Asteroid Terrain for Gundam and other Mecha figures

One of the hallmarks of MechaStellar is combat with a backdrop against the stars. In this post we’ll look at a quick way to create asteroid terrain for your space battles. You will need some lava rock which you can find at garden or home improvement store or even Amazon as well as some clear acrylic flying stands and lastly a drill to put some holes into the rock. Below you’ll some photos of the asteroids and Gundam figures of various scales.

Materials & Tools

First up we’ll look at materials. For this project we used

• Lava Rocks
• Flying Base Stand
• Power Drill and a drill bit

Lava Rocks are pretty common in home and garden stores, they are also used by home chefs when it comes to bread baking. They’re relatively inexpensive and look great as floating asteroids.

The type of Lava Rock you want to use depends on the kind of models you are using. Since we intended on primarily using these with small scale models (2-3″) in size we opted for a smaller size of lava rock. The ones we purchased state 3/4″ on the bag but vary from 1/2″ to 1.5″, based on the bag it was at least half of the bag was 1/2″.

For the clear acrylic base you can use whatever works for you, we used the “LITKO 40mm Square Flight Stands Compatible with Firestorm Armada”, although you may be able to find cheaper bases elsewhere. From there we used a 1/8″ drill bit with a power drill to put some holes into our lava rock.

Fortunately, the 1/8 inch drill bit is the perfect diameter for the clear bases, and the peg snugly fit inside the rock without even requiring glue.

I would caution against drilling the hole way through the rock, if you don’t have a very snug fit it can cause the rock to slide all the way down defeating the purpose of a floating asteroid. You can mitigate this by using glue / epoxy to keep the rock in place, and it has the added benefit of letting you move the rock lower in case your asteroids are too tall for your models.

In the above picture you can see that the 1/400 scale Gundam on the far left is shorter than the asteroids. You can fix this by drilling the hole deeper and having the rock sit lower, many of the larger rocks in the photo below sit a bit below due to a deeper hole drilled into them. You can also chop your flight stand in half so the asteroid sits lower.

For scale here we have a Gundam Standart for Exia on the far left which is roughly 1/200 scale nearly 4″, next to it is the 1/400 scale Gundam then the 1/300 scale Gundam and lastly is the Mobile Suit in Action (MSIA) of Shining Gundam at 4.5″.

Here we have a 1/300 scale Bigro and Gundam on top and a 1/400 scale Gundam and 1/1600 scale Musai below.

Lastly, floating asteroids means you want your ships to be floating as well so don’t lose track of your bases otherwise your poor Salamis will look like it has been sunk.

Here’s two additional photos showing a densely packed battlefield