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Yay M&P blog.

Note: The whole point of the army is to showcase giant, awesome robots and the rest of the army that supports them. Since I got COD bits, the regular warriors will have this color scheme. The bases are all in drab colors, along with the regular firewarriors. I still don't know what to do with tanks but I think they'll have the gray camo along with some fun designs to make them stand out.

Here's the rationale for the suits: Gundams, Macross, and jock culture with homoerotic overtones as seen on "Top Gun." All converted. All prototypes. I'm aiming to use a mix of models where lots of bits are just tacked on and models that are completely revamped. I will be making more of the former category since I just feel the Tau enjoy making modular tools for war, not to mention the PITA it is to make rounded armor just for the sake of doing it (when I already have FW models). I picked up a lot of COD material so I'm currently making bases out of it to rebase the entire army as well.

To start, here are things as they stand:

One special stealth suit for the stealth suit leader.



Madcats! Or Longbows if you prefer. Jetpacks are aimed sideways to emphasize strafing while firing. I also felt like rounding the chest for some reason.


Everyone loves a Jester!


Whoo knights. Stupid jockey.



I think this one was supposed to be some dude who carried combat engineering supplies to the FWs up front. Works for COD where close buildings prevent jetpack usage, I guess.


Just pieces of wargear crap tacked on this guy.


An airborne suit I've been working on forever. Mostly because I don't know where I want to attach the jets.

All of these pics are from the photobucket album so you should be able to browse the other stuff.

Planned additions:
VTOL suit that uses the skyray wings. Wings are probably too large so I'll make them folding for storage. Everyone likes hang-gliding gundams right?
HALO suit with piranha wings and a rocket pack. Comes with two gun drones. I'd imagine this would be a deep striking entry method, Starship Troopers style, where a drop pod that breaks into fragments opens up somewhere in the atmosphere.
The special character FW suit with the giant shield. Might make him into O'Shovah.
Another special character FW suit. Possibly using the jetpack from the XV81 model.
Semi-transforming variable fighter heavily using a piranha model. Dunno how this would work. Guess I can go with the mass-shifting route, reality be damned.

Planned color schemes:
Knight. Jester. King. Bishop. Urban camo. Mage. Razzle dazzle. American football jersey. Picasso. Maybe a traditional TRON scheme everyone makes with their tau suits.

There is certainly going to be a lot of character here when they are all painted up! I like the 'Just pieces of wargear crap tacked on this guy' guy the most, he looks nicely geared up. Are you just using GW paints for these or are you going for some of the more gundam friendly ranges like tamiya?

I bet you cant make a Tau version of this 'gundam' figure though:
http://www.hlj.com/product/BAN941676

Thanks Lego. I use Vallejo, hoping it's a gundam-friendly range. And thanks for the idea. I'm always looking for a new color scheme, and that one's not that hard too convert from a shas'o r'myr with extra bits extending from the spine.

Did some bases the last day or two. I happen to enjoy the idea of juxtaposing the clean, cel-shaded Tau I'll have to the typical "dirty, grim" feel of the 40k world. It should make them feel more alien and foreign.

The second pic of the bases, showing the one with the half-buried pipe. Have you considered adding some toxic sludge pouring out of it?

It would look good.

Those bases are awesome. I love the conversion work on the Stealth leader!

I think there is somebody out there with this in his sig(or something similar)

"Nobody can out robot-suit the Japanese. Nobody"

I agree, and it seems like the the Tau are the perfect for the conversion work.

Actually I had the leaking pipe in mind, since I bought some vallejo water effects about a year ago. The pipe has a hole on the other side.

I'll try to paint the lights in some fashion to show they were recently cut off from their power supply, so they'll be recently burned out. I can probably get away with not having to do light source effects since I don't want to have my suits in any color other than what I give them. Anything else would detract from the assault on the eyes.

Bored from studying, I did some work on the hover suit. It's a prototype close-air support with seeker missiles tucked under the disposable flying wing. Flying wing can carry seeker missiles or fuel tanks. Notable loss in speed and maneuverability as expected. Addition of extra engines under the generator necessary. As is the case with most Tau engineering, the ingenious modularity offered by the skyray wing is surprising. It's surprising what a shortened wing can do, and not much modification was necessary to the original design. Even the support struts line up! In addition, the generator case behind the typical battlesuit body is housed in the wing's support base. This means the crisis suit's engines can remain in the original position with minimal changes. The markerlight drones on the wingtips will be modified into targeting arrays and multitrackers, freeing the suit's onboard computer to handle the additional responsibilities of a moving wing.

It may develop into a light broadside replacement in the future with longer range and seeker missile delivery capability. Optional oversized plasma rifle with added modified piranha engines may allow for upper atmospheric combat.

