Casting: Take Two

Back in, oh, I don't know, 2008 or so, I tried resin casting some Space Marine bits. I was fourteen at the time, so it didn't go very well. Here I am, twelve years later, older, wiser, sadder, and trying again. Hopefully, it'll go more smoothly this time... Without getting resin all over Mom's sink. That stuff set like Gorilla Glue, and man, she was not happy about that one...

Mold kit from Hobby Lobby: the same stuff I tried last decade.

Rather than trying to cast an entire model, I'll start out with some bits. I need Kasrkin backpacks, and dozens of them. And Kasrkin helmets. Later one, I'll experiment with some partial models. For now, a set of three two Kasrkin packs.


Mold box. Initial concept was a box made from Legos, but I'm impatient at the best of times, so I went with a Tupperware lid and gluing the packs to a plastic base as seen.

That didn't work, the lid I was using was too shallow and would have left holes in the bottom of the mold. So I just glued the packs into the mold box and used some electrical tape to give the mold some extra depth.

The mold is set! It took all night, I went to work, came home, and popped it out.

Time to pour in the resin...

5ml of resin was too much...

Finished product! The antennas need some shaving, but overall, not bad! Now I just need to make another thirty-six, plus however many more Storm Troopers I'm going to make...

Photo credit goes to my Lady -my pic was straight up veggie quality. Squash plant, even...

Next project will be to replicate this mold a couple of times so I can make more than two packs at a time, and then maybe later, full-up Kasrkin.

Maybe later?

It'll need a two-part cast, and I don't quite have my head around how that will work. Maybe just the torso, so I can add kneeling legs easier.

-Six out.

Modifying Lasguns

 Quote For The Day: “[F]ighting humans is a losing proposition: All you get is sorry, hungry and sore.” -Mr. Keene at the Battle of Richmond, Gust Front, by John Ringo.

Stormtroopers get snazzier kit than the regular Guard: carapace armor, respirators, night-vision, grav-chutes, and most notably: hotshot weaponry. More powerful than the regular lasgun, they still lose range in favor of superior penetration. It always baffeled me why the old Kasrkin models had beefier lasguns than the regular Cadians but still lost range; the older metal stormies' and the new Scions' hotshots... Well, I'm not a fan of the look. All the stock lasguns look too long to me. And for such a mobile force, the cables from the backpack to the weapon seem a silly design. Modern forces carry magazines and boxes of spare ammunition for a reason. So, I cut the models up. Edit: apparently Mad Robot Miniatures now makes a set of heavily-armored infantry that looks and quacks much like a Kasrkin.

Take a standard Kantrael pattern lasgun from the Cadian sprue. Lop off the  muzzle / muzzle and bayonet, saving them for later. At the join between the skull and right-hand wing, cut again and discard the excess. Should have a skull with a wing flaring off the left. Shave off the integral sight. Chops complete.

Glue a thin piece of sprue on the top of the weapon, replicating the optics rail seen on the old M-16 series weapon or the newer FAMAS weapons used by the French.

Sand down, glue on, and smooth it out. Add armor, bayonets, and optics to taste.

Since the Scions got their own codex back in 6th Edition, they had access to the hotshot volleygun. A fantastic weapon: high rate of fire, good penetration. It's  been a staple for my storm troopers ever since. With my previous collection I'd settled for gluing an extra barrel onto a Kantrael pattern and calling it a day. However, since I obviously hate myself, my new ones are extra. An extra magazine to extend the existing one, underslung secondary barrel, optic mount from another Kantrael on the side to beef up the assembly... Hellfire.

As with all hobby pictures, it looks better in real life, held from an arms' length away.

-Six out.

Another Sunday Staff Duty

...And that's why I spent all day painting. And burned through The 13th Warrior, Hot Fuzz and Oh! What A Lovely War. Read two books. Picked up two boneheads from the MP station. Quiet day, really.

Sat outside for awhile, watching the rain come in and the sun go down, smoking my pipe for the first time in awhile. It was a lovely evening for it, too: the smoke from my pipe curling up and away through the sheets of water pouring out of the sky as my Irish playlist hums in the background.

Zombicide: Invader is a terrific solo / co-op game: scads of models (hundreds), simple rules (I've taught more than one grandmother to play), lots of fun. Sadly the models don't come painted (eh, I'd have eventually repainted them myself anyway) and, as mentioned, there's rather a lot of them. Hundreds. It's enough work to go through the characters, let alone the zombies. Er, aliens, I guess. Invader is alien zeds rather than humans.
This dude is from the Black Ops expansion box. Andre, I think.

Looks better at arms length, with a coat of Nuln Oil on.

 Why do all hobby photographs come out awful? This guy looks so much better in real life.

 And because it's Zombicide, this is totally-not-Nebula from the MCU 'verse.

