Horus Heresy Imperial Militia - Counts as Proteus

Hey ho, lets go!

So one of the very best things about the Imperial Militia in the Horus Heresy, is that it gives you one of the greatest scopes for using whatever you fancy to represents units and vehicles. As an army, the Imperial Militia represents a time before the standardisation of the Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum), and as such all of the armies are drawn from the available resources that each planet has, with a smattering of mechanicum developed vehicles thrown in.

This gives you a cornucopia of ways with which to model your armies! Obviously you won't be able to use them at any official GW events if you stray from their own range, but the temptation to make use of all those cool miniatures I've spotted over the years just proved far too irresistible for me!

To that end, I've converted (poorly I might add) some walking tanks from the old Dust Tactics game to represent my Land Raider Proteus troop carriers in my Imperial Militia army. I just love the idea of an army that has mostly utilised walking tanks, rather than tracked ones in its arsenal. 

Behold! Number 1:

There will be three of these in total when I am done... and I am considering purchasing some other walking tanks to really hammer home the aesthetic. I also have tripedal array for my laser rapier destroyer batteries so that should get the army looking on point. 

Peace out,

Rob

Anvil Industry Unboxing - Part 1

Hi everyone,

I recently showed you lot the large order I received from Anvil Industry. Today I'm going to show you some close up views of the purchases as they came out of the packaging. Later this week I will take pictures of the other half and go over those as well. 

I very highly rate Anvil Industry both for their products and for their conduct as a company. I personally think this shows through in the pictures below as the quality is plain to see. After I have reviewed the products through unboxing I will be taking you step wise through the construction of this force showing how the pieces all come together into coherent models, squads and a force. 

I will note that I have some parts from additional companies coming through the post to round off the force, but the vast majority of parts come from Anvil's Exo-Lord range that has near everything you could need to customise a force of space marines. As and when I receive the other parts I will also review them :)

Heads

Here you can see two examples of Anvil's Spartan Helmets that I purchases along with a sprue of their character heads. The Spartan heads came pre-clipped from any sprues and are shown as is from the bag on arrival. I'm very impressed with the crisp detail of the visors and the hairs of the crest in particular. Previously I have bought heads from Scibor and was disappointed with the "fudged" detail which was a particular problem when it came to painting the eye visors. No such problem here. 

Equally the bare heads have particularly nice hair detailing. I feel the eye sockets are just a bit deeper than is "real" but that means when you actually have them painted then they have a more realistic looking depth set back in the face.

Torsos

I've Previously purchased this sprue of robed torsos from Anvil before and as last time they are wonderfully clean of flash and the folds in the robes lend themselves well to wet blending as much as using washes to shade them for less advanced painters. These match up well with the robed legs I also purchased that you can see in the legs section.

Anvil do a few different styles of torsos in their Exo-lord range, I chose this medieval range as I really like the high gorget that gives the head a more sunken look and, practically speaking, a more protected neck joint. All the rivets are well pronounced and rounded with none malformed in the 27 I bought.

Pauldrons

These pauldrons are the matching style to the medieval torsos and have a similar clean casting across all 60 I bought with a nice upper and lower lip of riveted detail. If you were so inclined I believe it would be quite easy to cut the lower inner section of the pauldron with a scalpel to create a smaller more lightweight looking shoulder guard.

Legs

These are the medieval styled legs (do you see a theme!) These were the only items in my order that required any flash clean up, and that itself was minimal. I bought several sets of running poses and a single crouched pose for an apothecary. As you'll see when I have these up and built they provide a really nice variety of poses for your models. There are 5 unique posings of the legs which means you are going to have less repeats than you would get from GW or FW sculpts I find. I have squads of 5-10 so at maximum I have the same pose twice in a squad.

Finally for this first unboxing review we have the robed legs that match the robed torsos. I would only really recommend using these legs with the robed torsos personally. I have tried mixing and matching with other torsos and they just look silly. These had extremely limited flash to clean up and again they have a decent number of folds with a depth that lends themselves well to simple painting techniques if you aren't super confident with cloth painting like me! Again also you can see that there are 5 distinct poses preventing repeated poses.

