Getting stuck in (well, down anyway)

Things will start to take shape now as I am sticking some of the main elements down. I guess this means this is going to be more of a fixed diorama rather than a gaming board - not that my children will mind. I've finished a few other elements. I had a load of plaster - cast rock out crops and boulders so I've included a few elements with them to increase the topography. 

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Also I keep making these jeffin' rocks whenever I have any spare plaster and I never use them. Here's one on the left, more modelling clay, rocks stuck in and another crater for good measure.
I've tried to line up all the rocky elements along a definite trend. All those years as a geologist are finally paying off.

Finally, something that looks like something. This was a first, test layout. I'm just trying to get a feel for how things relate to one another. Looking at photos from the web, buildings tend to all be built in a similar direction, and quite close together, so I'll stick with that idea.

Let the gluing commence. Before one million different ways of laying this out are explored; I'm going to nail the damn things down or I won't get anywhere. The gluing is easy. Put a tonne of wood glue on the base and smear it out smoothly, slap it on the base board and keep pressing it down until it surrenders and stops curling at the edges. Resistance is futile!

 Here you can see the dark shadows around all the elements. That's a wide smear of glue as it squeezes out from under the edges.
Also, it appears that resistance is not entirely futile. A few of the elements, like the sand bag emplacements don't seem to fit with the layout and they're too curled up. I'm going to keep these as mobile pieces but they'll need flattening out.

Here they are, glued to a piece of plasticard that's taped very flat to my desk. The glue seems to soften the clay a little and it all gets pull flat, and then dries flat - in theory.