Skitarii Veterans

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.