Saturday, September 5, 2015

The Struggle With Deckplans

For combats on starships, having a printed, large-scale deckplan of the ship is very handy and generally useful.   

The printer/copier I have in the basement had a button on it that you could set for "poster" and during the last campaign, I printed out a usable large-scale deckplan for a 100-ton scout and a 400-ton merchant vessel.   I haven't been able to find those plans yet, and the printer I believe has given up the ghost at last.

I tried using 2 on-line programs that allow you to make Tile Posters.   However, they came out too blurry.  However, it may be because I used an image of a deckplan from Google images and the image might have been poor quality to begin with.

I was more successful by photocopying a deckplan of a System Defence Boat, cutting it into sections 2 inch by 2.5 inches and then photocopying each section at 4 times magnification, making each section 8x10, perfect for a standard sheet of paper with a border.   I then trimmed it and taped it together.  It is eminently useful.   The only downside is that I would have to do it at work, since the working copier/printer I have at home doesn't seem to have a magnify/zoom feature. 

If anyone has a simpler and equally cost efficient way of making tile posters or blowing up copies from a PDF, I'd like to hear it.