Modular Gaming Table

problem with me is i have somewhat of a too short attention span when it comes to finishing off projects. i'm brilliant at jumping at starting a new project but then the enthusiasm slowly wanes and i'm left with lots of crud lying around half finished. so in that grand ol tradition, here is my next project, granted a wee bit of a longer term one, but it would be nice if i got it finished.

Project Modular Table
sounds easy right? divide the table up into a grid of your chosen size and make lots of small bits for your gaming puzzle. so i thought but my problem lies with what i've been playing on the last couple of years and what i'd like to play on in the next couple of years. warhammer 40k is now in it's 6th edition and with lots of new toys coming out and new rules to boggle the mind i figured i need a table that does it's best to encompass all of this whilst still being a fair gaming table. by fair i mean something with a variety of different scenery that provides a decent amount of cover in some places and little or nothing in others, and i decent mix of stuff in between. Add all these newfangled flying contraptions coming out and now i have to rethink my original modular table idea to also include the possibility of cover for flyers and troop cover from flyers. originally my only goal was to have a nice table where you could stick your stuff on, play a nice game of 40k, but also for it to have a great 3dimensional feel. Now a mate of mine basically got me thinking in that direction when i saw his one snowy mountain terrain table. really cool table, lots of ups and downs, and i wanted one for myself. then i remembered another table he did ages ago with trenches galore and that got the little hamster in my head running like mad on his wheel. cogs started turning, slowly, but turning. building a gaming table is like building a house, you gotta start with a good solid foundation. now i don't mean just having a decent backing for your terrain, my ideal table must have levels, and more levels, and then more levels. in the area where i live flat terrain is hard to come by. it's a naturally hilly place sloping up from the coast. eventually way way inland it all gets flat and dreadfully boring. like most gaming tables i've played on. most usual gaming tables i've seen consist of a flat board (or board sections) upon which terrain is placed and gaming is had. bringing me back to my mates board that had trenches. a gaming board should not just be all up and no downs. sure we've all seen some beautifull tables that have ups and downs but the major drawback of them is that they've been static. ditch X will always be here, large hill Y will always be there, etc. what i want is for a person to walk up to the blank board and take pieces of modular terrain and make his own puzzle. if he wants the one table half to rise above the battlefield and the other half to sink down low, he should be able to do that. hope i'm not strapping a ork rokkit to my newly constructed icarus wings here but i heard somewhere a saying that goes something like "reaching for the stars, you might never touch one but occasionally you might reach the moon" . so back onto levels and the foundation. so far i have provisionally settles on each modular tile consisting of 2 layers polystyrene (cos its cheap and easy to get) attached to a masonite sheet. each layer will be about 1" thick. thus allowing you the freedom to make nice trenches, rivers, etc but with the added benefit of  being able to go up up up and away also. as for size, again provisionally, i have decided on 36 tile sections (icarus syndrome again), each one 12" x 8". roughly the size of an a4 sheet of paper. a bit small you might think but since there will be 36 of them, you can combine a few for your bigger terrain pieces. and it's really not that small in the scheme of things. now added to this i've decided to assign a 1" outer border to each tile, as a guidline for me to only build a terrain feature inside the central area. so only a 10" x 6" terrain rectangle. this will allow for the table as a whole to hopefully not seem too crowded. most pieces of terrain like say a set of ruins used on gaming tables right now aren't really all that big, they are just mounted on bases that make them seem bigger, often we even classify the entire base as area terrain, thereby fixing it in our heads as bigger than what it is for the purposes of the actual size of the ruined walls and such. ok, enough waffling on for now, hopefully more soon as this progresses, pictures will happen to prove it happened :)