Making Tracks: Leman Russ Executioner

So, this is it: the sixth and final armoured vehicle planned for my Valhallan 40K army.  I wish the swan song was a bit more dramatic, but I think I used up all my customization mojo on Cold Comfort earlier in the month.

Despite the game's setting of the 41st millennium, the vehicles I have built so far look pretty similar to tanks of the Second World War, with some present day accessories and sci-fi trimmings (like the hull-mounted lascannon on Snow Tiger), but the Executioner breaks that mold cleanly.  The main gun is the infamous Executioner plasma cannon, and the stowage boxes in the rear of the turret have been replaced with additional plasma coils in order to maintain a high rate of fire.  Space Marine power armour is no match for the fury of superheated plasma, and even Tactical Dreadnought (Terminator) armour can only withstand one shot in three.

Since the other two tanks had a crewman in the open hatch of the turret, I knew I wanted this one to be buttoned up.  I've read enough issues of G.I. Combat to know that if you don't keep that hatch secured, Sgt. Rock is going to climb up onto your track, riddle the commander with .45 slugs from his Thompson, and then drop a couple of 'hot pineapples' down into the tank for good measure.  Besides, the closed hatch makes the tank look a little sleeker.

I kept the tank itself relatively plain, with no sandbags, bedrolls, shovels and the like, because I wanted the centre of attention to be the big plasma cannon.  My reach outstretched my grasp a little, however; although I am fairly happy with the coils themselves, I had wanted to give them kind of a 'glow' effect.  Painting light sources is a pretty tricky business and I am strictly a journeyman painter, but the principle seemed easy enough.  I think it would have worked better against a darker background, but I was unwilling to repaint the entire gun barrel to facilitate this.  Even though the glow didn't turn out even close to what I pictured in my mind, it still gets the idea across, and so I left my efforts in place.  It also suits the name I decided to give the tank: Lux Cathedra (Light of the Throne).

If I was a bit gutsier, I would have tried to paint some sort of glowy starburst down inside the barrel, like the heart of the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek.

Now *that* is intimidating.

There may even be a tactical advantage in Lux Cathedra's stock appearance (which I will now lose by pointing it out): each piece in the Warhammer 40,000 game is worth a certain amount of points, which serve as the currency which keeps the games evenly matched.  A base-model Leman Russ starts at a modest 150 points, and then you pay extras for accessories like weapons sponsons, extra armour and so on.  If you've ever purchased a car from a dealership, you are already familiar with this principle.  Lux Cathedra, with its lascannon in the hull and plasma cannons in the side sponsons, weighs in at about 260 points.  (It would have been 275 but I decided I didn't need the undercoating.  What the heck do I care about the resale value of a tank which stands a significant chance of becoming a burned-out hulk by the third turn for heaven's sake?)  This is not a complaint, as it will earn those points back the very first time it runs across a squad of Terminators in the open, but the bottom-liners in the Departmento Munitorum will be keeping a wary eye on the Executioners they commission, as will the enemy, so it bodes well to draw less attention to one, rather than more.

Still, the glowy green energy weapon in the turret makes it hard to be anonymous.

I did try to add a little distinctiveness by adding some patches of snow to the rear cargo box and sponsons.  I bought some snow flock for the horde of foot soldiers I will be painting next, and thought this made as good a time as any to experiment with it.  Again, it would have been more distinct against a darker background, and I definitely need more practice with it, but since I will be painting about a hundred man-sized models (if all goes well!), there will be plenty of opportunity to improve.

Six tracks in six months is hardly anything to brag about in the big scheme of things, but I met my deadline of having all the vehicles out of the way by February, and they all look pretty consistent.  Hopefully I can keep up the same pace on the infantry, and maintain the dream of playing with the army at least once before G&G VI in May!

Making Tracks: Leman Russ Tank

The latest addition to my Valhallan armoured element is a second Leman Russ tank.  Unlike the Vanquisher I built previously, this one uses the standard Russ battle cannon, so it is not limited to an anti-vehicle role.  In fact, since it has a hull-mounted heavy bolter and two more in side sponsons as well as a heavy stubber on the turret,  it's actually better suited to anti-personnel work, and should make an ideal 'objective clearing device'.  Since I wanted a proper Latinish Imperium name for the final tank, I wanted this one to be a bit more generic, and ended up calling it Cold Comfort as a reference to both its frozen homeworld and the cold steel of its armour.  (Cold Hard Truth was in the running right up until I painted the letter 'd' in cold, but it just felt too unwieldy.)

There are six different variants of the Leman Russ, and since my 22nd Valhallan Armoured regiment will have three of them by the time I'm finished, I wanted one of them to be the base model with a standard turret.  This vanilla Russ also makes a nice foundation for things like the two tank riders, the commander and a bulldozer blade.  The 'dozer blade makes it easier for the tank to move through difficult terrain like forests and such without becoming immobilized by throwing a track or some such.  The tank riders have no rules but I find them especially evocative, since there are historical examples of this from WWII Russia, and I think they bring a great deal of character to a stock model such as this one.

The Silly Putty masking technique is still working well for the initial camo, although shading the white portions does take a little bit of effort, and the consistency to the other vehicles may leave a little bit to be desired.  Still, I probably ended up spending more time on the three human figures than I did the rest of the tank. 

