Sternguard on a budget

Evening all, this week I have been working towards constructing my first wave of Sternguard.  As a Crimson Fists player, the elites choice of Sternguard is a no brainer, the combination of nice fluff and a very flexible codex listing and Pedro Kantor's Sternguard buffing abilities means any 'Fists player should have at least a squad of them.

I've got it into my head that it would be nice to at least have the option of fielding three full squads of sternies if the situation allows, and that situation would have to be at least a 1200 point battle if it's going to be legal with a HQ and two troops choices.

Lovely as the GW releases are, buying six boxes of the latest Sternguard plastics at £30 each would cost me £180, which frankly is too much for my hobby, I probably spend that on minis in a year so i need another way.

For £40 i've amassed enough bits, bodies and guns to equip 30ish Sternguard, many of the parts came from my bits box but if a bits box isn't there to furnish an epic project such as this then what is it actually for? Trawling ebay got me 20x old Death Company metals for £17 (look out for late night auctions when most people are not online), and the rest was spent on various bits websites purchasing weapons and terminator honours shoulder pads.  Add a paint stripped tactical squad from my brother's foray into 40k and that makes 30 bodies.

The marine on the left is a standard tactical marine with a swapped in Crux Terminatus pad, and one of my home made combi weapons.  For the combi-flamer you need a bolter, imperial guard grenade launcher and imperial guard flamer.  The heavy flamer is carved from an old terminator and I added a wire grab handle to the top, he also has a metal crux terminatus.... all of my sternguard will have terminator shoulder pads to mark them out from the rank and file marines.

The next four marines are a plasma gun and three combi plasmas each made from a bolt gun, storm bolter magazine and a plasma pistol nozzle.  The addition of termi honours and extra general bling should add to the final effect, I want my veterans to look well equipped and individual, so I'm getting a little excited with the purity seals.  The old metal death company marines are a little weedy next to the modern plastics so I drill out the head starting with a 1mm bit and gradually working up to a 6mm then trim off any excess metal with a knife and needle files.  This is a tricky operation and not to be rushed!  I can then add a newer head and make him a bit taller in the process.

Two more minor conversions, the old veteran on the left has the addition of a box magazine to beef up his bolter, and to the back i have attached a helmet (my pet space marine peeve is bare headed dudes not at least carrying a helmet).  The guy on the right is a salvaged tactical with drilled out head and added 2013 sternguard bare- head as well as the usual termi honours and sternie bolter.

Here are the next three combi- flamers, two with grenade launcher mags and one with a box mag.

The overall plan is to have 15 special weapon/ combi weapon dudes with 5 each of melta, plasma and flamer, then the rest with sternguard special issue bolters. You can see the results of my plasma efforts above.  I've made about 14 men so far, some may have heavy weapons although I'm not sure about this, but with so many I'll be able to pick and choose for my games of 40k.

30 Sternguard at about £1.30 each, that's one reason to be cheerful :)

Pedro Kantor

Hello 40k people, I've posted up my recently painted Pedro Kantor model to celebrate my first couple of games of 40k 6th edition.  It's taken quite a while to get this far due to other commitments but in the last month I've painted lots of Crimson Fists and revamped my old Imperial Guard while acquainting myself with the new space marine codex and reprising the joys of footslogging Imperial Guard.

My first game was a 1000 pointer versus mechanized Orks, in which Pedro led a Imperial Guard platoon onto the objective while his battle brothers gave supporting fire.  It was a very close game and surprisingly I came out on top, partially due to Pedro bopping a squad of Killa Kans in close assault but also largely due to my opponent being enormously sporting by offering advice on my moves.... cheers Si!

My second game saw me facing an inquisitorial retinue, now talk about two totally different forces, I had tweaked my 1000 point guard/SM army to have a cheaper SM captain over Pedro, and two extra mortar squads in the platoon.  Despite facing two inquisitors, a callidus assassin and loads of lascannon wielding Jokaero I managed to mortar and las spam the inquisition to a standstill, meaning i just took the central objective with heavy casualties and won my second game.

