First, some near future US troops (RAFM Traveller midtechers)
I thought that the mix of the old and the new/futuristic made them look appropriately near future (We're talking mid 21st century, though they could probably pass as modern US troops with a little squinting and I'm planning on using them as fairly generic non-hostile environment troops up until about 2170). I think thats the "Firefly Principle"-- by mixing old fashioned with futuristic you end up with a realistic future without it feeling too much like today. I think I was definitely inspired a bit by Ghost Recon for the look of these guys.... I tried to get a multi-cam-ish look for these guys (there are 6 colors in that camo pattern...) and I think it looks okay, it certainly doesn't look like the UCP or Woodland, or like my tiger stripe Navy Seals (I should really post some pics of those at some point). Doesn't really matter if its not perfect, of course, because camo patterns get adjusted all the time, I'm certain they'd change a bit in the next 50 years. These boys have already seen combat as regular infantry to be rescued by a joint Canadian-US commando team in a near future WW3 scenario (they were pinned down by Neo-Soviet revolutionaries in a US-allied Russia).
The one other thing I find a bit strange about these fellows is their weapons. I've pretty much arbitrarily decided that the gas-masked fellow is the SAW (his weapon looks kinda like a Sten but I could imagine that the magazine is actually a box magazine with caseless ammo, which I assume all the weapons use due to their relatively small magazines), the guy to the left of the squad leader is a grenadier, and the others have assault rifles of some futuristic design.
Also, I applied my second layer to Serenity (fixing up the engines, mostly.... I still feel like the color of the actual ship is a bit too bluish and not quite greenish enough, or is it brownish.... its a hard color to get), painted up two other similarly sized ships. I imagined the bluish one to either be a patrol ship for the Alliance or a similarly powerful organization while the red and white one feels more like a pirate to me. I tried to paint certain elements of both ships to look somewhat like a heat radiator... I kinda like the blue ship with the bright panels, but I'm not sure its worth painting all my ships in this way.... there are ways to cover them or make them less visible in theory, so even for my hard SF setting its not really needed.
With ships this size I'm thinking that I should cut all the ranges in 5150 Fringe Space in half.... ships moved a bit too quickly across the map, anyway.
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