Some smaller accessories are meant as small telltales to the stoic preparedness of the Valhallans, such as the holstered pistol within reach of the tank commander, the packs and rucks affixed to it, and even the axe affixed to the front hull.  After all, 'Be Prepared' is the Boy Scout marching song, right comrade?

In addition to weathering, I wanted this tank to sport some battle damage.  The bullet holes under the driver's viewport were done by holding the tip of a nail in a candle flame with a pair of pliers and then pressing it into the plastic repeatedly. 

The larger shell craters were achieved in similar fashion, but used the heated head of the nail instead.  This gives a nice rippling affect like you might get from a HEAT round or plasma bolt that hit the armour at an oblique angle.

I do have to be careful in traversing the turret however; with the main gun at maximum elevation I can avoid knocking off the hunter/killer missile on the starboard sponson, but the turret rider will boot off the rider on the hull if it goes the other way!

This model took me longer to complete than I anticipated, but if I can finish off the last tank by the end of January, that will leave me February, March and April for the foot models and air support element.  I will need to stay focused if I want to have the army field-worthy in time for G&G VI, but if I can actually get a game in with the army before that, so much the better!

Making Tracks: Chimera APC

My Valhallan army, when completed, will have six armoured vehicles, of which this Chimera is the fourth.  Heading in to the back half of vehicle construction has me looking at the various bits, bobs, sundries and accessories I have collected over the years that might be affixed to a vehicle.  Clearly the time has come to 'use it or lose it', and as a result, this troop transport has over a dozen such additions to the stock kit.

It's also important to understand that from a practical standpoint, an armoured personnel carrier (APC) for the Imperial Guard is kind of a ridiculous concept.  Every other race in the Warhammer 40,000 universe is either faster, stronger or better equipped than the puny humans who make up the rank and file of the Guard, and often in more than one category.  The idea of using an armored transport to get closer to the foe is more than a bit foolhardy.

That said though, 40K is still a game, and you can't win the game by hanging back and shelling the foe into compliance (sigh); objectives have to be taken and they have to be held, and shielding some of your troops with a protective metal shell could be the difference between them getting to the objective with enough strength to hold on to it, or getting there in the first place.

And then of course, there is the aesthetic side of things, which gives me just as much enjoyment as the game-playing component. I only have one Chimera, and figured it would go to either my regimental command element or my veterans. Once I saw that the veterans could be upgraded to a demolitions team (hands up if Crazy Harry is one of your favourite Muppets!), my decision was made for me.

Because the Chimera is not a fighting vehicle per se, I opted for a distinctive paint scheme, different from both my artillery and tanks.  My plan is for the squad that rides this track to be very much a 'character' unit, something with a cachet like that of 'The Dirty Dozen' or 'Kelly's Heroes'  (failing that, perhaps 'The A Team'...), so I thought the Chimera should reflect this as much as possible.

I also figured that if this vehicle was going to be right in the thick of things, there was no better place to depict this than in the turret, with a crewman blasting away with the heavy stubber, clearly trying to keep enemy infantry at bay while his comrades use the assault ramp in the rear to get out and plant their deadly melta bombs.  Using a Valhallan heavy weapon crewman as the commander also meant that I had to make a decision regarding the camo I will use for my infantry, and I went with a simply pattern of grey and black blotches, since I will be painting an awful lot of it.

The extra-large searchlight also seemed to fit the theme of both mine-clearing (which a demo team might reasonably be expected to do) or just blinding enemy troops inside a bunker while the bombs and flamers come into play. 

The Demo Team vehicle needs a an evocative name, and I ended up choosing Petrograd Express, and painting this just below the turret on the starboard side.  (I realize Petrograd was what they called St. Petersburg back in the days of the USSR, but as a pseudo-Slavic version of Oiltown it proved impossible to resist. Still, I think I will be leaning heavily towards more Imperial themes for my two remaining tanks.)  Both sides of the Chimera's hull include auxiliary fuel tanks as well as racks of spare lasguns in case ammo should get low or the situation become sufficiently dodgy. 

The pick, shovel and crowbar are all meant to cultivate an aura of preparedness as well as independence; after all, none of the other units are going to want to get too close to a squad carrying that many explosives, even they don't happen to be in a minefield at the time.

The most striking feature of the Express however, is no doubt the mine plow on the front.  This is an add-on made by Dragon models for use on an M1-A1 Abrams tank, and is called a 'track-width mine plough'.  The scale is not precisely correct, but is certainly close enough for me.  Ironically, the instructions for this one accessory are actually more detailed than the vehicle it is attached to, but I managed to get enough of it completed that I could mount it to the piece that normally holds a bulldozer blade on the Leman Russ.  The black and yellow 'danger stripes' I added for no better reason than I just thought they looked wicked, and masked out the stripes with tape, my first time doing so.  It was by no means a perfect job, but I left the marks where some leakage occurred on the advice of my wife, who rightfully pointed out that I was going to weather and chip the blade anyways, and would never achieve such organic results intentionally.  I'm certainly glad I listened to her!

It's a long ways from perfect, but I am already looking furtively at the approaching deadline, and I am pretty happy with the Petrograd Express given the time I had available.  I don't anticipate having a lot of painting or building sessions in December until my Christmas holiday begins, and I have to crank out two more Leman Russ tanks before the end of January if I don't want to be rushed painting my infantry or their air support (dun dun DUN).