Creating props for the table: crafting an alien laser weapon from scratch

We're fast approaching the end of the spring semester, and I swear I've been doing things besides teaching and woodworking this year…but I have another project to show off. This one's a bit different, since it came about from an RPG campaign I'm playing in. A friend of mine has been running a years-long series of campaigns in the same homebrew setting using a number of different game systems where the events of one campaign become the background and history for the next, as the world changes and adjusts based on the players' actions. Perhaps I'll talk about it more at some point, but in the current campaign (using the Draw Steel system) we found ourselves fighting off a murderous hit squad of a mysterious alien race from the heavens, who fought with weapons of yellow light.

One of those weapons which my character recovered after we survived the attack was described as a laser chakram which could be thrown like a boomerang and also used to fight hand-to-hand (perfect for my sneaky dagger-wielding Shadow). As I was driving home after the session, I suddenly found an idea of what it might look like popping into my head…and then found I couldn't get it out of my head. It took me most of a weekend working obsessively to fashion it out of wood and paint, but I think the result is well worth it.

A chakram would normally be a single circular piece of metal, but in my head I saw an idea of a two-part weapon which could be split into semicircles for hand-to-hand fighting, then combined into one for throwing. I haven't done this yet, but I'd like to eventually countersink some magnets in the two bases so that they can snap together and simulate my vision for it. I realize it's hard to tell the scale in these pictures, but I can comfortably fit a hand into each half to hold on to it.

This is actually the first woodworking project I did without a pattern to follow (before the ones I mentioned in an earlier post), and it's remarkable how straight the path from my head to finished product was. I had to buy a router to trim away wood to make the laser “blades” stick out from the thicker board, and it turned out to work pretty much exactly like I'd expected it to (I'd been planning on getting one anyway, this was just a good reason to speed it up). Making the round cuts required a jigsaw, one of my favorite power tools but also one I hadn't had much occasion to use before. I realized after I'd made the cuts that I had a better jigsaw blade for fine cutting than the default one which came with the saw, so they could be slightly better, but as long as you don't look too closely it's fine.

Here's a shot of them on the campaign map. And yes, the laser portions do glow in the dark – this is me we're talking about, after all (you can just see a hint of it in this photo). It took several attempts over a few days, but I eventually figured out a way to mix my yellow glow-in-the-dark pigment with a regular yellow pigment in such a way as to look good in both light and darkness. I also took the chance to use some of the metallic paints sitting around in my paint collection, since I don't usually have much use for them in my paintings. The semi-random circuitry-inspired detailing was a late addition as they were coming together to break up the visual monotony of the design, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

This was a very interesting project for me with how I didn't really plan it, it just sort of…happened. I did feel a bit like one of Dwarf Fortress's dwarfs forging an artifact in the grip of a Strange Mood, hauling materials to a workshop and laboring on a great project until it's finished (fitting, in a way, for my character who is also a dwarf). I haven't been similarly inspired again yet, but it did sort of open my eyes to what I could accomplish with what I have. Will there be more like this in the future? We'll find out, I guess! A hui hou!