Battle of Scarif build overview

 

My latest project is building a 6ft by 4ft board representing the Battle of Scarif from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. You know the one, where the rebels led by Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor land on the Imperial planet of Scarif to steal the plans for the Death Star. It’s an epic battle with stormtroopers fighting Rebel commandos, x-wings blasting AT-ACTs, an enormous tower and star destroyers smashing into each other. I want to show all of it and run it as a participation game at shows.

So first things first I needed to decide how big it was going to be and what elements were going to be included on the board. As always I went hunting for a map. It’s a made up battle so what are the chances that there’s a map for it - well pretty good really. It turns out that there are people even nerdier than me. I found multiple different maps and drawings of Scarif of varying quality and detail. Looking at them more closely it became clear that most related to the video game version and that others were just generic. However I did find one that seemed just right and that appeared to map the whole complex pretty accurately when I compared photos and screenshots with the map. 

I knew I could fit a 6ft x 4ft (1800mm by 1200mm) board into my car using the stacking system I created for my Imjin board. I therefore looked to see how I could fit as much of the map as possible onto that size board. A lot of the terrain is not actually fought over in the movie and by making the tower base 60cm in diameter, I could fit all of the key bits of the battle onto the rest of the board. I placed a 4 by 6 grid over the map and hey presto I was good to go! Well pretty much, I just needed to make the tower a bit smaller and the islands a bit bigger.

The board was going to create a number of challenges,

• A very complex tower build with an enormous tower structure 
• Large expanses of sea, beaches, weirs and waterfalls
• Tropical islands with beaches, bushes and oh so many trees
• Lots of interconnected transit systems with attendant infrastructure
• Trying to make the board look like the movie
• Sourcing 6mm figures, walkers and spaceships 

However, the good news is that there are no hills, no real contours and as it’s not historical I have quite a bit of licence. It’s also pushing my modelling into areas that I’ve not worked in before so I was really looking forward to starting work on it.

The next post will cover the creation of the base elements of the board.

Until then keep those dice rolling 

Charles the Modeller