Many of you may already be aware of Wargames Factory's new Shock Troops range, a sprue of which gives you a wealth of weapons, heads, and arms, not to mention 3 bodies. I went halfsies with my friend Ben, and picked up a whopping 63 more troopers to add to the ranks of Mechanicus. The above Heavy Flamer troopers represent my initial conversions, and needless to say, I was hooked. Their left arms are courtesy of some Battletech Banshees, giving them a heavier bionic look (not to mention making them slightly ape-like) with their gas masks topped off by green stuff hoods. Those are Sentinel flamers, and the metal tanks are from.... somewhere.
I sort of wish I was starting my AdMech army all over again, but, since I have a lot of the basic troopers covered (forty of them, in fact) the balance of these fellows are destined for special weapons duty.
I had a Necromunda weapons sprue or two hanging around, so I decided to make full use of the bountiful special weapons. Unfortunately, the Shock Trooper bodies are exclusively male, otherwise I could've continued the Melta Girls theme. Oh well. That fuel tank is from an old plastic shoulder joint, and resembles an artillery shell as much as it does a portable tank, now that I look at it.
You can never have enough melta-packing troops in an army these days, what with all the tanks flying around. If that's not bad enough, those tanks are usually full of troops, and lethal ones in the case of Orks and the new Dark Eldar. Man, am I the only modeler who salivates a little when a pretty new range comes out? Maybe I'll make some grav transports, and some melee-looking Skitarii will pull double duty. Mechanicus Attack Skiffs? Hmm... that'd give me an excuse to scoop up some of those sweet new Ravager kits.
I had a set of multi-melta nozzles left over from some other project, and grafted them to the guns of some regular troopers. It was only whilst taking these pics that I realized I had forgotten the canisters on the sides of the guns. They're heavy-looking rifles to be sure, but do they read all the way as meltas without the canisters? Damn.
I figure the Mechanicus would use something with a little more power than your standard sniper rifle, so with the weapon nubs I had after the assault weapon conversions, I made these wicked-looking magnetic accelerator rifles. The snipers carry extra mag barrels with them for when the capacitors wear out, and extra clips of ammo. I sort of wanted to replace their arms with heavy gunnery limbs, but my initial experiments looked too much like Tau or Ork Snazzguns, so I went with these fellows insteads.
Now when that next shipment of green rods comes in, my Tyrannofexes will be finally be ready to stomp out and kill things.
Happy Halloween, people.
Okay, maybe not the actual Tau. I came across this during my daily lunchtime browsing of IO9. You can see additional pics of this fellow and his friends here.
Just a short post today, as I have some projects to finish up (and some to get started on) in addition to my daily struggle with the freelance world. Finished Tyrannofexes, Skitarii, and scratchbuilt tanks coming soon....
A friend of mine's birthday is coming up, so I decided to make him some themed objective counters for his ork army. Luckily, I still had plenty of snotling bits from a set of Grenadier ogres long ago, not to mention some Warboss bosspole bits from a bitz purchase. That set of green plastic counters is nice, but never really did it for me. Plus, being a GW product, it's a smidge overpriced, and these are more fun, anyway.
You can argue that two snotlings, a flintlock, and a bunch of thermal grenades aren't much of an incentive, but what Warboss would turn down a shiny new firearm anyway? I wonder that guy in the back is smiling about; notice that none of those grenades have rings or phlanges, which makes me think a practical joke is about to go very, very awry.
I'm sure that lizard has some value in ork society, and it's probably dietary.
I don't know he's using that spoon as a weapon to guard his boss's trophy pole, or has simply finished using it to spoon marine brains out of those helmets. Either way, he's waaaay too happy to be there.
These minis are due in part to the fact that Halloween's a-comin' and I wanted to paint something spooky, and partly due to B.Smoove sending me some Flayed ones I had no idea what to do with. Add to that a Reaper Miniatures Succubus I was too prude to paint at the time (her wings are now part of the Hilda Garde III airship) and a dash of extra bits, and you get this nice witch and her murder servitors.
Latent psyker/mechanicus-adept/college students should never take their work home, much less handle it after getting out of the shower. That Necron head on her staff plugged itself right into her brain via that cogitator on her back, and now she's out causing mischief in an already turbulent underhive. At first I was going to swathe her in tattered robes, but in the end I left her as-is; she looks more unhinged this way, and really, what would the alien robot brain on the staff care as long as she provided mobility? As a nod to her previous life, I painted her loincloth with the Mechanicus cog motif. No, this is not the start of a new line of sexy Dark Mechanicus girls. No, I don't know what that key goes to.
Witches need familiars and servants to carry around their spellbooks and whatnot, and this little guy was already in the pipeline to be a weapon loader (it's a short hop from lugging ammo bins to lugging arcane tomes, and the hours are better anyway). He started life as a robed skeleton and got a heavy green stuff cowl and some mismatched mechanical arms from my ever-dwindling supply of Battlemech bits. Those books and things are from the new plastic Flagellant sprue.
Flayed Ones I've only used once in a Necron army, and while they're good for seeing off a small squad of low-leadership troops, they're pretty much a useless one-trick pony (now, if they could emerge and assault in the same turn, that would be worth something). The two B.Smoove sent as a reward for his logo contest were a nice gesture, so I decided to turn them into Murder Servitors, and dressed them up with green stuff, plastic chains, and the skulls of their victims. They already have scraps of flesh clinging to their limbs anyway, so furthering the illusion that they were rags with more green stuff made sense. I almost put human heads on them so as to make them viable generic evil henchmen, but decided against it at the last minute.
To provide some differentiation, the second Murder Servitor has a Wraith surgical bit. Originally the Witch was going to have it and a set of claws on mechadendrites, but she became so full of cables and things anyway it would have made the model too cluttered, not to mention un-transportable to/from gaming sessions.
Lastly, as a treat for staying with me this far, here's a taste of what's next in the pipeline:
More commissions, please. They pay for Tyrannocrons, like this one (of three).
