship for Dropfleet too. We’ve also got sculpts for new Carnevale characters coming in, as well as new RUMBLESLAM wrestlers too! We’ll have more information on all of that soon.

Aside from miniatures though, we’ve also been working on rules. We have a Dropfleet and a Dropzone errata coming your way very soon, covering some of the frequently asked questions with the new rules in Battle for Earth, as well as a couple of Traffic Jameses that needed fixing. We’ve been incorporating all of these into the cut down rulebook for Dropzone too, which will be going off to print very soon. Carnevale has an influx of new characters coming soon, which we’ve been playing with – they provide some interesting new mechanics and roles for your gangs! We’ve also been working on the aforementioned new RUMBLESLAM wrestlers, pencilling in some rules for them.

Aside from that there’s new MDF scenery coming out every week, with some fantasy sets on the way this Friday – we’ll preview some of those in Teaser Tuesday tomorrow.

Oh and of course there’s the forthcoming new Kickstarter campaign for undead Fantasy Heroes, but we’ll talk more about that very shortly too!

Oh and there’s this little thing called Stellaris – I should probably mention that too. Now that the 3D printer is up and running, we’ve got the Ether Drake coming very soon too. There are some bits of that in the picture above, but they look quite small compared to what I saw earlier today…

Thanks For Your Patience!

That’s what we’d like to end on here! All of our fans are great, and we thank each and every one of you for your continued patience, enthusiasm, and cool painted models!

If you have any awesome TTCombat models or scenery kits you’ve painted, make sure to send them into info@ttcombat.com – we love seeing them, and sharing them right here on TTCommunity.