Test Flight...

The next generation Stormraven (extended) prototype out for a test flight before principle photography for the contest over at Miniature Wargame Conversions. Test Unit Alpha 1 is sound, if a little drafty inside, and, at the time of this blog entry, ready for final paint and detailing. For those of you not in the know, contest entrants have to submit photos of unpainted conversions only, so while she looks a little rough now, rest assured she cleaned up nicely in the end. 

The Tachikoma engineers and yours truly thank you in advance for voting for us on the 30th (or whenever voting opens).

Happy Monday, People. 

I'll just leave this here....

From the factory floor of M3 Aircraft Works, where our intrepid engineers are diligently working on a improvements to a rather poorly designed aircraft. Whether this design will make it beyond the flying prototype stage is uncertain. During the initial design competition stage, it did beat out the twin-boom hulled "Flying Tumbler", which, while inspired by a capable, solid body design, looked too much like a Land Raider with wings. Sadly, the mock-up for that poor beast was subsequently pushed off the factory floor into the parts bin. 

The Inquistion, the Last Part (edit): GUNHEDS and Walkers...

Recently it was pointed out to me that I wasn't leading with my strengths, so I went back through and gutted this article for reposting.

The three GUNHED's above were my answer to the appalling vulnerability of the common Penitent Engine. Where the PE is slow, underarmored, and underarmed, (and based on those woussy mecha from The Matrix)  the GUNHED is fast, heavily armed and armored, and has a Sister Repentia in the crew compartment (which is, of course, featured open to show off said pilot). I kept the flamethrower buzzsaw arms and pseudo-sentinel legs (I only used the right one for uniformity) and ditched the rest. That said, it's based on this manly hunk of steel:

That's GUNHED Sergeant MBR-507, from the Japanese movie GUNHED, which came out some time back in 1989. It was pretty standard fare for a Toho movie, in that it was shot in glorious Tohovision and featured giant monstrous things trying to kill each other. The plot was thin, the acting was... adequate, but overall, the star is the Studio Nue-designed monstrosity you see there. GUNHED is an acronym for "Gun Unit/Heavy Elimination Device", and were meant to be entirely unmanned drones deployed in battalions to fight... other unmanned war machines. Interestingly enough, that Kawamori design is also the precursor for the mecha in the underrated Eureka 7.

Anyhow, my take on it was this (and no, it doesn't transform) :

A lot of bits went into #507. That long-barrelled vulcan in the turret came from an old, large scale Heavy Gear weapons pack. The metal turret and tread assemblies is from a pre-Flames of War tank wargame (three lead tank blisters for a mere $6 apiece!) and the rest are Penitent Engine parts, plastic bits, Inquisitor icons, and other things. The legs I extended by use of plastic i-beams and the tread bits from the tank models.  I tried to keep it gothic, keep it dark, and keep it, as other 40k designs, looking like it should have had more tacked onto it, but after thousands of years had been boiled down to its basic ugly funcitonality. Yes, the penitent inside is a Dark Eldar Wych (pun intended):

In the old days you used to be able to order practically any manner of bits from practically the entire range of GW minis, and life was good. Now you can't, of course, because maintaining a massive bitz inventory is evidently too much of a bother for the powers that be to handle. Now we have to scrape and scrabble on eBay for plastics that aren't even marginally as interesting as all of the things we used to have access to whenever we wanted, as much as we needed. 

Those thrusters, of course, are for turbo-boosting into battle so you can flame/buzzsaw them after to you Punisher cannon them to pieces.  I like the book on the engine section, there. I was really into the WH design motif of covering things with shrines and scrolls. This thing remains one of the jewels of my collection, and I liked it so much, I built another one, #508 (or "Flame-HEDD")  with an emphasis on fire:

That giant flamer in the turret belonged to an action figure a long tim ago; I found it at the bottom of a drawer, I think. Having the accelerant tanks on the outside of the turret seems like an awfully good way to get them blown up, but then again, having an open cockpit on a war machine is a terrible idea, too. Maybe it closes like a clamshell, retracting up into the chest? If that's the case, that Rackham babe needs to tuck in her legs:

Yes, I noticed the glare spot on these. The angle on the bottom of the chest section seemed to catch the light no matter what I did. I suppose I should have sealed these with matte instead of semi-gloss, but every time I use a matte spray-seal it just kills the metallics. 

