I’ve been fairly productive with my hobby modeling this past week. Unfortunately I couldn’t get my Week 7 game in for the Arx Rift campaign, but there you go. But I have lots of stuff to show off in this post.
To start off, I have been working on these Obliterators forever. (Find and add link to initial WIP) The deal with these guys is that they’re not marines with the Obliterator virus, they are Dark Mechanicus Legio Cybernetica robots seconded to the Iron Hounds by the Legio Nefandum. I call them “Obliterator”-class Cataphracti, and I made them out of old plastic Terminators with various other bits. But here they are in their Mars red paint scheme:
I didn’t want to repeat any weapons, so when it came to the third Obliterator I had to get a bit creative. Those three pieces of plastic tubing are supposed to be the various twin-linked weapons available to them, I guess, and the Orkie power saw thing would be the Power Fist. The last one is actually my favorite, as is often the case I ended up liking the one I thought I’d like the least as I was building it.
There’s all these rumors about Chaos Marines getting some kind of fancy new close combat oriented Obliterator unit in the next codex. We’ll have to wait and see, but I’m not sure how I’d convert them. I’m all out of old plastic Termies…
Next up is my Squat infantry. That’s right, Squats. I became interested in doing a Squat unit when the race was officially restored to canon in the appendices of the new 6th edition rulebook, if for no other reason than a need for something different to do with my allies detachment. So I went ahead and did it. The old metal models being extremely expensive, I was originally going to use converted Warhammer Fantasy Battle Dwarf Quarrellers, but then I thought of the Forge Fathers army by Mantic for their Warpath line. I thought it would be a good thing to do a different company’s models and then review them. But then I didn’t like the Forge Fathers power armor, and it seemed they were more ideal for Space Marine proxies than Imperial Guard proxies, so I went back to the Quarrellers idea. But THEN I saw the Dwarf Iron Watch models by Mantic for their Kings of War line. They’re basically WHFB Dwarf Quarrellers, but totally-not-WHFB-Dwarf-Quarrellers. So instead of 10 models for $35 I got 20 models for $25. But let me get back to that, because I want to show you a couple of pictures of them:
I call these guys the Aeneian Dragoons. You know, home world is destroyed so they’re off adventuring type thing… Anyway, I think of them as mechanized infantry and went ahead and got a Chimera kit to make for them to ride in. The guns are lasguns of course, and the crossbows are sniper rifles. I’m going to convert up some special weapons out of the remaining models, so I’ll be posting on that on a later date.
This is their sergeant, who does not have a name yet. I lead the detachment with a Primaris Psyker, a guy I named Svalinn Vitki, and for him I used a Reaper miniature (but more on him in a later post too). Basically for the sergeant I just added some GW Berserker arms, or parts of them at least. The Mantic kit comes with ten of those two-handed hammers, and they really don’t have anything at all to do with the unit, they’re just random extras. They’re too thin and small to use for space marine weapons, but for this instance one worked out fine for the sergeant’s close combat weapon, helped out by a hole drilled in the Berserker fist (after removing whatever it was originally holding.)
Now, I like these guys, but I can say honestly that I would have rather had the Games Workshop minis in the long run. They are more expensive, but the Mantic minis only come in two basic bodies with two basic heads, and you get to be “aiming” or just “holding weapon in front.” The torsos fit together awkwardly, and the arms either fit perfectly or were a pain to jigger around and never looked right. The details fade out around the edges and undercuts of the sculpt, and in general GW makes a much better product. Mantic has a bit of a curve in quality when you compare older and newer stuff, and GW has been doing this a long time, so there is that. If I ever needed any more Squat infantry I would go back to the GW product, but seeing as how this was just a small allied detachment to add to my Chaos Space Marines army, these are fine.
Next up are my Deathwatch Killteam:
The radical Inquisitor there is a Reaper Miniatures figure (with a GW Berserker bolt pistol replacing what used to be a hammer), and as such is a little tall compared to the “heroic” scale of GW. But whatever. His deal is that he’s very radical, and his Deathwatch team is composed of very borderline loyalists and a few questionable Blackshields, and he himself uses forbidden psykery to get the job done. So they are counts-as Rubric Marines, natch.
The boarding shield and master-crafted bolters there (boarding shield is a MaxMini product, “mechanical shields” I got off eBay) represent the Mark of Tzeentch Invulnerable Save and the Hellfire ammunition (or whatever it’s called) for AP3. I used a cut down piece of plasticard tubing for the barrel and added scopes from the loyalist Tactical Squad kit to make special Deathwatch bolters.
This guy is hunkered down to shoot from behind his boarding shield. I’m going to go half and half between hunkered and moving.
So that’s the first five of those guys. I have the parts for another five to complete the squad, I’m just not making any more until the new codex comes out.
Next up is my counts-as Plague Marines, a group of “forward observers” from the Fleet of the Iron Hounds. These guys are a very plain five man squad with only an option for a personal icon. The idea is that they are there to justify taking my counts-as Blight Drones (converted Landspeeders) where Brother Viktor and his zombie marines wouldn’t be fluff appropriate. So their Plague Marine-ness is represented through technology since the Iron Hounds don’t do the daemonic.
The heads are Kromlech products I picked up just because I thought they were cool. Since my squads are identifiable through helmet choice mainly, I thought this would be a good way to put them to use. They’re a bit small for GW scale, but they work OK. The sergeant there is using loyalist Devastator parts, obviously, and the servo-skull-thing on the other guy’s backpack represents their Feel No Pain. Because it’s some kind of Dark Mechanicum force field generator. Or summat.
I have a gripe about third party heads, and it’s that you usually can’t get one design to give to the whole unit. I have seen where you can get all homogenous heads, but this Kromlech pack was two sprues with five different designs, so this is how these guys are going to be.
This guy is my favorite. He’s exercising the option for a personal icon for deepstriking allied units in. I reckoned that since that’s all I wanted it for, and since these guys are like Air Force forward observers or some other kind of Fleet specialist (or whatever), that an actual teleport beacon from a loyalist Terminator kit would be just the thing. So I gave him the kneeling legs from the Devastator kit and an auspex from the Tactical Marine kit and modeled him as if he had just set up the teleport beacon and was monitoring stuff with the auspex.
And that’s it for those guys for now. I’m working on my backlog of half finished projects, so I’m going to be working on a “new project/old project” type schedule as far as painting goes. I should have some more painting to show off in about a week, and I’m also going to be posting a tutorial on converting a Valkyrie to a Vendetta this week, so look forward to that.
Reviresco!
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