Oh Ghost Ark, You Complete Me.....

The Ghost Ark is not a kit.

The Ghost Ark is a curse. 

As models go, you have quick little jaunts like, say, the Rhino. It fits together quickly and simply, and is a solid little mid-afternoon jaunt in the hobby park. You see the leaves, you feel the wind on your face, and you’re done. A little too soon, perhaps, but it was pleasant. 

Then you have the Ghost Ark. The Ghost Ark is not there to remind you of life, putting the spring back into your step after spending hours in the dreary office of Other Models. The purpose of the Ghost Ark is to punish you for not buying enough Necron stuff in the first place. 

How dare you, Ghost Ark says. How dare you not buy flights of Destroyers and triads of Wraiths from the last codex. What was wrong with Pariahs, who did everything a single infantry unit could do, and better than everything else in our meager codex? How dare you reject them? 

But--but the only things that worked in the entire list were the Warriors, Immortals and Destroyers, Ghost Ark. What was I to do? I used Pariahs once or twice, but there wasn’t enough points left for everything else. And Wraiths, they just died too quickly. 

This chap is my new favorite Necron, ever. 

Shh, shh. That is all in the past. Ghost Ark says. I am here now. 

Yes, Ghost Ark is here. Make no mistake, cool and serpentine, this thing is the very best of the Cutting Room floor: 

Do not, repeat, DO NOT throw away concept sketches. EVER.
The art department at Lucasfilm knows this, and now GW does, too.

The pilot is in as many pieces as they could make a figure. I was was surprised that the legs were attached as an integrated piece, because they were separate from the pelvis, which is its own separate bit. There are the obligatory torso halves, but there are separate HEAD and NECK pieces, for pete’s sake. One arm is separated at the elbow for no apparent reason. Then you have a spinal column connecting him to command chair. 

What other infantry-sized miniature has a separate neck?

Still my favorite part of the entire model. 

Sorry, did you want quality out of your Necron vehicles? No one (with any common sense) bought flights of slab-sided, boring monoliths, so in retribution, here is your delicate plastic flower. That is our revenge, Necron player. Drown in the depths of our design. Choke on our cyclopean geometry. Ghost Ark is the other side of the diabolical eldritch coin. A pyramid with a big gay emerald on it was iceberg tip of the horrible writhing squid monster sleeping beneath the surface of a lackluster codex. Therein lies an underworld of poorly-written fluff 
and way too many open-topped vehicles.  

Like the well-engineered Rhino, this thing does fit together like a dream (well, a different sort of dream). But make no mistake, there are quite a few places to go wrong in this garden of earthly delights, and if your attention to detail wavers, Ghost Ark will not forgive you. Slovenliness will be met with disaster, so you’d better have your wits about while you’re working on this. 

You should most definitely not be writing a review. Ghost Ark will punish this most severely.  

Ghost Ark #2 of 4 turned out rather bendy. Maybe they flex in flight like a fish?
At any rate, this is a mold issue of some kind, and 100% not my fault.  

Necron players are going to be buying and assembling these things in spades, in their many hundreds. Why not? It’s an AV13 transport that restores warriors to their units, has banks of gauss weapons it can fire on the move, and is generally a good idea. Marines wish they had something as good as Ghost Ark. Imperial Guard... well, they have the Vendetta, which is arguably better. Not since we got that graceful bird have we been gifted so.

I will say it this but once, ever, GW, so you’d better  listen up: this makes up for the awful tragedy that is the Storm Raven.

The Cestus... well, you’ll have to give us a while for that one. 


On second thought, no, it's just too bloody ugly and stupid. 

An Xmas surprise (for Necrons)...

The Catacomb Command & Annhilation Barge (or Pwn Barge, as it has become known) is 90% the same footprint, in all three dimensions, as our good friend the venerable Tyrannofex. There had been much trepidation about this, as the length of their Necron Persuasiveness Enhancers had been of some concern, but apparently from nose to tail the length works out to about the same, which is excellent news, because I wasn't looking forward to purchasing 3-6 barges even at discount eBay prices. Looks Like my barges will be fewer, and for Overlord joyride purposes only. 


Now all they have to do is make Doom Scythes the exact size and shape of my Harpy models, and we'll be in business. I'd rather make three more of those things than see a bunch of blasted crescents flying around the table any day. There's just something sad very un-threatening about chasing my opponents around  with metallic doom pastries..

