Steel Legion-ish

A couple of weeks ago, I saw that another blogger had posted pics of my great coats under the heading of Steel Legion.  While I'm always flattered to see my noticed by someone else, my great coats aren't really Steel Legionish.  So, it got me to thinking, how I would go getting the feel of the Steel Legion from plastics, if not exactly duplicating the actual Steel Legion metals..

Space Wolves Dropping In

The Drop Pod is one of my favorite models; when GW starting making them in plastic I was thrilled since I didn't see myself dropping the money to buy a significant number of Forge World DP's.  I love the interior detail of these models so it's a shame when I see folks gluing the doors shut because they don't want to take on painting the interior.  But actually, painting the interior is pretty easy if you plan ahead.

Even More Greatcoats

I decided to add 2 squads to my Greatcoat platoon, nothing really ground-breaking, adding flamers to the basic infantry squads.   With 6th ed adding grenade throwing to the mix I also added a grenade chucking lasman to the mix, also a guy with a Necromunda lasgun for variety:

So currently here's the whole platoon:  4 squads, platoon command squad with meltas and a special weapons squad with meltas. 

Future plans include adding heavy weapons, either missile launchers or autocannons

Blood Angels Fans May Wish to Look Away

Not my work, but I wanted to share this:  at my FLGS, a young Blood Angels player had for months been putting a half-painted Storm Raven on the table.  Finally, one of the regulars at the shop decided that he couldn't take it any longer and offered to paint it.  He decided that Death Company black would be cool with red outlines -- kind of an homage to the 'A-Team' van.  But he exacted a price, a price some may find too high to bear.  That price is revealed after the jump...

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Battlescribe Updated

Battlescribe has just been updated to work with allies.  What is Battlescribe?  It's the roster building software that I'm currently using.  I switched over to Battlescribe about a year or so ago because it offered an Android app.  Cool thing about it is that it runs on Apple/Windows/Linux as well as IOS and Android and the price is right -- FREE.   Like most Droid apps, the free version includes ads, the pay version drops the ads.   Also the data and roster files are completely interchangeable across platforms, so I can easily build a roster on my PC then transfer it to my Android tablet for use at my FLGS.  The user community also seems to be pretty good at keeping the data files up to date when new codices drop.

New FAQ's up 9/7/12

GW has posted main rulebook and codex FAQ's.  They can be found here.  I've only looked at IG so far. Further analysis to be burning up the internets to be sure.

What I see for IG largely makes sense:

Grav Chute insertion works anytime a Valk/Vend has moved more than 6", so it works when zooming

Commissars can't cap allies,  while I can see high comedic value...

IG Priests don't affect allies (duh)

Allies don't take orders even if an IC attached to an IG unit.

Rough riders lances explained more clearly

And my favorite:  Leman Russes are HEAVY vehicles.

Venerable Brother Lucas -- Painted.

Now that he's painted, I thought I'd post a few pics of the Grey Knights Ven-Dread that I converted for the Tale of 4(ish) Gamers that was running at my FLGS.  I had a bit of a quandary in painting him; do I stick with the grey scheme that I'd settled on for the vehicles, or do I paint him all shiny silver, like the other Grey Knights?  In the end I opted to paint him like a vehicle while painting the helmet in the sarcophagus silver.

I used a few different washes, Ogryn Flesh, Green and Blue to get a heat stained effect on the barrels of the autocannon.

The Throne of Judgement makes a great chassis for a dreadnaught but it does have a lot of details to paint; A LOT of details.  I'm still not sure that I got all of the purity seals.

Tale of 4(ish) Gamers -- Conclusion

Back in May, I entered into my FLGS's Tale of 4 Gamers contest -- 500 pts per Month up to 2000 pts by the end of Aug.  I haven't done the best job of posting my progress but I did complete the challenge.  In my case I used the occasion to get to some models done that had been hanging around for a long time.  Here's the result:  2000 (or maybe a bit more) points of Grey Knights:

Draigo and Friends, a Librarian, a squad of Termies, a squad of Purifiers in  a Razorback, a Ven Dread, a Storm Raven and a Culexus

Is this a competitive army?  Probably not but it sure is pretty, and it was a lot of fun to finally get on the table.

Oh and the challenge? I won, so I'm now the proud owner of  a special edition red GW Paint station.

Stretched Stormraven Part 2

In Part 1, I covered stretching the Stormraven and lighting.  I left off with figuring out what to do with the batteries.  I decided to mount the batteries on the base for a couple of reasons:  first, I didn't like the idea of having to retrieve the batteries from inside the model in order to change them, second, I didn't like the idea of putting that much additional weight up on top of the flying stand. 