Overall

If you hadn't guessed I am very impressed by the quality of Anvil's products. It's worth bearing in mind that I ordered nearly 30 of everything (60 of the pauldrons) plus a few one of sprues of items and it took me a single hour of work to clean any mould release off the parts and completely clean up any flash and remove all the items from the sprue. I cleaned the parts out of habit and past bad experiences with resin in general, but with the exception of the medieval legs there was absolutely no tell tale sign of the slightly waxen/greasy feel that mould release leaves on the resin. 

My presumption with the legs was that due to their many rivets and detailed plating sections that more mould release is applied to ensure the pieces and the moulds aren't damaged during removal.

In part 2 of this unboxing I will be going over all of the smaller sundry items that I also purchased, which include arms, weapons (melee and ranged), as well as cloaks, loincloths and a few other bits and pieces. So stay tuned!

Peace out,

Rob

Spartan Assault Tank - Counts as Conversion Complete

Hi folks,

I hope you peoples have had a lovely christmas and are none the worse for wear after the festivities! This post is just an update on my counts as Spartan assault tank for my 30k Dark Angels. I finally won enough bits on ebay to construct the sponsons. Nothing complicated here, just a normal lascannon sponson with an additional gun in the middle, to be used as laser destroyers rather than quad lascannons. 

A little bit of greenstuff crack filling required but other than that the next time you see this monstrosity it should have its first lick of paint!

Peace out,

Rob

Converted Counts as Caestus Assault Ram for Dark Angels - WIP

Hey everyone, I hope the weekend finds you well,

So I wanted to use a caestus assault ram for my 30k Dark Angels army as a means of transporting my terminators into the heart of the enemy. However they are over £100 and I also felt that given everything else in the army is converted and looks a bit half assed to boot that a pristine unconverted model would stick out like a sore thumb.

Thus I looked into converting or scratch building a ram. I stumbled upon the above picture which shows sketches of potential ram designs by the forgeworld team before they settled on the one at the bottom of the page. I genuinely didn't think I could make that look good, the separation between the two front arms just worried me as I am a very untidy and and amateur converter. 

But I looked at the design at the top right they rejected and thought I cold handle that! So below is my WIP for building that. Its just inspired by that concept (i.e. looks nothing like it) and I really am not good at using plasticard and foamboard etc, but feedback will help me improve it I am sure! The photos are  many and varied in their quality but I just snapped as many as I could to try and let you see all of it.

The plan is to have two magma cannon looking things on the turrets that will be blasting the hole that the front would ram into and disgorge its contents. Other than that I am worried about the wings really!

All the bits for this by the way cost me £50 total so even though it looks like a lot of kits to smash together its still half the price of buying the ram proper!

Peace out,

Rob

Spartan Assault Tank - Counts as Conversion

Have you ever seen fire in zero G?

So as I mentioned in previous posts I have been working on a counts as Spartan Assault Tank. The reason for converting my own are two fold. The first is cost, with the actual tank rocking at over £100 its pricey! The second is aesthetic, I really don't like the over sized and extremely vulnerable to damaging enemy fire tank tracks. They just look silly to me. I'm also not a fan of the slightly extended nose.

I can totally see that people would like this aesthetic, I don't think it is an inherently silly or ugly tank, but not my cuppa thank you very much. What is my cuppa is the grandiose baroque gothic look of 40k, I absolutely dig John Blanche and the fantastically religious overtones of a techno backward advanced civilisation, I dig it good. With that in mind, I sent £40 on ebay and in stores picking up all the necessary materials and also dug around my room for whatever I thought might be useful.

Below is the results so far...

I still have soooooo much to do on this, but I couldn't resist sharing it. It doesn't even have an undercarriage yet! That is one of the next things to do as well as decide how to convert the weapons and mount them on the side. I have lots of greenstuff work to do to smooth out some of the transitions and generally tidy it up from being the mess it is at the moment.

But overall I am really pleased with how it has turned out. Almost considering building a second...

I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this, in particular if I rocked up with this and said I was playing it as a spartan would you be cool with that? I know it doesn't really look anything like one but I hope the rule of cool would win through :)

Peace out,

Rob