What's in the box? CMG Praesidentia Sentinel Drone & Hawk Wargames Roof Detail Accents

Two boxes showed up in the mail today... CMG Praesidentia Sentinel Drones for my Organization of Unobtainium Exporting Planets robot army and Hawk Wargames (Dropship Commander) Roof Detail Accents. So what's in those boxes?

1cm grid

The drone comes in three different references, each one identical to the others but for its nose weapon: from left to right: phase lance, phase cannon and tri-phase blaster. Each pack is made of three metal drones and three small bases.

What do I think? Nice sculpt, minor flashes at the tip of the wings and weapons, I'm always a fan of having variants of  a given model, they're scale-less and could be used for anything from 6mm or smaller fighters to 28mm or bigger micro drones, the stand is a bit to low for my taste (but that's subjective, I envision them as flyers zooming over the battlefield; but I guess they could just as well be grav lifted "ground" vehicle, hovering just above the ground)...

Caution: the two following paragraphs may contain ranting! Hawk Wargames is a very frustrating company... When I first read about their game I was very enthusiastic: air-mobile centric game, beautiful and original models (the Post Humans and United Colonies, that is; the aliens are a not exactly my thing)... And then I found out it was all going to be 10mm-scaled! I came over to 15mm to freely mix and match manufacturers, I'm not about to buy into another scale that's compatible with pretty much nothing else. I'm sure there are plenty of arguments for that specific scale (air-mobile tactics need a lot of space, but then why not go 6mm, another widely accepter standard?) but that choice of scale seems a very GWish "let's make sure if they taste our product they can't go anywhere else to get their lead - or resin or whatever- fix" move to me. Not meant as a compliment.

Then came the building... Again, a hard on: actual row buildings and city blocks instead of the usual stand alone building, and full modularity to boot! And then I saw the price: 33 to 65 POUNDS for a single (beautifully detailed, but still) building? Holy Mother of the Emperor with a side order of Space Wolves! What kind of small country budget do you think I have?

Anyway, I wanted the rulebook (more on that in a future post, maybe) and I added the A/C ducts and A/C units packs to my order. At £5 the pack for 21 assorted A/C units or 30 cm of A/C duct (with assorted corners and "dips") they are pretty good value for the money and will work nicely along GZG or Atenociti (to name just two) fitting to pimp otherwise plain MDF buildings...

In the left column you've got a 20 mm long duct (15 ea/pack, the duct itself has a 5 mm square section i.e. 50 x 50 scale cm if used with 15 mm and is further raised 3mm on a frame for a grand total height of 8 mm/80 scale cm), a 90° corner (10 ea/pack) and a dip connecting a duct or corner into the roof (5 ea/pack).

Center and right columns you've got five types of A/C units and a pyramidal skylight, there is a sixth type of A/C unit (similar in size to the lower right ones) but I somehow forgot to take a picture, each of these seven items comes 3 ea/pack.

What do I think? As I said good value for the money, the A/C will add variety to similar product by other manufacturers and the ducts are, as far as I know, unique product so far. Again their fairly scale-less and could be used without trouble for 6, 10 or 15mm. Maybe even smaller/bigger in specific applications (28mm ceiling details?) Unfortunately, the casting is somewhat inferior to what I'm getting used those days: some products have fairly big bubbles for an item that size (look at the upper part of the straight duct on my picture) and the details are somewhat "grabbled", irregular. Then again those piece are for detailing terrain, not the star of the show... Overall not disappointed with what I got for my money, but sure hope the casting of pricier models is better!