You'd think the Ecclesiarchy would lock up all of their scrolls and relics in museums, but they seem to delight in carelessly nailing them to tanks and other monsters of the battlefield. You might also notice the engine sections are slightly different; these pre-date my current standardization kick. At the time, I did make sure to use only the right-hand PE legs, certain torso bits, etc. that matched up to connect the models, thematically.  It didn't take me long to discover the (then) newly-released Warmachine range:

The Grey Knight version, the X-252 "Melta-HEDD", uses Khador warjack parts (I forget which one) and Inquisitor Karamazov's tri-barrel multi-melta. In retrospoectAlong with the PE and other parts, this model fit together really, really snugly. The Dark Age Reaver girl even fits nicely in its little command throne. More than that, she actually looks like she wants to be sitting in there, and isn't chained to anything.

Well, she's not enthusastic about it, but she's not writhing in anguish, either. 

Compared to the other two it looks a little under-armed; my intention was for that boxy thing on the turret to read as a psycannon, (even though it reads, visually, as some kind of sensor). Being a Grey Knight construct, it has the obligatory Force Weapon in that bigass gauntlet. You didnt think I'd cut away  a dreadnought-sized axe, did you? Likewise he carries a Liber Demonica just in case he has to call out a demon's true name in the middle of combat to subdue it. There is no plastic on this model at all, so it weighs as much as two old-school metal dreads. I shit you not. This thing is fucking heavy.

Man, I do love that cluster of exhausts in that big, solid torso (if I was in the black again I'd start a Warmachine hobby in a NY minute) Sharp eyes will note the old-school Battletech Marauder torsos as boosters on the engine sections. I am almost (at long last) completely out of bits and bobs from the old B-Tech range, too, so unless you want half of a leg or torso that's been smashed beyond recognition, I wouldn't bother asking. 

Yes, I do also own the Penitent Engines that the GUNHED was supposed to supplant. I even used GUNHEDS as stand-ins for PE's at one point, but was so disappointed by how quickly the PE's got chopped apart that I retired the models from that dubiously helpful duty out of shaming them. Yes, really. I went and got real PE's out of pity for the made-up ones. 

I always thought the Penitent Engine had  a lot of potential, if only it didn't have the major stumbling blocks of being open-topped and badly armored. It's far more interesting to look at than the average Dreadnaught, and is closer to being some kind of Dark Eldar construct  than an Imperial design. I mean, a machine powered by a tortured sinner that carries blades and shoots fire? It may be shit on the battlefield, but it's one hell of a neat idea. Unfortunately, neat fluff rarely translates well into the game. 

Remember, this was my first 40k army, and so the idea I had was to run some of these up behind Rhinos or Immolators and let them go to town on the opposition. Of course, Rhinos are terrible to hide behind longer than, say, a turn, and the PE's are so lightly armored that a violent sneeze chops off a vital engine part. Despite this, they were such a neat gothic concept that I even took advantage of some bargain-basement priced Sentinel parts, along with some of the nicer metal Specialist range bits:

The Inquisitor range was a treasure trove of cool-ass parts, like cyborg gladiator arms and devotional scripts. Unfortunately, big metal arms plus light plastic parts equal trouble, and this thing was so forward-heavy I had to build up the base on the bottom to it'd stand properly. Nowadays, my models are much better balanced (uncannily so, in the case of the Tervicrons). 

Like my other sentinel-legged constructs, both of these need a rod up the grounded foot to keep them on the base and stable, but the parts allow for such great poses that I don't mind all the extra drilling.

I'd cap off this edited entry with something witty, but there's a hostage crisis right now at Discovery in Silver Spring, where my friend works. I'm praying for the hostages safety, and that a police sniper will fucking blow the gunman's head off.

Wednesday's a bitch, gang.

Sometimes, The Things Assemble Themselves.

No pictures this post. Today it's Theatre of the Mind. 

I see things, I put them together. That's this hobby of ours in a nutshell: putting seemingly disparate parts together to make something cool.

Whilst browsing blogs, as you do when you're unemployed like me, I came across this:

http://coilhouse.net/2010/04/inventorsculptor-kim-grahams-weta-legs/#more-13318

You can wear them for hours on end, and even an amateur can run and climb in them. 

Gimme some arm extensions with spinny wrists, lightsabers, a few more bits and bobs, and blammo, you have a Grievous costume. But, why stop there? Go the extra nine yards and add this:

http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html

Now it's a powered version, strong enough to lift lightweight weapons and armor. Not mobile enough for you? Go here:

http://www.martinjetpack.com/

Now it flies.

This stuff, it's not a game, it's the world. It's coming. Get it?

Good morning, people. 