My first thought was to use parts of the crashed Aquila Lander from the old Battle for Macragge starter set; ultimately I couldn't fit the 3 AAA battery pack under any of the bits in a way that would fit on the base.  Looking around, I found a disused Leman Russ hull that had once been a Looted Wagon in my son's Ork army -- perfect.

Here's the boring electrical stuff -- the red LED helps in debugging the connection to the model as it can be a bit finicky.

I opened up most of the bottom of the hull and expanded the turret ring hole slightly to allow the flying stand to fit throught.  The bottom of the clear flying stand ended up getting slimmed down a bit to allow the batteries to fit.  The Russ itself I decided to decorate as a Traitor Guard tank using some Chaos sigils etc

Here's how it looks all painted up

And the Stormraven itself:

And of course the reason for the base, the lights

Grey Knights Venerable Dreadnaught

Some years ago, Dave Taylor built a beautiful Custodes army, one of my favorite models from that army was a Dreadnaught converted from the Throne of Judgement.  I happened to have a Throne of Judgement lying around that I had scavenged parts from, so I decided to use it to build a Grey Knights Venerable Dreadnaught.

 To build the sarcophagus, I obtained  the bit from the plastic ven-dread kit from a bitz seller. I wanted the pieces to look sufficiently grey knight-ish, so I got the helmeted head from the Dread Knight kit.  Lastly, I wanted to build this as a rifle-man dread, after looking around, I settled on using the reaper autocannon from the Defiler kit -- Reaper autocannon on a Grey Knights model?  HERESY!


To de-chaos the reapers, I removed the bayonets and filed off some of the spikes, then I covered up the Demon mouth with a magazine from the IG Heavy Weapons set.

The arms holding the autocannon were built using the hydraulic cylinders from the IG Vehicle accessory sprue, the searchlight from the same source and some plastic tubing cut at an angle.

And a few paint-in-progress shots:

Horus Heresy Trailer

A  trailer for the for first Forgeworld Horus Heresy book has appeared here.  It will debut at  Gamesday UK.  Hat tip to Apocalypse 40K.

GW needs to get whoever made this trailer to do the mainstream GW trailers.

Stretched Stormraven Part 1

The biggest problem that I have with the Stormraven is that it's too short -- it's supposed to have the same troop capacity as the Land Raider but clearly the troop compartment is smaller. 

To make the troop compartment large enough  means lengthening it by about 1.5 inches to my eyes.  I decided to take the same approach as Chapterhouse by adding the length to the rear of the hull.  Why not just go with Chapterhouse's conversion kit?  Well, they extend the hull a bit too much to my eyes, about 2.5 inches.
 
I made the template for the hull side extensions by tracing the rear of the hull outline, shifting 1.5 inches and tracing again.  The result is here:

The side extensions are then fit in nicely.  The floor extension is a simple 2"x1.5" rectangle, I added tread plate to match the look of the stock floor.

 

Even though it will be difficult to see, I painted all of the interior bits prior to assembling the hull.

I'm not a huge fan of the "T" tail look, so I cut the tail and flipped it, so that the stabilizer is swept back and in the anhedral position.

An extra feature that I decided to add to this project was lights -- 4 white LED's for the headlights, 2 blue LED's to light the cockpit and turret, and two red LED's to light the cargo hold.  The panel lights create an interesting study in object source lighting.

The battery pack will be mounted on the base with  silver buss wire running up the flying stand.  The socket for the stand will provide the contact point for the battery power.

Here's a shot showing the headlights, pilot console lights and the interior red lights illuminated.  Completing the model now is largely a matter of final assembly and painting.  The last really big challenge is building terrain on the base to hide the battery pack while still allowing for removal to change the batteries.

Col Iron Hand Strakov.... err.. Straken

Here's my version of Col. "Iron Hand" Straken, ala Vostroya.  I call him Strakov.  I've had this guy around for a while now but hadn't posted him, though I did enter him in a contest over at Miniature Wargames Conversions.  Ron's excellent Cadian Straken over at From The Warp inspired me to do a post on this guy, finally.

I started with the Vostroyan officer with a Power Sword and Plasma Pistol. To represent his bionics I replaced one foot with a with the foot of a necron warrior.  For his power sword arm, I used the bionic arm from the Space Marine captain sprue.  I cut off the chain-sword blade with the original Power Sword blade from the Vostroyan offfcer model.   Since Straken also carries a shotgun, I added an Empire repeater handgun to represent the shotgun; I think it gives a nice Steam-punk look that I've always associated with Vostroyans.

 

And finally a few pics of the Colonel all painted up.