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.

The Kramer VI Incident

Not a post about Kit-bashing but with the new 6th Edition rules out this called for a small introductory game just to test the rules and give our models a test drive (sorry no pictures).

The line up: Blood Angels vs. Imperial Guard
Points Value: 750

Needless to say there was a lot of page flicking to this game. My Angels got beaten back but it was fun and it did give us a chance to play test the new rules to accustomise ourselves and maybe give the game a little bit of narrative.

Man of the match: Assault Marine that survived; 6 Autocannon shots, 6 Heavy Bolter rounds, 3 Sniper shots, 6 Multilaser shots and a shot from a lasgun in a single shooting phase. He finally fell to a psyker's psychic scream. Beaten but not dead I think, it will be fitting that he'll be back for more in the future.

And just because it gives it a little bit more flavour here's a bit of in-character fluff to go with.

+++Transmission Record Re: Kramer VI Incident+++

Servitor 07.A59.X

+PLAYBACK+

"Lost? What do you mean lost?"

"The recon patrol we sent did not report back at the specified time, I had no choice-."

"Do not give excuses. I do not have patience for excuses. Tell me you have the artefact."

"The artefact is lost my Lord."

"Failure is a heresy Sergeant, I expect you to redeem yourself. What were the casualties of this engagement?"

"Captain, twenty battle brothers in total. Librarian Aelius was amongst the fallen."

"Your failures are mounting Sergeant. What information do we have of the enemy?"

"From our reports it was the Imperial Guard, Captain."

"Heretics! What sanity have these Guardmen lost to fire upon the Space Marines?"

"They were lead by an Inquisitor my Lord."

"What is the source of this information?"

"... There was a survivor. What we've extracted from him was that an Inquisitor was involved. He claims the Inquisitor took the artefact with him. "

"Inquisitor or no, he has stolen what is rightfully ours and taken the blood of our Brothers. Gather your Battle-Brothers Sergeant, we shall show his man what it means to cross the Space Marines."

"What of Brother Valerius, the survivor my Lord? His body is harmed but his mind has gone mad, he's succumbed to the Black Rage."

"A shame that a Brother has succumbed this day. Induct him into the Death Company Sergeant. He'll have his chance to right what has been wronged."

+END+

Extract from Guardsmen Herman's Confessions

(Confidential)

We didn't mean it. We didn't they just... came out of nowhere. It was all dark that morning, we just got orders to go scout an area around some old abandoned space port then BANG! before we know it we were being shot at! 

So we shot back. We couldn't see a thing but we shot back. Then the sun started to come up and they came out of the darkness. Throne, they were Space Marines. We shot at Space Marines! Our orders were to hold our ground for some VIP package  coming in by air so we called in the rest of of our unit back to reinforce us. 

I can't believe I'm even here and alive. Throne it scares me to even think about it. We managed to push the Marines back... for a while. Then came this big red tank spewing fire and death every which way. We had to retreat, we lost two boys to the flames before luckily the thing smashed itself into a brick wall and got stuck. The Emperor had our backs that day.

Our reinforcements finally arrived and they cut down the remaining Space Marines. They put up a brave fight but one by one they fell. The last of them fell but one of them broke cover when our boys got a bit cocky and strayed too close. We lost a full squad of Guardsmen to a single Marine with a chainsword. He fought like a man possessed, we poured all our fire on him but it bounced off him like he had the luck of the Emperor. Not a single scratch dented his armour.

He just kept coming! Swinging wildly towards us until I heard the most awful gut retching scream, then the Marine just dropped, like a log. I don't think we actually shot the madman, Johnny with the scope said he saw some fancy Inquisitor blast the Marine.

We got lucky today. I know that. I didn't want to shoot at Space Marines it just happened they left us no choice. God-Emperor help us I hope we did the right thing.

Gunslinger Sergeant, Pt2

Just an update with pictures of the gunslinger sergeant, painted and finished. There has been a small change, I used a different base model (also another old metal Death Company model) and positioned the arms so he's firing akimbo (John Woo style).

Pretty basic paint scheme.
Armour: GW Blood Red and GW Enchanted Blue
Scrolls: GW Bleached Bone
Tassels: GW Bad Moon Yellow
Guns: GW Shining Gold
Metalwork: GW Leadbelcher
Everything was basecoated and washed with GW Devlan Mud. The model was finished off with cleaning up some of the blotchiness that formed and highlights.

Previous posts:

Gunslinger Sergeant, Pt1

Gunslinger Sergeant, Pt1

With the release of Warhammer 40k 6th edition there have been many changes to the rule system. Some good, some bad, some weird, some awesome.

There was one rule that popped out to me, not exactly game breaking but makes for some really fun models. Gunslinger: This allows a model with two pistol weapons to shoot both of them in the shooting phase. Since I run primarily Codex:Blood Angels this meant I had to give someone in my army two Melta pistols. I decided to give it to an Assault Marine sergeant, couple that with 2 Meltaguns from the squad and that's a Deep Striking Assault squad with 4 Melta shots.

Okay it is pretty game breaking.

Anyways I just had to convert a model with it, I've had this idea for a while and I have converted models with dual bolt pistol before. This one is not a particularly ambitious kitbash but it shows you can still make some interesting models just using the normal multi-part kits.

The Break Down.

Main body: Old Death Company model

Arms: Infernus Pistols from Death Company kit.

