OK - I'm back, catch-up time..
PDH - Cheers!
dstein - Hmm, now what could all those little dots represent I wonder?
GG - Could be
PDH - A very virulent virus I'm afraid, there's a good chance everyone on Dakka will get a small dose at some time
vik - Obviously vik appears to be the main vector of transmission
dstein - So do some of the local's round here
vik - indeed!
dakkagrot - Are you sure you're not compensating for anything with this big gun fetish?
Not that that's a particulary bad fetish to have.
mullet - Nah, he's a shoota boy, dat's all dey get. The other shoota boys only have the one shoota too, it's just they've been outnumbered by the the slugga boys.
Gits - Hmm, I haven't got any Samurai Jack references lined up yet, there's an excuse to re-watch some
neil - He looks like a screaming Japanese guy to you?
Llamahead - Well thank you kind sirrah. I could be a lot faster though, and to be honest it's normally my painting speed that I bemoan. I think. Isn't it?
Lots of things get built, or almost built, but then just sit around getting painted at an average speed of one colour per month. There's still un-finished guys from the first page of this blog, and these are the guys I'm actually motivated to work on by Dakka
Sage - If you're finding pages and pages of stuff you're not visting very often.
Cheers though!
dstein - Oh definitely. When it takes so long for one idea to come to fruition, there's a huge backlog of ideas building up, some of which get lost in the wait.
So, been off for a month, mainly due to my pretty-much annual loss of internet.
It's been a fairly hectic few weeks anyway, and to be honest I spent a fair bit of my remaining free-time playing Oblivion and Deus Ex. My will crumbled and I did get Skyrim, but I'm trying hard not to play it yet, even though I know there's no chance I'm going to finish Oblivion soon.
As I've been pretty busy anyway I didn't bother getting my internet sorted till this week, but once again it took 2 attempts for them to actually get here. Now I've got t'internet back I can get on with the christmas shopping. And catch up on about a billion pages of threads I've missed.
And I'd better put some stuff up here, what with being off for a month it might even make a decent-sized update.
So what nefarious deeds have I been up to in the meanwhile?
That would be telling now, wouldn't it? But I will tell you what I have done on the modelling front (no point in mentioning the painting front *mind momentarily wanders off thinking on a war compised of modelling and painting fronts* as that's been bloody non-existant)
I did recieve a little grav-tank shaped package from Antenociti's earlier:
Along with that crab-stylee hover tank the bits are calling to me to do get cracking on some vehicular mayhem, so I pay a little trip to my folks and go rummage in their garage for some old models. And find some - result!
There's a couple of promising boxes:
and this:
Plus a bunch of old metal skaven (some with paint on even - I was faster when I was a youngster)and a box of bits (including one wing from Vader's Tie, the chrome parts for two cars, an apollo lunar lander and a bunch of the old Epic buildings (from when it was Titanicus). I've now spent a fair amount of time playing with the roof sections of those trying to devise something.
Inside those boxes:
Most of the tank and the Orion shuttle from 2001. With some dodgy bits of plastic and old marine bits glued fairly randomly to it in an effort to turn it into a marine fighter plane as I recall. That might end up being cleaned up and looted as another fighta. And tank bits always useful, I knew it wouldn't be a complete kit as I've used several bits elsewhere. I obviously clipped one sprue into a bits box at some time, I thought the few remainng bits in my box were all that was left, so that was a nice bonus.
And the other box:
The bits and a rough view of how it goes together. You can guess how old it is by going back to the box pic and noting that I got all that resin for a princely £12! At one time I was planning on using the body for a tiny scale starship of some kind - just a generic build for fun, but never got round to it (some things never change
). Nothing immediately springs to mind for the bits, but jet exhausts and a cannon are sure to come in handy.
And some bonus shots of the green hover tank thigummy ( A Special Vehicle Force 'Euphractus' to be exact)
That's not the original gun, that's still in a bits box somewhere, saw it a while back I know. Not a particularly detailed paint job, but I don't think that was supposed to be it's finished state. That one cost £9 when I got it way back when (the box holds paints now).