Finally getting through the flight crew for my light-up Valkyrie.

Disaster struck. We've all had this moment... There goes a quarter of my Nuln Oil. 

Commissar trio. Look at all the medals!

More Highlanders... I wish I could say I was almost done with these angry Scotsmen, but I've dozens of them, unassembled, in a bag at home.Victrix makes nice minis.

Thirteen models in a single night is not so terrible... Shame I didn't get to sleep, but that's Staff Duty.

-Six out.

Terrain: Rubble And Graves

So... my Lady is pretty much the best. She ordered the Sigmarite Mausoleum and Azyrite Chapel for no other reason than to see me smile. It would explain why she's been walking around chuckling randomly for the last week, though!

I'm still scratch-building terrain and rubble area terrain from spare parts: building an actual kit from GW is going to be an exciting experience. Cracking open the Mausoleum kit, and holy slate, batman! This is going to be too cool... My battlefields are going to be so extra. Can't wait to throw these together.

I mean, look at this dude:

A few more highlights, and he's just about done. There's two of these in the mausoleum box...I'll have to experiment with a tan limestone-style color scheme.
Current progress on scratch-build #4:

Cutting up and gluing pieces of sprue is a hassle. But there's no other way I can see to building up the mounds of rubble that an urban battlezone would feature. Looks good in the ruck of a full-up field battle when painted, though. And later, if and when I ever get into Adeptus Titanicus or Battletech the same terrain will work just as well due to the cyclopean nature of the Imperium' architecture.

-Six out.

Terrain: Welcome To The Jungle

There's a little list of things that, when said by a certain rank, are terrifying:

• Second Lieutenants: "In my experience".
• First Lieutenants: "I have an idea".
• Captains: "I've been thinking".

I had an idea.

My jungle terrain has been on back burner for a while. The old stuff was... adequate. Plastic trees stuff into cardboard, and thrown onto the table.

Meh, right?
So: 9" by 12" felt piece, rounded off and glued onto a spare bit of wood.

The old trees, superimposed on the new base. The trees come with little pegs, so I had to hammer pilot holes through the wood.

The felt swathes started curling up. Easy fix: spare washers glued to the perimeter.

A step or two away from finished...

Close enough to finished... Foliage is a bit shiny and the felt basing is a bit bland, but the effect of a dozen of these on the field should be good enough.

Orks and the Grayson 109th hunt each other through the steaming jungles of Mantala.

It's not realistic. I know. Needs more bushes like that in the foreground, and smaller ones the height of a model's ankle.

-Six out.

Red Alert Again... And Progress On The Valk

My buddy Jake came over for a game of Red Alert. Two large star fleets in open space, ripping into each other in the icy vacuum. Definitely a game I want to continue playing: there's potential there for a campaign system, and to mix in Warhammer 40,000 for boarding actions and planetary assaults / evacuations. Yessss... Campaignssssss... *Begins furiously scribbling notes*

Confederation battleships break the Commonwealth line

But for a game set up with identical, larger-than-recommended fleets, fought to the last ship (literally: it wound up being his flagship scuppering my flagship, and nothing else left on the board) it only took two hours. Considering it was Jake's first encounter with the ruleset and mine with teaching this particular game, I think that's reasonable. The pace was rapid, but not frantic. The special actions cards hold potential for shenanigans and just plain meanness, but some serious karma kicked me in the rear eventually. Jake did win, after all!

It feels a bit weird for a game that supports line tactics to punish refusing the flank, but them's the breaks. These days, I'm just happy to get a game in.

The fearsome Rebel Confederation fleet in all of its unpainted glory. Within two hours, all but one would be debris...

I definitely need to get these models painted. If possible, by someone with an airbrush and a yen for starships. Jake indicated he might be willing to do so.

Pictured: pain.

If I ever do another light-up Valkyrie, I'm going to just do a light in the nose. Nothing else. Running all of these wires through the aircraft is a bloody nightmare. But it works!

And the interior looks good in red, if I do say so myself... Which I do.

Neat, clean, and pristine: like no military vehicle I've ever seen! 

 Work on the gunners continues... Slowly. I find low motivation to finish these guys. The Valkyrie crew models are just ugly, even with third-party heads. I mean, look at this stumpy little guy:

Port-side gunner. Call-sign: "Stubby".

How is that a natural pose..? Oddly enough, a GW head from the Scions' box looks better:

Tail-gunner. Callsign: "Four-eyes".

Still not a pose that I'd strike if I were a gunner on a helicopter. Blast shield and the four-legged mount is from the Cadian Heavy Weapons Squad sprue. Works well, though a bit fiddly to splice together.

As a kid, my dad gave me a close-quarters facemask. Basically a hard-kevlar shield for the lower half of the face. It looks remarkably similar to this dude's respirator, and they're usually seen on US air crew, particularly crew chiefs and gunners. This Valkyrie is still the last open-bay bird I'm going to do.