Jump Pack: Pack from Death Company kit

There are still more rules to play with. Changes to power weapons is making me rethink a lot about the load out for my Blood Angels army, for better and for worse (I have to start thinking about missile launchers for those pesky flyers). We shall soon see what the future holds.

Continuation:

Gunslinger Sergeant, Pt2

Assault Terminator Conversions

Thunder Hammer and Storm Shields

After being hammered (pardon the pun) by a bunch of Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield wielding Terminators I decided I wanted a piece of that pie. I've never been a fan of Terminators, they are an expensive units and with the amount of weapons that can punch through their armour I didn't like having a 200+ point unit that drops like flies sprayed with Raid. 

Coming back to the game after a long hiatus from playing and modelling I found they changed the rules for Storm Shields in 5th Edition 40k, still not convinced it took a single game of getting pounded into the ground for me to realise their potential. Dangerous and durable, they make for some excellent assault troops that aren't left with their thumbs up their arses after a successful assault (changes to sweeping advances also made my Assault Marines cry).

So the answer, build some Terminators. But looked at the new Storm Shields, bah! That's not fitting for a Blood Angel. A brief search of some of the new models and I quickly set my eyes on the Sanguiniary Guard's Wings to use as Storm Shields. 

(Courtesy of GW website)

It was a bit of a jump and I had my own doubts whether it would work. The wings were relatively tall and I was concerned it might overshadow the Terminator or just make them look unwieldy. My curiosity (as always) won and I got myself a set of the models to see if my idea could pan out. I think it worked out quite reasonably.

I decided to go the full nine yards and go for a solid block of 10 Terminators. I actually made 5 of them out of Grey Knight Terminators to give one squad a bit more 'flash'. A single box of Sanguinary Guard yielded 10 wings, unfortunately this was split into 5 right handed and 5 left handed wings. This meant I needed some left handed Thunder Hammers, which don't really exist in pre-existing kits. Well, back to bitz hunting.

The answer came in the form of the Chaos Terminator power weapons, with a simple weapon swap I got my left Terminator arm with Thunderhammer. There was some clean up needed to make the Chaos arm a bit more Imperial friendly.

The Terminators themselves were relatively simple to assemble. Unfortunately I had to 'wrist-mount' my Storm Shields, this meant that on close inspect the Storm Shield looks 'glued' to the marine's arm. I know as a converter this little detail should be addressed, a friend even offered to give me a mould for Storm Shield hands to fix it. I reluctantly had to decline, I hate leaving models with tiny detail like this omitted but if I tried to replace all the hands I know I'll never get round to it. The compromise was for the greater good.

Onwards to the painting! For the shields I had an idea that stuck in my head. As the shields were feathers I wanted to go for a flame type effect, mimicking a Phoenix wing. I don't know whether this was a good or bad idea, I'm on the precipice of rejecting and keeping it. The other scheme I had was to paint it blue to signify the energy field around the shield. Since the armour is red anyways I thought a stark blue shield might distinguish the model a bit. I don't know, maybe someone will comment before I glue everything together.

This is the prototype, the others have yet to be finished but at least I know what I'm aiming for. 1 down, 9 to go!

P.S. Since taking the picture of the unfinished Terminator I had decided to swap the orientation of the shield/wing on the arm.

AdMech Conversions

Being an Adeptus Mechanicus nut I always wanted my very own army to represent this secluded and relatively unknown faction of the Imperial alliance. Previous attempts at making an AdMech force was met with failure as the procedure to convert viable models was long, labourous and quite difficult to replicate consistantly (usually consistency is not a problem for the AdMech but I wanted some coherency to my force).

The Trooper

The kitbash I settled for was a conglomeration of the Tau Firewarriors,  Imperial Guard and Forgeworld bits. Simple head and body swaps (or arm and head swaps depending how you look at it).

The breakdown of these little troopers are as follows:

Head - Forgeworld Elysian drop troop head

Torso - Tau Fire Warrior (with the standard backpack)

Arms - Imperial Guard Cadian arms

Weapons - Lasguns with the barrel replaced with the Tau grenades

Legs - Tau Fire Warrior

Very simple kitbash with promising results. The only crux is that the Tau Fire Warrior torso is slightly weedy compared to the common man and as a result the Imperial Guard weapon arms do not match up perfectly in every case; some tiny cutting of the sleeves usually solves this but it is difficult to get a snug fit everytime (good thing it is easily hidden away).

Like a Boss (I really need some explosions in the background)

Heavy Weapons 'Team'

All foot sloggers need some fire support, and initially I had based the AdMech army on the Imperial Guard Codex this meant the support came in the form of Heavy Weapon Teams. The Mechanicum's love for walkers was what made me make this cute beastie. 

The main body and legs come from the Forgeworld Necron Tomb Stalker model, the weapon was raised so that it ran parallel with the body using Green Stuff and this was attached to the back 'spine' of the Tomb Stalker body segment. 

The GS section is a bit ugly but as a prototype it shows that the kitbash can work and soon a multitude of these guys will be gracing future battlefields. Further improvement planned is to magnetise the weapons so that I can swap the load outs for a bit more versatility.

Other areas for improvement is the front of the body segment, as it looks very bare. I was thinking of covering it up with purity seals and scrolls to hide the fact I can't sculpt. 

Other Source Material

A great resource for Adeptus Mechanicus conversions and scratch built Titans.

Dakka Dakka is always a good place for inspirational material.