Made a bunch of bases as well as finished the assembly of 2 suits. Will update those later. For now here is a battlesuit with an ice theme.

Deleted due to craptastic quality to save bandwidth.

Finally a good photo and one that's decent compared to the rest. I'll care more about the whole diffused-light deal once the thing's finished.

Final set before basing. Couldn't wait to show my friend. Learned a lot from painting this guy up. I know I have the capability to blend and feather. I still have lots of suits, tanks, and guys to do so there are some blatant mistakes - painting ADD is my excuse. Will be clearing some WIP pics to help speed up load times.

Background for this dude:
This guy lives in water. However, he's not too smart so he uses red laser beams. He desperately wants to make friends, but every time he uses his laser to light the way, water boils and all he sees are dead fish for miles ahead. Not to mention that he isn't too bright since red totally breaks his camo. He wears a yellow light in the vain hopes to one day capture the heart of a beautiful anglerfish. He was picked up by a scout who was looking for a place to hide. He was brought in and enjoyed the company of that big guy with the (non-compensating) sword. It was found out that his suit can only function if water gets into the intakes. Like Aquaman, he one day hopes to be a really useful engine.

Cadre icon:

Preeeetty! Nice effect and good color on that blue

Whoah, thanks bro. Forgot to add background notes for this guy. He might have a cool suit, but his story just gets you down.

edit: Once I get another guy or two done, I might post a showcase of sorts on the general M&P forum. I'd like to ask for criticisms (because fishing for praise doesn't make you any better) but it will bog down the thread. So, I'll ask for them when I make another thread. I like that hardly anyone has responded here so far since it makes things easier for future viewers.

Wow- that water effect is really cool. It would be great to see a whole force painted in that scheme.

To be honest, the, um, "eclectic" scheme on the rest of the force really doesn't do it for me. Are those salvage bits that are going to be repainted, or the final scheme?

But the modeling is cool. Love the winged pack in particular.

Nope, just that one. The whole point of the army is to showcase giant, awesome robots and the rest of the army that supports them. Since I got COD bits, the regular warriors will have this color scheme. The bases are all in drab colors, along with the regular firewarriors. I still don't know what to do with tanks but I think they'll have the gray camo along with some fun designs to make them stand out.

So yeah, there will be a dozen different suits of color once I'm done. Hopefully. Maybe next year, if I get better at painting, I'll try entering 'em into golden demon and hope for a first cut or honorable mention. I doubt it would even go that far since "Tau are supposed to be communist bastards who all wear the same thing, this isn't in the spirit of the Tau" blah blah blah.

Being the epitome of all that is man i rarely say this but....

THAT SPIDER DRONE WAS SOO CUTE!!!!!1

I love the color scheme on the crisis suit.

Looks like the old guard has left. There's two megaforces and a battleforce worth of Tau upstairs, waiting to be given some TLC. I'll miss the old guys, but I can paint better now. It's the way of things.

But....hm....I see we have some stragglers in our midst. Some flyboys decided they could jump ship and come aboard as traitor stowaways. What's this?

A GROUP OF CA(NA)DIAN PEASANTS APPEARS!



How many are there precisely? What? What's this? SIXTY-FIVE you say? Wow. That's amazing. That's the start of a WW1-themed cadian army right there. Dave Taylor made one of those. Or it could be the start of a Vampire Counts counts-as army for the Mousillion region of France . Or it could be a giant WW1-themed Kroot contingent, using good ol' single-loading rifles with bayonets. Two bayonets. Cuz these guys are fast mofos that will shank you twice.

PICK YOUR CHOICE:

1. Vampire Counts, using skellie heads
2. Copycat Dave Taylor's WW1-canadians
3. WW1-canadians that fight for the greater good and can shiv you twice.


Choose wisely.

1 or 3, though they're so totally different from each other ... Would the kroot-at-arms be swarming around with these flyboys? Drunkenly huge theme difference, but would make for a solid contrast between the two halves of the force ...

I vote #1 for fantastical victory. Can easily have knights converted for black knight cheddar.

Awesome blog by the way, AquaTau is very impressive. Nice bit mashing all over as well

- Salvage

If I had the youtube clip of the Futurama episode when Fry goes to an "interactive" theater that forces him to choose the "right" choice during a movie, I'll include it here. Anyway, thanks Boss. I'm not a big scratch-build kind of guy because while I can paint, I'd rather focus my efforts on better painting than better modelling. I'll use all those Bret shields for a future WHFB army, though.

#3 HAS BEEN CHOSEN! KRADIANS, I CHOOSE YOU!