Merry Christmas!

More so than Thanksgiving, Christmas is time when I feel truly grateful for all the blessings of the year, and this year has been exceptionally blessed, what with the new job and other developments in my life. You all have been a part of that, some of you more than you know.  So, to everyone out the big wide world, thanks for being there, and the best of the season to you and yours. 

Resurrecting the Necrons, Part 1: Changes...

So, the Necrons finally got the codex update we've all been waiting for. It's made some units better, some unusable and some... are just different. While I never stopped using mine, really, they'd sort of taken a back seat to my Admech and Marine armies on the gaming table. With the all the new kit, it seems like high time they come to the fore again, but it's going to take some heavy reorganization....

I loved my Destroyer wing army. Three squads of them like big, multi-wound tanks zipping about and torrenting things to death. Now they're jump infantry with weaker 24" guns, and not much else going for them.  So, like everyone else under the sun, I'll be using the models as Tomb Blades. As they were, they would have competed with the Blades for a Fast Attack slot, but honestly, did the Necrons really need a new jet bike unit? Couldn't we just add tesla weapons as an option and left them as Jetbikes? For that matter, when you think of jump infantry, you think of a some sort of standing model with a jetpack, and these are... skimmers with flight bases. Oh well, both forms of Necron jump infantry blow anyway. If I ever buy any Triarch Praetorians, they'll be turned into Crypteks. Now the only viable Destroyers to have in an army are the heavy variety:

And even these are competing with things in other slots for points. At least Heavy Gauss Cannons didn't get nerfed that much. Still, it makes me want to re-jigger these into an Immortal with big stabilizer legs and jump wings of some kind. You'll see what I mean further below.

I barely ever used Tomb Spiders at all in my old army. They cost too much, did too little, and died rather pathetically. However, I loved the model so much I invested in a group of them when I found them on the cheap on e-bay. I bent the hell out of the parts to give them a more dynamic pose, and added extra arms from the old Wraiths to give them some surgical kit. How were they supposed to operate with those big clumsy tri-claws, anyway? 

I never understood why they decided to call them spiders when they're basically giant beetles. Oh well. Now their stats are great for the price, they fix vehicles, and they still shit scarabs like there's no tomorrow. Can you field nine of them in big crawly units? You probably shouldn't but who knows? From the book art, I'm betting there's going to be a plastic  kit that can either be a Spider or a Wraith, which means some nice leftovers either way. Speaking of Wraiths: 

They're slightly better now! Whee! Their options are.... different, and mostly not so good. I do like the particle caster and whips, but the transdimensional beamer, ilk ethe other characteristic test shenanigans in the codex, is shit. They should've written them to force the enemy unit to take their tests on 2D6, or just plain made it a different sort of weapon (like a flamer with entropic strike, or gauss, or something else). My Wraiths lost their surgical tools, and got whips to make them more creepy and ethereal as they flew around:

No, they won't be hiding behind any low terrain, either. I'm willing to put up with it to have them swimming through the air like those sentinels from the Matrix trilogy. Sadly, the new wraiths are constructs, so these may have to be beheaded. 

I ran out of whip arms, and as a result their commander made do with all the extra claws from the others. The new multi-eye heads, providing they aren't too big, will make them more insect/cephalod like as a whole. I don't think I'll have the heart to behead the poor buggers win the time comes, though. I only ever ran them as two units alongside with my Destroyer Lord, General Vhespid:

He was also engineered never to get cover, sadly, but being a jet bike, he never needed it. Just zipped right in with a cloud of scarabs or wraiths and axed things to death. This configuration, with legs, is closer to what destroyers are now, or should be. Honestly, all GW had to do was relabel the old Destroyers as Tomb Blades and give them different arms, and go from there. What the hell use does Preferred Enemy have for shooting units? 


Ooooh wait, 6th edition is coming. Maybe it'll make all shooting twin-linked or something? Who knows? I prefer to expect the worst; that way I'm pleasantly surprised when good things manage to happen, like Ghost Arks and Annihilation Barges. 

WIP: A new whip for an old army.....

Just a quick WIP of Ghost Ark #1 today. I'm still trying to decide whether or not I like the "old penny" paint scheme; it doesn't quite have that "fresh out of the sand" thing going for it. I may need to use some actual sand.....

=][= MVNDA

Tears of Envy has been showing off some of the brilliant design work that has gone into this project on her excellent blog, which I highly recommend all of you go check out. Apparently there's an affiliated website coming, along with other lovely gothic things.  


