The Mechanicum Transport

This is an old project that has recently gotten a bit of momentum after receiving a GSI Tentacle Maker for Christmas. Mmmm... tentacles. This is an awesome tool for creating textured tentacles or, in this case, cabling for Mechanicus conversions. Very easy to use and pretty robust, I suspect it will find extensive use in the future. 

But onward to the model, the transport vehicle (counts as Ghost Ark) for the Tech-guard. The idea for model came to mind after seeing another person's Mechanicum transport at my local GW store which was very pretty indeed. But seeing that model reminded me of another type of transport from a totally different, yet underrated, game. I present the UEF air transport from Supreme Commander.

Simple,utilitarian, effective. All the hallmarks of a Mechanicus vehicle, the only problem is that it is not red. The model I built is based on the Space Marine Storm Talon, elongated with the barrel of the Necron Doomsday cannon. The Storm Talon's tail was cut off (carefully) at the first section of armour plating and the Doomsday cannon was shoved (carefully) into the hole.

The next thing to wrack my mind was how to do the harnesses. The idea I had was buy a Space Marine Drop Pod and use the harnesses from that, there are 10 in a box, I thought I was so smart. This idea gave me a whole host of trouble as I tried to fit them on. I finally settled on the following configuration and I'm happy with it. Simple, utilitarian, effective.

After receiving a tentacle maker I just had to use it. No vehicle of the Mechanicum is complete without bare cabling all over it. It was easy to go over board but I really restrained myself to not go crazy. What I ended up adding was just a few cables running from the main 'head' of the vehicle into the spine. 

This is what the transport currently looks like. 

The only details left are the holes for engines and the front of the transport. I decided not to give the thing engines and was planning to put the Machina Opus on either side. That's the symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus for the non-cyborg nuts. Now, I suck at free-hand painting so I'm trying to find a skull big enough to fit the bill to stick on. I think I've found a piece, so we shall see how that goes. The Ghost Ark itself has the ability to repair Necron warriors on the fly, and as a skimmer I've always had the image of some form of bottom feeder look to the front. Crawling through the wreckage of the battlefield, salvaging bits of men and equipment to fix back up. So, I took some small Necron claws, syringes and lashes from the Spyder kit and made Cthulhu. These are currently blue-tacked on as I'm still contemplating how to aesthetically attach them to the main body.

More to come when more work gets done.

The Mechanicum Stalker

When the new Necron Triarch Stalker came out there was no fighting it, I had to induct it into my Mechanicum army.

(Picture courtesy of GW website)

I liked the look of the Necron Stalker already but for a Mechanicum sanctioned vehicle it looked too Necrony (obviously). This meant the model needed to be stylised to become a vehicle used by the Imperium without losing the overall look and feel of the model.

The Body and Legs

First thing that was easy to do was the legs. I added some green stuff to mimic some of the plating Mechanicum forces have. This was relatively simple to do (although when I did this there was trouble in getting a good adhesion of GS on to the leg. Third time was a charm so it might have been stray oil? who knows?). In addition the Necron glyphs on the front legs were filled with putty and filed back to get a smooth finish.

Next stop was the cockpit that meant the Necron iconography and driver had to go. I didn't want to replace it with a driver of any sort as I wanted this to be part of the Cybernetica division (go robots!). This meant either an exposed cybernetic brain thing or some sort of armoured canopy. For simplicity (and practicalities) I went with the simple canopy variant using the cockpit canopy from the Stormtalon gunship which I planned to paint over. The assembly without the curved spine as in the normal Stalker assembly was a bit fiddly, thankfully a spare teleport homer filled the gap and let me have something to glue onto. A bit of snipping and filing also got my cockpit ready for it's adhoc canopy.

Adding the canopy was actually more difficult than first thought. The driver cockpit of the Necron Stalker is hollow and without a floor. This made putting a canopy on a bit tacky as one could see all the hollow goodness from underneath and behind. With much scaffolding with plasticard and putty I filled the back and the underside of the cockpit and smoothed it down (maybe I'll add some cabling and other details later). An old Space Marine Terminator back was used to cover the back of the assembly and to provide some detail in the form of vents.

The next thing to address was the front and the difficulty of fitting an angular canopy to a curved cockpit. The answer was in the form of a spare bit from the Stalker kit. This is some armour plating that goes on top of the curved spine above the 'light' sensor thingy. This was filed down to fit in the hole between the canopy and cockpit. The rest was filled with GS and the slight mismatch is hardly noticeable (subjective of course).

The next stage is to adorn it with small details that the Mechanicum likes to put on vehicles. This means cog symbols, purity seals etc. I just need to find the right places to put them.

The Weapon

This was the fun bit. The main weapon load out I want was the Heat ray, this was perfect as the Heat ray was just another Melta weapon. After magnetising the weapon so that it can swivel in its mounting I got to work in converting the weapon to look something from an Imperial Forgeworld. First was to create the Melta tanks on the Stalker weapon This was simply done using a bit of plasticard tubing. The area highlighted in red was cut away to make space. Once the area was cut out the tubes were super glued in place before any extra details were added.

With the tubes glued in I got to work with the tanks details. The two outer 'bands' were first made and left to set before the inner 'band' was modelled. This was done because I didn't want my clumsy fingers messing up the work. With everything dried the tube was capped off at both ends and that's the Melta tanks done.

The next bit was picking the barrel of the 'Heat ray', the perfect piece for this was the Devil Dog's Melta cannon and it fits quite well (I had to cast myself this bit).

Now it just needs a few little doodads to bring it into character and some painting to finish it off.