Last night at work on night shift, I decided I wanted to make a Unit Record Panel, so I could track damage and have the unit stats immediately at hand all on one panel...then I thought perhaps I could actually simplify the control panel by doing the same thing as I don't play with height levels. So when I got home this morning, after a coffee (or two) I went to work in Inkscape and created the basics of these two panels so they could be laser cut in two-tone plastic that is 3mm thick.
The red lines are cut lines, and the black areas are etched lines/shapes/text etc. The plastic is white underneath with a black top, so that when you etch away the black top, it leaves the white underneath exposed, and is great for having text, lines, shapes etc stand out really well.
The Control Panel will utilise 3mm cube magnets (that will glue into the small red squares shown in the pics below) to allow markers to magnetically lock into place to show your KE, Speed and Rotation, and the Unit Record Panel will use red acrylic "pins" to track damage.
I've used the above methods to create bases for another game I used to play, it is pictured down below, so you can get a feel for the look I am aiming for.
I still have a bit of mucking around to do to adjust them a little more to suit my tastes, but this is pretty much how they will appear.
When I have finished designing them and have had some cut out and confirmed everything is working correctly and there are no mistakes, I'll share the files for people to download and get some cut for themselves if they are interested in this kind of stuff.
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