Three-part Bomb

Every field owner needs a 3-part bomb. You can use it for anything and the partitioning lets you increase or decrease the challenge in the game for one side or another. Use it for Bomb the Base and Battleball, use it to represent the three most important things that employees need to know about dealing with difficult clients, whatever.      Want to make Bomb the Base difficult? Hide all three pieces in the field and make the team find them. Want to make it simple? Give the team the entire bomb to start with. Do your defensive teams in Battleball tend to fail completely? Hide one of the parts of the bomb before each drive or even place it in a known location each time.      Use the bomb as a radio and tell your escort team in a VIP escort that they need to recover the bomb pieces (at each waypoint) to call for extraction. Hide the bomb piece within 10 feet of the waypoint for extra challenge. (Like the escort team needs more challenges!) Use the pieces in a simplified CTF game and place the pieces around the field. First team to return two pieces to their base wins.      No matter what you do on your field a 3-part bomb can add to the games you play.

Notes on construction: A kind relative cut the 2x4s, put the pegs in and drilled the holes for me with scraps he already had. He also threw on the maroon primer. The dark primer ended up being a bad thing overall. I had to paint several coats of white underneath everything I wanted to look fourescent orange (and did it under the green stripe, while I was at it). Note that the masking tape didn't end up staying flat/stuck enough and bled onto the maroon. Also, I used a latex white, which was a bad choice. The latex wanted to peel funny as I pulled up the masking tape and that's why the edges look ragged. The orange spray paint stuck just fine, though. The "front" of the bomb has the diagonal stripes. One stripe is green so it's easy to tell what the "proper" orientation of the pieces is. around the sides and back of each piece are two wide stripes. I wanted to make sure that each piece was easy to see if I tossed it under a bush or plant. In the end it looks a little sketchy but since it's going to be thrown on the ground, dropped, etc. I figure that it's good enough. Also, I ended up liking the worn look the more I played with it.

Laptop

Notes on construction: This is about as simple as it gets. Cut the top and bottom of the laptop, add hinges and go. Mine is a little fancier. A relative planed off some of the wood near the hinge so it was flush with the surface of the wood when mounted and had an extra piano hinge he gave me. He also routered the edges so they were round, which is nice because I would have simply sanded them. Like the bomb, the laptop was initially primered in a dark color (black) which is why I need to repaint the thing; I thought that the reason I could barely see the orange paint was that there was a flow problem with my can. It wasn't until I saw the paint dripping that I realized it was a problem with the coverage of the fluorescent paint over the black.

Flags

     You'll mostly use flags for simple things: waypoints, base locations, etc. Usually a flag is either just a flag or it's a location. My favorite flags are waterskiing flags that are made to be placed on the back of a boat to show that it's towing something and to warn away other watercraft to not cross to closely behind it. I've usually seen them for about $3 (US) at stores like Big 5, Wal-Mart, Target or Fred Meyers. They've got flexible poles, plastic pennants and are about 12-16" tall. One of the fun things about flags is that you can make each one unique by copying an image in permanent marker to each side of the flag. I recommend either putting the image on only one side or putting the reverse image on the back because the flags are typically slightly translucent and will show a "shadow" image on the opposite side. Below are some images that I've used before or plan to put on my flags in the future. You can find more on T-shirt sites, video game fan sites, webcomics, crop circle sites and other sites where people tend to share images. Note that an ideal picture is simple black and white.

     To put the image on a flag print it out as close to full-page as you can. Pixelation and fuzziness are fine. Place the image under your flag and copy through. A bright light will help you see the image better. Note that I don't own the copyright to these images. I'll keep using the images until someone tells me I can't; I don't think that anyone is going to be upset by the fan service I'm paying them by using the graphics. You can click on the first three for a larger image.