While you're at it, follow her, too. She's quite possibly one of the most talented designers I've ever had the privilege to sort of know, and always, always interesting. 


Happy Friday, people. 

Hell Is Other Resins...

The good news is that Anubis is nearing completion. All the brush work on the main model is done, which means I get to go back over it with an airbrush and do some weathering soon. Well, as soon as I get my ancient airbrush cleaned and up to par. The bad news is, while I was priming his wings, the wind picked up the box and, well....

Snap! went the sensitive spar on two of them. This brings us to the title of today's blog. Anubis was crafted from a clear resin that is the most infuriating shit I've ever had to work with. It has a measure of elasticity, yet it shatters. It's rock-hard and doesn't sand well at all. About the only thing it takes to is drilling, but you have to do it by hand, because a Dremel running at the slowest speed will, in fact, melt the resin, giving you a drill bit coated in black, translucent crap. The only thing it didn't do in the mold, apparently, was air-bubble, but there are enough crevices and weird imperfection on the thing that I had fits sanding it down. Oh, and did I mention that the clear resin is EXTREMELY PAINT RETARDENT. Thank heavens I had some Tamiya Mr. Surfacer on hand, because other primers just slid right off. The Anubis kit was a great deal at the price, but in retrospect, I should've passed on it completely.  Once the model is finished, I may even sell it and console myself with the Revoltech (despite the heinous paint job)  or Kotobukiya versions being released eventually. 


Then there's this:

A General Grievous Tyracron commissioned by a client. Overall, the project went well and I'm very satisfied with it, but I wish I'd been able to use a metal Hive Tyrant instead of a Finecast one. Finecast, while being light and fluffy, is also crumbly and incredibly brittle. It has a small measure of elasticity and there were no glaring problems the sculpt, however, it's not much harder than, say, very brittle chalk, and I was nervous every time I had to cut or drill into the thing. Unlike my half-metal version, this thing is not at all top-heavy (a plus) and can stand without the larger base (the client wanted to be able to use it as a Nemesis DK) but man, is the FInecast resin ever flimsy. I can't imagine trying to work with some of the smaller models. 

Now, it drilled well, took to CYA glue and paint like a champ, and generally held the detail from its casting pretty well too. Thankfully, some of the horror stories I've been reading here and there didn't apply to this kit, but nonetheless, there was some chipping of the parts right out of the box. If I'd been assembling it as a stock Tyrant, the whips and swords would have eventually just snapped right off from continued use. Luckily, those sexy serpentine lightsabers are themselves quite sturdy. I have a hunch he'll be primarily a shelf piece, but the client has a working Star Wars army, so who knows? Transport him carefully!

Some hot Grievous vs Grievous action for you. 

Every Jedi's worst nightmare. For that matter, Space Marines wouldn't like two Swarmlords coming at them, either. 


More commission stuff on the way, plus some Necron action (ooooh I can't wait, can you?) Yes, I did order some Ghost Arks. I may magnetize them to work as Doomsday Arks, but if the size factor is equivalent enough, then my Tyrannofexes will simply step (or hover?) into a new gunship role in my Necron army. I'm not entranced with the Annihilation Barge design, so that role may go to my Harpies. Again, it'll depend on the form factor. It looks like one or two of the things I ruminated about waaaaaay back during the Codex: Royal Necrons post are coming true, too.


Happy Monday, people.  

I wish they'd hurry up and....

... cast Daniel Craig as Ibram Gaunt already. Defiance was fucking brilliant and he's not getting any younger. Also with the new Necron models and whatnot. 


Speaking models coming soon, we forge on with Anubis. I'm busy resurrection my ancient airbrush so I can shade his bronzed frame properly.  Also, there's a clone of General Grievous coming and a bunch of other things from commission-land. 

Oh, come ON...

My version isn't even done yet, and they go and come out with this.

It's just so well made, too. 

Man.... I really need to get a move on and finish that model.

9/11

This is what should have arisen again as a monument to the slain. 


Personally, I hate the current memorial. While I get the symbolism, leaving two holes in the ground is an insult. It feels like handing the slime who did this a trophy to hang on their cave wall. After all, they didn't leave a notch in the Pentagon, did they? Hell no. 


Sigh. 


RIP, Donna Hegelmeyer. Your kids are doing fine, but they sure miss you.