Welcome back my excellent friends. My humblest apologies for the time between updates, but the weather has not been helpful with painting.
This is quite a long post, so be prepared.
I currently have 3 squads and 2 characters for the pirate force, a sizeable warband, some decent heavy weapons and anti infantry options, it would be quite flexible on the tabletop. However…
Heavy weapons reduce the movement speed of my troops (and suspensors to offset that are not in the Eldar equipment list for some reason), and, more importantly, my planned opponent has been proudly showing off all of his rhino chassis based conversions for his space marines. He has an advantage of having started his project a few years ago.
I need added movement, and I need something harder to damage than squishy space elves. I need a tank!
However, the only vehicles available at this point, as I am collecting as if it was 1988, were the Rhino and the Land Raider for transport…
…Unless I use the vehicle creation rules in the RT rule book! That marvellous set of stats and numbers that gave us the Deodorant Grav Tank should be my salvation. I just need something to base it on.
One trip into town and a look around and I found this piece of lovely plastic;
There was a motor unit, battery mount and a set of wheels, but we just want the chassis, lighter and easier to transport. Now… it needs some weapons. During the trip to find the base vehicle also gave me this;
A small gundam box showing a pair of small rifles on top? Yes please! Can I make these a base for a pair of shuriken catapults, let’s break out the milliput and see.
For the circular ammunition magazines, I found some old split pins, filled in the underside with greenstuff to allow it to indent the guns for a better fit, and some sculpted housing.
Unfortunately, two light catapults aren’t going to help hugely against other vehicles no matter how good the following fire rule is. We need a big gun. We need to go old school again.
TRANSFORMERS! ROBOTS WITH BIG GUNS!
I had many transformers/knock off changing robots in my youth, so getting my hands on a decent sized cannon just meant looking through an old toy box when I visited family. This option seemed appropriate, but I can’t remember what bot it was from so don’t ask.
Boom. Literally.
That’s the offensive ability sorted, now to look at the ‘anti-grav’ ability, let’s talk greebling. The art of taking normal items and using them to add detail to a project, for my tank, this took the form of pins!
With holes drilled through the (deceptively thick) plastic of the blue areas, that you may notice here were also filled in with milliput rather than keeping them hollow (and had I been smart I would have greebled before filling), so the circular pin heads (cut off the pin a short way down) are set looking like some sort of ‘power globe’.
Now, it looks a bit wonky here, but trust me, paint will tie things together, so first we prime!
You may notice the new dome in the ‘head’, my display cabinet came with a number of these ‘dots’ as a way to stop damage with the door slamming. Free greebling!
Then we base colour and wash!
And finally main colour and highlights!
And my local game store does some nice laser cut mdf bases, so with some dowel and hot glue, we get a finished product!
Now, I can see some rough areas, and my limited skill in a few areas, but I feel this is very much in the spirit of those older RT vehicles seen in white dwarf, made from deodorant sticks, or zoids! I’m not a miniature designer, just a strange wizard sat at his kitchen table making an army for a game from almost 40 years ago. I had fun doing it, and it looks good based next to my units. 3 foot rule is in effect!
So how will it play? What are its rules? Well, my excellent followers, keep an eye on this space, and we shall go through how to make an army using the Rogue Trader rule book.
It’s … very different…