I'm really enjoying 6th edition and I like the 'fluffy' synergy of my Crimson Fists and Imperial Guard who hold the line while the Astartes act as mobile fire teams and fill in emergency roles.  Over the comng weeks I'm building a Sternguard force for a coming tournament, unfortunately no allies but I think a Pedro-Sternguard build could be competitive.

The Gun Cutter- A mock up

Evening all.  So after some scribbling of ideas and ruminating on the insanity of embarking on what looks to be a huge investment of time, not to mention plasticard... I knocked together a rough mock up out of an old carton and my trusty glue gun.  The point of this is to make sure that it hangs together as a whole and to help me visualise how I'm going to model it.  Judging from the size it looks like it will have to be a modular build so I can store and transport it easily, as the current dimensions are about 55cm long with a 35cm wingspan.

This is actually the second attempt- the first one was way too fat and bulky and looked stupid.  Hopefully this doesn't look (as) stupid, anyway it's pretty close in shape to how i visualise the Gun Cutter described in Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn novels with the hawkish profile and dagger like aspect.

The diagonal bit under the belly is an access ramp which might be intended to house a Chimera or Rhino inside the lower fuselage, that depends on my insanity levels when it comes to cutting the plasticard (I've ordered 8x A4 sheets of the stuff, and I've got a feeling that might not be enough)

The engines, of which there are four will be scavenged from some pod racer toys.  I've seen this done on some Thunderhawk scratch builds and they look spot on for a 40k ship.  I need lots of vertical jets to make the prospect of this huge lump operating in a gravity well at least fairly plausible, because let's face it..... in the grim darkness of the future, there is no aerodynamics.

Looking at the photos I'm questioning the proportions, maybe the fuselage could be longer and or skinnier.... hmmm.  I'll sleep on that, and start buying every imperial flyer bit I can find on ebay for the next few months.

Building a 40k Gun Cutter- Planning

It's been a while since I've done a scratch building project, and after reading Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn Trilogy for the third time I realised that the inquisitors 'Gun Cutter' would make an interesting project. Having a look on the internet and taking a few notes from the books inspired a few points about the craft- it's a void capable craft that can enter planetary atmospheres, it can house 20ish troops and it has berths for about 5 crew. It has three autocannon turrets and it's about 80 metres long.... ok in 40k scale that would make it about 1 metre long but I think I'l stick to about 60-70cm for practicality. After some very rough sketching I have a shape, instead of following the model of the Thunderhawk gunship, I'm going to take my inspiration more from Battlefleet Gothic as this is more of a spacefaring system ship that can land on planets rather than a dedicated lander.

I've got plenty of plasticard on order, and will be making my own resin castings for the more repetitive detail (I'm too lazy to cut out the same pieces over and over again!)

I see this sort of vessel as being a transport for high ranking Imperial agents, dignitaries like navis nobilite and rogue traders, something along the lines of a yacht.  It should make a cool centre piece for my rogue trader themed army.

Crimson Fists Captain Jorge

After a fairly large break in my painting I've been hankering after trying out my painting skills to 'benchmark' them and see what I'm capable of.  When you're painting loads of rank and file troops for an army it's easy to forget about the more sophisticated painting techniques that are saved for special characters and commissions.   So I broke out this plastic Space Marine captain to really flex my painting muscles and here is the result....

One thing I really wanted to try was NMM- that's non metallic metal, and I used this technique on the sword.  As you can see I've used conventional metallic paints elsewhere and it seems to hang together.  The sword is just Revell dark grey blended up to GW Skull White in a way to mimic shining steel.  I'm fairly happy with the result and will incorporate it into future projects.

