Thursday, December 4, 2014

Digging out a behemoth.


After taking a look through the Horus Heresy Book Four: Conquest from Forgeworld, I've definitely decided to repurpose my Vostroyans as Solar Auxilia. Once the Imperial Army list rolls around, I'm sure I could swing them back to acting as regular grunts too, but for now, they'll be the elite of the standard human troopers.

One thing that's fun in the Solar Auxilia list is that you can take a Solar Auxilia Tank commander and add him to a pretty wide variety of vehicles, including super-heavies. He transfers his Ballistic Skill of 4 to the rest of the crew, which means that when you add him to the Stormlord super-heavy, the Vulcan Mega-blolter (which is a 60" range, S6, AP3, Heavy 15 weapon) will hit, on average, ten times. Or 20 times if you remain stationary in the movement phase, allowing you to shoot twice! With additional weapons onboard, you could comfortably wipe out a 20-man squad of Marines each turn. Fierce!

So, with visions of torrents of fire raining down on the heads of my opponents, I dug out an old conversion of mine. I converted this Baneblade into a Stormlord as soon as the data sheet was released, a couple of years before GW made the actual model now found in their online store. Of course, as soon as I finished it, I moved on to a different project and never painted it.

But now...



14 comments:

  1. I always wanted to build one of these with the rear set of sponsons facing backwards, like a naval ship.

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    1. You know, I thought about that approach for this one originally. Drive fast into the enemy's ranks and unleash Hell.

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  2. Nice looking conversion, I especially like the solid looking front area and the use of the commanders position taken from the Baneblade turret.

    The only two things I'm not so keen on is the length of the barrels and the lack of a drivers viewport, the front looks a little unusual without that.

    I do like the Solar list form Conquest. If I didn't already have Militia using the IA13 list i'd be very tempted to do them (but then I say that about a FW AdMech army as well...)

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    1. I built it with just the silhouette to work from, so I'm not too surprised there are some details that are "off". Looking at the driver's viewport on the actual model, I see now that my conversion has angled plates at the front that aren't present on the GW kit. I might try to mess around with adding a driver's viewport, but of course, the sensor array in front of the driver might work too to provide him with streamed information when he slips down inside the tank.

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  3. Awesome!! Keen to see those vostroyan conversions!!

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    1. Not too many conversions for the Vostroyans, they'll be mostly stock.

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  4. Lovely! Can't wait to see the army come together - I'm still kicking myself for selling off my old Vostroyans. Great models!

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    1. Never sell off cool models you haven't painted yet ; )

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  5. Dave, I think it overall looks good. However, I am not really sold on the barrels, they're a bit wonky somehow (also I think a few of them may not be straight).

    The lack of driver's viewport can be a problem, or it can be fine, I suppose it all depends. Besides, there's nothing that says the driver has to be sitting down where the transmission would actually be. Still, a remote viewing device might be helpful down there, as Rictus mentions.

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    1. They're a bit longer than the stock model, but as I mentioned above, I didn't have a lot of information to go on. I'm fine with them as is ; )

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  6. That is a really nice conversion. The rivets match the size and spacing of the original rivets really well. Did you drill holes and then sink rivets into the plastic?

    Vostroyan make excellent guard for admech as well. I think they one of GW's better ranges.

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    1. Thanks John, the rivets are actually sliced from the Baneblade parts I didn't use and carefully glued down (the yellowing you see is the glue).

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