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 Trickstick wrote:
You may be interested in the book "Flesh and Iron" by Henry Zou. It is about a Guard regiment that specialises in amphibious assault and river warfare.

Seconding this. My Guard army is made up of Cadians but I've thought once or twice about adding a platoon of Zou's Space Louisianans using Catachan models.

Use 1/2 your actual models... base them "submerged!" Infantry can be waist deep.... thinkin' catachans with boonie hats!

Do up a Tauros like a mini Jet-ski like amphibious vehicle.

Great Idea...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Craft,_Infantry

Built to land 200 troops but you could scale it down and put some pretty cool heavyweapons on it. British had versions too...

Keep us posted!

I love this thread so much, I could cry.

Lots of good ideas, especially the sea plane vendetta conversion. I imagine that there would be a fair amount of aircraft used on a water world.

As for the guardsmen themselves, I like the idea of having the chimeras be their landers/beach crawlers. The port-holes is a good start (don't know how you'd do realistic glass, though), but I think what would REALLY sell it is if you had your chimeras encrusted in naval paraphernalia. I'm talking about every vehicle having:


Self-explainatory


Grapple gun launcher, perhaps based off of a regular missile launcher with some plasticard, perhaps counts-as HK


A collapsed life raft, rather than an open one, of course.


Both rope and extra toggles. You've got to dock the chimeras somehow.


Some netting that hangs off the side. This could easily be achieved with some screen door material painted rope color.

Plus perhaps some life jackets, an anchor, perhaps a small bouy. If you wanted to go real crazy, you could start using a tiny bit of GS to quick throw some barnacles on.

This would be SUCH a cool project to work on.

Anyways, as for the guardsmen themselves, I'd try and stick to a single thing that sort of makes them look aquatic. Tanks have tons of room for detail, while smaller models will quickly look cluttered. Whether you wanted something big (they all wear life jackets), or something small (a bunch of extra equipment and not a backpack), I'd stick to just one kind of theme.

Awesome idea! very original also, never heard of something like this before. Good luck if you tackle it, looks like the modding will be fun!

Funnily enough I had this idea as well, but hit the financial roof before I could really even start with it. However idea of the planet wasn't same. It was to be archipelago of small islands, dotting the whole water world. Imperial Guard Regiments or Planetary Defense Forces were mostly moving from island to another, making amphibious assaults or defending the key islands from enemy. Water itself wasn't hostile but the island mostly were.

Anyways for units I thought about... pretty much same than what was told here. A lot of Chimeras, some vendettas/valkyries for assaults. For defending massive amounts of heavy weapon squads, dug in tanks (so only turret is visible) and some bunkers and ditches (would have wanted to make caves too, but it's rather hard for table-top game). Also to gain at-least molecule of heavy firepower to assaults, I designed to make a watercraft (unable to move out of water) with Leman Russ's stats. Just place Leman Russ turret to some military looking gunboat. Never found suitable boat so kinda gave up. I also once dreamed of making actual battleship but... no chances with that without winning in lottery. xP

Amphibious Leman Russ variant just... sounds tad odd to me. The tank design itself won't allow it. Also additional armor in Hellhound variants... is the reason why I believe it's not having any in-game amphibious bonuses (as it would sink I think).

Umm... as the world (Icome up with) was supposed to be rather full of seaweed and other green-vegetation on shores and on the sea, the color scheme was supposed to be mixture of blue and dark green... even if most ideal coloring might be dark green and shades of gray in that case. Better think of the camouflage as well, even if it's not the most essential thing to start with. Fighting on mining barges you might need that shade of gray or your soldiers will be rather easily spotted against the grim colored environment. Of course feel free to paint your models as you wish!

Also about hovercraft... do note that some really rich planets -do- use floaters in their Planetary Defense Forces, but it's really rare to have them in outgoing IG regiments. If I recall right... they are expensive and hard to build, so I doubt that any PDF would want to give up on their own, for battle elsewhere (correct me if I'm wrong).