'Oi, you young ruffians. Just you put that canopy back on.'
I'm particularly proud of the way I painted the console so that 20 years later it would look like I'd added them to the photo with MS Paint.
Basically, rip the seat out, install a greenie in there and find a suitable turret, hey presto, there's another skorcha m'lud.
Although it does have a back hatch and is the perfect size for a grot-sized chimera.
Or thinking on it, give it a big ol' cannon and it'll be a looted wagon. I think that ones sorted now.
And has anything been done with any of these miscellaneous parts in my dakka-absence, you ask.
Look, I know you didn't ask. You know you didn't. They know you didn't.
It was more a rhetorical kind of statement, allowing me to segue into the next bit.
A link, if you will.
Ahh, sod it, look, I did some fiddling with that grav-tank, see:
Wasn't sure of the parts that came with this, so had no real idea what I was going to do with it till I had it in hand. The hull comes as one piece, and looking at it I had visions of a hovering staff car type affair. After a bit of pondering (or staring at nothing in particular as it's sometimes called) I decided that a full-on staff car with ork general in the back would be awesome.
But a bit of a pain as I'd want to hollow out the body for a job like that - I wouldn't want the general to be a plug'n'play ork. So a buggy it is then.
So open a window and grab that dust-mask, there's resin to be hacked at.
Phase I
Got rid of the turret support and started to square off the panels so it doesn't look like a big ol' circle has been chopped out of the buggy.
At this point I'm thinking the driver will be to the right, with some kind of gunner behind and to the left, possibly an arrangement similar to a vyper gunner.
Phase II
Driver and console in place, complete with comfy back rest, possibly to get some electric gubbinses on top. Driver could be plug'n'play or just squeezed in there nic and tight - hard to tell at the moment so I'll probably throw a bionik arm into the mix, just to cement his cybork status. Start of a gun mount, switched idea on the gunner for now. Built some thingummies to fill behind the driver and started adding some bolted on panels.
Oh and started on some wiring too.
Bet that was unexpected.
Phase III
More gubbins added, mainly on the rear sides, plus a spotlight, some more tanks of dodgy kemikals, another bit of cabling and a nice rear plate to attach the engines to. Whatever kind of engines it's getting. I toyed with a few propellors but none of them were really doing it for me, this thing should look fasta, needs some jets of some kind. At the moment it's between three of the old hunter missile front plates, the jets from a land speeder or that classic old-skool solution - the toothpaste tube top. Gotta say, with some extra tubing, the toothpaste top has it so far.
Also got a wotsit ariel near the front. Very important that is.
Very, very important.
No idea what it is, but all da meks say it's mucho important.
Phase IV (where's those giant ant models when you need them?)
Pretty much done except the windshield - that'll wait till it's painted before I decide what style it's going to be.
Gunner Johansann is now in place, I fiddled with several weapons till I decided on that old fall-back of the drum mag shootas. This time rather than use extra mags to signify they're big shootas I switched up the barrels. The all-important barbed wire bumpers are also in place, and the driver's horn, or big hoota as he likes to call it.
And ripped the engine nozzles off the Euphractus in the end.
After this shot I un-blu tacced the arm, glued the roll-bar (definitely singular) in place with a little support bit, primed it black then gave the topside a coat or two of humbrol sand. Then gs'd the gap in the driver's arm I'd forgotten about. It was going to be red, but going for a more yellowy desert scheme as that's how I saw the original staff-car concept.
I'm now thinking it might want some kind of red and orange tiger-stripe camo just to get a bit more red on there.
Managed to put a few pieces of some boyz together, but none finished so I'll save those for later, make it look like I'm working faster
Anyway, that's a chunk to keep you going for now, I'd best go see what's been going on in other peep's blogs now....
My P&M Blog :
Imperial Knights: The Avengers Initiative
Da Dark Angelz
Not sure about that bigger bit in the head space either, that's kind of overpowering the rest, may hae to swap it out for a small cog.