I'm really trying to up my game when it comes to painting as I felt for a while I'd got into a rut (painting an Imperial Guard infantry company, over a hundred guys in brown overalls was a killer!!) so it's nice to show off a bit and remember that painting minis is meant to be an enjoyable experience!

Crimson Fists Tactical Squad with vintage minis

After another hiatus from blogging I thought I'd show you my most recent paint job... these Crimson Fists are assembled from a motley crew of vintage metal Space Marines and painted to my normal spec Crimson Fists paint scheme that is visible elsewhere on this blog.  I haven't painted much in the last 18 months as my hobby stuff has been packed away in a loft after a succession of house moves,  life keeps getting in the way of the Emperors work, Gah!!

The minis in this squad cover a range of eras, with the smaller looking 'Aquila' Armour guys actually being the first next gen marines that were released in something like 1992.  They were initially available as a boxed set of 15 bolter armed marines called the 'Strike Force', the other figures include some old Blood Angels and cetre stage in the bottom row is a Mk8 Mentor Armoured marine, now that too is a pretty old figure but it's a nice example of Jes Goodwin's exemplary sculpting technique when Games Workshop started going from the standard 28mm scale to the more familiar 28mm' Heroic' scale.  I love the pose on the Mentor armoured marine, he's giving out some tough vibes for sure.

I remember when this boxed set came out (yes I am a wizened veteran) and for my birthday I had the choice between this box and the Terminator boxed set, in the end I went for the Terminators because I already had something like four squads of beakies painted up as Blood Angels by then, but it reminds me of how back then everyone who collected marines had a hotch potch of different minis sculpted in many different styles.  While at the time it was frustrating, it also looked pretty cool, as up to 2nd Edition Warhammer 40k everything tended to have a more anarchic look and feel.

A Thousand Sons

Anyone visiting this Blog will, at the very least know about the epic Horus Heresy series, and I'm guessing many of you will be following it. The most recent release, Graham McNeill's
A Thousand Sons charts the fate of the eponymous Legion, familar in their 40k incarnation as sorcerous Chaos Space Marines the story goes a long way to explaining the downfall of these once noble warriors while thankfully avoiding many of the potential traps and cliches already plundered in lesser Black Library piblications.

With the Horus Heresy now numbering a dozen books, including an excellent anthology of short stories edited by the head honcho himself- Rick Priestley. The quality has been a bit patchy to say the least. As far as genre literature goes the overall quality has been good, and having my first exposure to the great Heresy aged a measly ten years of age I have found my expectations probably unfairly high. Fans, while loving their adopted material can also be the most partisan of critics and I'm sure the Black Library are more than aware of this. Personally I found the series got off to a good start, with truly epic scenes depicting the rise of Horus and the prosecution of the Emperors great bloody work- The Great Crusade, becoming Homeresque in their recounting. The low point so far I would have to say would be Mechanicum, McNeill's last outing in the series and, to be fair a difficult subject (making the reader sympathise with mechanical characters seems pretty difficult) made me approach A Thousand Sons with some trepidation.

So it is satisfying indeed that the Author has trumped the series by writing a novel that makes the reader love the main characters, undoubtedly the most human Astartes we have met yet, before plunging them into a wicked tragedy that takes the reader into a downward spiral as if a brother of the Thousand Sons legion himself. Magnus the Red, arguably the most powerful and potent of the Primarchs is a flawed gem of a character. His humility and philosophical outlook enamour the reader, while his veiled ambition and pride shows portent of his downfall, his love of knowledge and outlook for humanity leave you in no doubt that he is good. So all the more tragic the outcome, we know the fate of the legion- their transformation is skillfully written. Be it known the Emperor makes mistakes, and this book encompasses that very hubris in a skillfully written account that could be no further from the black and white good versus evil version of the 'current' 40k background, here instead find the multitude of greys that colour the human condition.

Good science fiction tells you about humanity, and Graham McNeill has put the Black Library back on track with this latest installment- top marks.