X-Planes: The Adepta Sororitas Proclaimer

Anyone who's played the Witch Hunters army list knows it has its problems, and in many ways it's also just as good. The Sisters still remain some of the best infantry choices in the game, in my opinion. Early on, though, I couldn't win with them to save my life, and was mad that they didn't really have a great fast attack unit that played to the list's philosophy of "roll up to you and flame you in the face, then chop your arms off." Anyway, that coupled with hours of playing the PS2 video game Kinetica led to the above; a simple, sexy conversion that looks fast and mean. How does this thing fight in close combat? Simple, it stands up:

Then it rakes you with a melta gun, a heavy flamer, and those really brutal buzzsaws it uses for front wheels. It's a bike, so it moves like one, and it's a CC walker, so it fights like one. As with so many other sci-fi designs you'd have to be insane to want to drive one of these. I mean, being strapped to the BOTTOM of a moving motorcycle? Jeezus. However, the model is incredibly badass. I liked it so much I made three of them:

Parts list? Fairly easy: Penitent Engine arms, Marine bikes, Immolator gunners and turret bits. You cut away the turret bucket so she can straddle the engine, glue the torso so she's standing up, and voila. The pilot's arms took a bit of trimming and reworking, and in truth a couple of those models use 1/35 scale infantry arms, trimmed down. I was soooo pissed when GW closed their bits store. No more infinite source of Penitent Engine bits or cool-ass Eldar wings. I could go for those Micro Arts mechanicus wings, I suppose, but I'd have to have a sense of their scale. Of course, now that the Space Wolf codex has Thunderwolf cavalry, I may just have to adapt the design for the Astartes. I could replace the PE arms with Sentinel leg articulations, I suppose, but I wonder where I could find giant powerfist things to replace those buzzsaws. Hmmm...

X-Planes....

In case you aren't familiar with the term, and X-Plane is an experimental aircraft used to test new technologies. More often than not, they look weird and do weird things, like sweep their wings back (or forward), land facing straight up, shoot lasers, etc. In case you're curious, there's a whole tumblr page devoted to them here.


I love converting models, most often to make things that don't exist or should. So, whenever you see the X-Plane header in this space, it's probably because I've made something odd, such as this Space Marine Bike: 

Now of course there are no rules in 40k for Techmarines on enormous trikes, so this one functions as an attack bike in my Marine army. Something that I find happens quite often when I'm converting models is that, after a point, the model seems to build itself. for this one, I had a rather nice jetbike chassis from some obscure range, and a pair of leftover imitation-SM Bike forks (metal ones, of all things) from a manufacturer that was sued out of existence by GW ages ago. I used the bike bodies for a project you'll see later. Anyway, the more I rifled through my bits containers for things, the more this odd bird seemed to take shape, until I added the Techmarine with his multi-melta backpack as an afterthought at the end. The rear tire is, in fact a pair of 1/35 scale jeep tires, mounted using Ork bike weapon mounts:

 I've been converting things like this since the old days of Battletech, when you could field just about any 'mech of your own design, whether or not you could modify a model appropriately (which I frequently did). The Techmarine rider is, as you may have guessed, not even originally a marine model (well, parts of him). The head is from a Sentinel pilot, the torso, shoulder armor, and arms are from a Marine tanker gunner (all of my tanks are "buttoned up", so I have gunner/commander parts I never use) and the legs are from an old metal cavalryman I had (for some reason), bulked up with green stuff into Space Marine legs. His servo arm is the leg of an old Battletech Locust. The whole model is rather heavy (being 90% metal) and has a very Batman-esque look to it, probably thanks to the B-52 intake between the "forelegs":

Those are mounted by way of legs from an older large-scale Heavy Gear model, of which I bought quite a few out of love for their Votoms-based designs. Many of these became fodder for other models, unfortunately (partly due to the utter lack of interest in playing the Heavy Gear RPG/wargame in this part of the country). I've committed more heinous crimes against old minis, such as the utter destruction of "classic" 40k Dreadnought models (let's be honest: the designs were rubbish)  and the use of a Castellan robot's body as the fuselage of a bomber. I wish I had kept those things somewhat intact now (even just to sell intact on eBay). Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. 

As a last note, I understand that people will want in-progress pics so they can see what's running through my mind as I make these things (not to mention make some of their own)  however many of the models you'll be seeing here have been built way before I even thought of blogging, much less documenting the creative process. The next project I start (which, at this stage looks like Necron Tyranid models; more on that later) I shall endeavor to document, but for you kind readers (thank you for your comments about the Warhound!) the next few blogs will be things which have been built and, as such, are photo-ready. This includes the strange armies I have built for Warhammer Fantasy.