Well, Kroot are barbaric savages next to the neat Tau futuristic space-armor anyway. But, this way, at least I have humanoids. I'm already paying for it after last night. I forgot how tall the Kroot, and their rifles, are. So for the majority of my guys I'll use some lightly-converted lasguns and convert the Kroot guns to have a shorter stock and assign them as squad "snipers" of some sort. I get to do all sorts of fun little specialist squad stuff I normally can't play around with on the uniform Tau squads and bits. I just wish I took a better look at Dave's army when I was last in Glen Burnie.

My my..I'm in a locquacious mood.

Simple Tau grenade launcher upgrade. Tau help out their comrades, duh. They'll probably need underslung bayonets too if they're to stab things. There's also a sarge waving his scary chainsaw in the back.


The Kroot rifle is long. Only a few guys will get them. This will be harder than I thought since I'll have to try to keep an ordered number of equipment per squad. I'm anal about being a perfectionist with my squads and equipment uniformity for some reason. However, I'm making an exception in this army because while Kroot are awesome, they'll die in waves when they DO die. Also, my crisis suits and later on, hammerheads, will all have different stylistic designs anyway.



Standard equipment list for each 20x Kradian squad:
1x sgt. arm with chainsword
2x backpack with shovels
2x backpack with grenades
1x vox caster
1x small comm, from catachans (?)
1x flamethrower converted
1x IG vehicle shovel
3x regular shovel
2x kroot long-barreled rifle
1x Empire handgunner rifle (these guys are underequipped )
Whatever FW Krieg/Tallarn stuff I might buy in the future, cuz those tallarns have sweet long-barreled rifles.

edit: BREAKTHROUGH! I just realized I could just use 7th ed. empire handgunner bits instead of painstakingly convert lasguns. Kroot use similar guns anyway.

edit 2: Boltguns. They are S4 anyway, look sturdier, have no butt stock, and I can attach knives for bayonets.

After initial testing, the Kradians have decided that the underslung grenade launcher was not for them. Complaints of uncomfortable hand positions and a loss of the ability to attach a bayonet were chief concerns. Understandably, the Tau do not wish to endanger their brethren.

So comes Lasgun Mk. 2 with upgraded power supply, creating the need for a larger barrel. Bayonets on demand!

Sweet looking stuff. Go Kradians who can shiv you twice!

BTW, if you're thinking of using some bolters with bayonets, a lot of the chaos ones come with them.

Mannahnin wrote:BTW, if you're thinking of using some bolters with bayonets, a lot of the chaos ones come with them.

Discovering the bayonet attachments that come with the new CSM kit were a bit of a revelation for me when I saw them on TWS, as I don't actually own any of the new box ...

I think I'd rather bolters than souped-up lasguns myself. As you point out, S4 AP "Anything" Rapid Fire pretty much makes bolters a better counts as than S3 AP - flashlights

- Salvage

Even though I got some bolters, I decided to go with the lasguns cuz I can just branch out and make a complete IG army with this later. It'll take more work but I got tons of IG pairs of arms and I can easily cut off the bret sleeves, attach cut-down IG arms, then greenstuff as needed. Mostly it's because I like lasguns with bayonets. But at least these flashlights fire SUPERSCIENCE energy beams.

Also, Discount Bees at eternityofwar.com made this picture. It encompasses what my tau are about.

Some of that gaytau firewarrior love:



Normal models? Who cares about those..


Wowee, converted rank-and-file troopers you say


Guy on the left will be standing on a slant, guy in middle is tripping over a pipe, and guy on right's the leader of this hilarious bunch of fools, with markerlight tech!


Engineer will be holding a shovel, two guys running for cover


Close-up of the run-and-throw guy

Still painting Tau firewarriors. Received a couple sets of pig iron kolony rebel gas masks.





Look pretty nifty. I enjoyed attaching truescale heads to my guys. Because the brets with rimmed hats have cloth surrounding the head, they don't look too out of proportion.

I dunno if the pig iron helmets suit tau auxileries that much, they look p evil

Yeah that's the prob with gasmasks. Even the mickey mouse variety looks evil. Still, it gives most, barring the unmasked ones, a faceless, masked legion that goes with my Tau.

As much as I enjoy the gaytau love and think of 'em as awesome GOOD GUYS, I can see why they can be regarded as yet another evil 40k army and I've always used helmeted heads. They'll look cool when I start the IG army I guess.

So apparently I'm still painting. Check out dat small desk.
I wasn't too happy with the lighting but hey it's a small apartment with one lamp and they're still WIP anyway. You can see some of the blending/shading I guess..



Group shot:



Rest, more detailed stuff here:
New Dakka Gallery rocks!

looks cool. unique, i like them!