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Just about up to the OSL stage with the commander, just got some quick pics when I got home.

Looking great, you are keeping that balance just right at the moment.

Thanks

Hopefully I didn't just overdo it with the OSL on this.








I didn't really figure out all the stuff I wanted to with that background wise though, I'm still actually stuck on a name for the army overall. The idea when I was making this was sort of like I guess a way to show both the iridium and neruoweb jammer, but revising the list I lost the space for the jammer, sort of like it used gravity to improve the armour of the suit as well as sort of deflect shots back (represented by giving a unit gets hot from the jammer) but that the power consumption was too high so the system was limited anyway. Either way I just saw the gap on the back of that suit and wanted to really put a gn drive there, it's something I was actually considering the last time for a riptide to represent the earth caste pilot thing by just having it as an improved nova reactor.

Anyway if people have any ideas that could help me with naming this army and possibly commander I'd like to hear them.
Edit: After some brainstorming I settled on the name Commander Goldensun and decided to name the suit the XV85-g.

Oh nice, the glow really draws out the details of your mini-- the GN Drive especially looks awesome.

For the army itself....
Deus Iridia
Gold-Nine
Golden Watchers

IDK just some ideas.

And for now a WIP drone.



Mostly waiting on bases to arrive so I can get working on the first Ghostkeel. Also need to get some stealth suits for part of a conversion idea I have but the store was closed so that has to wait too.

In the meantime I actually managed to make some background stuff for the commander and that actually led to naming the army as a whole while researching the Tau language; Oi'nars Sept (Shiny rock), also gave them a Tau name and took some nice pics to update the signature and for the section this project has in the opening post.



Background stuffs

Shas'O Oi'nars Kais Oi'yanoi (Commander Goldensun)

Goldensun is a somewhat experienced commander who, thanks in part to her experiences rising through the ranks and the Oi'nars Sept being mostly Earth Caste, believes wholeheartedly in deploying her forces completely clad in battle suits. The horrors of the battlefield had led her to believe that the lack of these suits en masse put too many lives at risk needlessly, something her sept does not have an abundance of to start with. Her unique battle suit is a modification of the XV-85 that adds experimental shielding and power generation in an attempt to further improve upon the current X series.

Oi'nars Sept
Oi'nars is a small third sphere sept found to the south of Fal'shia centered around the planet Oi'nars, named for the shiny rocks found there. The heavy concentration of Earth Caste leads Oi'nars to mostly be a mining planet full of technological progress and combined with Ork and Eldar pirate raids the sept is mostly focused towards battle suit advancement. The Sept boasts a relatively small amount of Fire Caste for its size, mostly due to continued losses from pirate raids but also from defense against remnants of Hive Fleet Behemoth. As the raids have mostly focused on nearby Tash'var Sept a majority of this sept's military history is focused on dealing with the few remnants left from Behemoth destroyed a mere 200 years before settlement on Oi'nars; fortunate as if they had settled earlier the planet would be nothing but a barren rock.

Its forces go to battle proudly in the golden colour of the rock their sept is named for, abandoning the usual camouflage used by the Tau. This lends well to the tactics Goldensun uses as she commands a quick combined strike, stunning the enemy as the sunlight shines off their armour, before quickly retreating to patiently wait for the next strike. Conveniently enough combined with energy shielding experiments this has led a lot of the raiding Orks to believe that energy based weapons will just bounce off of the Oi'nars' golden armour.

Well that looks brilliant mate. Love it, fluff sounds good.

You have got the OSL just perfect IMHO. I don't like it when its over done, but you have nailed it on this guy.

Thanks
And here's the first ghostkeel built after the bases finally showed up. It's pretty similar to the one that I saw Shas'o Dre come up with on advanced tau tactica through google, but I cut at the ghostkeel's neck piece until it fit in flush. If I had bothered to build the interior instead of sealing this it'd be able to open and close as normal with just a different head. The head is just one of the stormsurge ones, unfortunately when I bought them they didn't come with the antennae so making the best of it since I still have another for the other ghostkeel and I'm going to try getting the third on a riptide so it doesn't have such an undersized head.




Also some sad news about the blog is the opening post is starting to get really laggy to edit.
Something like 3 second delay on typing at this point so I may have to create a third one somewhat soonish which then I'll transfer the contents and links for this project and just put a link back to the OP of this thread in to keep it together and really shrink down that opening post. Of course there'd be a link at the end of this thread going into it, but I don't think its just at the point that I'll have to move this yet.

Edit: and I did end up moving to a new thread, here, however I had also done a bit of thinking as well. I had got to the point where I at least had all the Tau models I had interest in getting to paint up for fun but fortunately I had got them mostly by trading stuff and gift money from before.
Actually working out the numbers and such ($924 to get the Tau list playable still), in the end it worked out cheaper to go with Ad Mech (by around $400 from estimating), an army I had wanted to play before and even have this crappy model I tried to make back in 2010 for them.

Quite interesting to see how far I've come from then too.