Quote For The Day: “This war will not be over until the last of us is dragged, biting and kicking from the last trench or the last hole after we have expended the last round of ammunition.” -General Mühlenkampf, from Watch on the Rhine, by John Ringo & Tom Kratman.

-Six out. 

Troops Of The Line

 

The Infantryman. The Grunt. The ground-pounders. The Joes, the dog-faces, the mud-wind-and-rain boys. Don't get me wrong: tanks are awesome. I know, I've led a platoon of the monsters. But... the Infantry is my home.

Seriously: when my Battalion finally had enough Armor officers to take over the tank platoons, I rotated back to the Infantry company. Within twelve hours of taking over a platoon of blue-corders, my new boss gave me a mission: "take a twelve-man detail to raid the HHC and Support Company camps. They're camped out in the woods and setting up security. Draw blank ammunition, radios, and night-vision as you see fit, and have fun." When I grabbed my squad leaders and told them that "we're not sleeping tonight, lads, we're going to bushwack some folk" they immediately began high-fiving each other and smearing on face-paint. If I'd told my tankers we were going to spend the night running around in the woods, there'd have been moaning and bitching beyond belief. We then proceeded to spend all night crawling through the bushes, setting ambushes, breaching wires, fire-fighting, and generally having a whale of a time. It was good to be home.

 On that nostalgic note, here's some of my line troopers.

 

The ODST helmets are from Shapeways, the lads with berets come from Mad Robot Miniatures, and the extra armor is all extra sprues chopped up and glued on. So many cuts... So much glue... 

Charging with a bayonet. Even in the 41st  42nd Millennium a man with a sharp piece of metal is a scary thing. Ever ordered a formation to "Fix... Bayonets!" ? I did, once. Good times. And yes, I know: his camo face paint is smudged and incomplete. What, and yours was perfect after ten hours in the woods? Yeah, right.

The AP value of a rock appears to be... 0. But if I model any of my plastic dudesmen with the atlatl dog ball throwers, can I double the range? Photo's not mine, but I have no doubt some of my Joes did this.

This chap wields a plasma gun -actually the top half of a Space Marine combi-plasma. A bit smaller than the standard plasma gun, but it makes sense: they're supposed to be an airborne / air mobile force, after all... It's just a shame that they keep blowing the hell up!

Almost forty of these guys done. And more to come.

Anyone experimented with ten-man squads of Scions armed with only the hotshot lasguns? I'm thinking that'd be the best way to do anti-infantry. I lose a bit of range, but the mobility and lower price is a bit of a draw for me. I keep tying my volleygun squads down on objectives, and the only "mobile" forces left are the anti-tank sections. Melta guns are great, but... "Well done, I vaporized a single cultist. Woo. Go me." I need some way to thin out hordes.

-Six out.

Derp... And Superheavies

Carbine got into the plants, so she has a bit of pollen ground on her snout... I can't take her seriously looking like that, even when she does try to look regal. Derpy little Pup.

Ah, the madness of Warhammer 40,000: a heavily-armored tank, bristling with guns... But driving closer so the nutcase on top can smack the enemy on the head with a sharp piece of metal.

Quote For The Day: "And it is my a-hoo-wah job to take my company into that maelstrom of nukes and gas and hypervelocity missile rounds and fight the Posleen on their own turf at up to one-thousand-to-one odds and cover all the other troops who don't have the equipment to experience it." -Captain O'Neal. Gust Front, by John Ringo.  

One of the annoying things about playing what is effectively an airborne army, is that it lacks heavy firepower. Forces with more than a Leman Russ or two can steamroller mine if they're played competently (Hi Jake!). "Dropping in a melta squad" is not a panacea. A year or two ago I swore that any force featuring more than three Russ or more than one Land Raider, or a Knight, would face the might of the Baneblade.

 

My original Baneblade, the Roma Victor, came built already, courtesy of a good friend in the Armor. Painting one is an involved process. Lord. So many panels. So many rivets. 

But ye gods, the firepower. More guns than you can shake a two-by-four at! She's chalked up eight superheavy-class kills in her career. And durable enough that it was never even once destroyed. She did need some TLC to get up and running, though.

 

Of course, due to the vagaries of the Warp (i.e., a storage company) the Roma Victor is no longer available to me, so I was back to throwing squads with a couple of melta guns at the problem.
Black Friday rolled around, and a Baneblade got cheap enough I could afford it. So, construction begins on another superheavy. The determination between the Baneblade and Shadowsword classes will be made a later date.

The cunning and imaginative soul that I am, "Roma Victor II" will be the default name. At this point, though, I am accepting suggestions for names.  Go!

-Six out.