First off a little history I've been playing
40k since 2005... a buddy of mine (R.I.P.) got me into the game. He started me out on the Eye of Terror expansion with some left over guard and some goat dudes I'm not sure what exactly
GW game they were from. I was hooked instantly. I immediately fell in love with the Khaos Khorn Lord and the play style so I modeled my Traitors and Goat Men after Khorn. I built a reasonable 1k point army of Khorn Berzerkers heavy on well... Berzerkers because I figured win or loose all glory to Khorne right? This of course was when you got feel no pain, fearless, 3 attacks for your standard Berzerker and the Khorne Axe could just rend it's way through armor with few difficulties... oh and Blood Lust... I loved blood lust. Then Khorne got the nerf... all the little gifts of the chaos gods were taken away and what was left I felt was but a shadow of how I ran them so I quit playing Khorne... I was outraged... my beloved Berzerkers were pathetic (that's how I felt at the time) So then I started exploring other avenues. I fooled with Guard some, ran a few Sisters of Battle mostly just painted the set that Joey (R.I.P.... buddy) gave me. It was going to be his show case painting. I inherited that desire... so now I'm painstakingly painting them a dozen hours or so per model. Eye brows, eyes, pupils, ect. ect.
So later I figured I could re-roll Khorne it had been a few years now and my anger had cooled. I was looking for a new army to play. I like to buy codex's just to have them and think and dream about stuff. I had recently picked up the new Space Marine codex and was looking at all the cool upgrades and reading online of places like the Bolter and Chain sword and the Way of the Water Warrior, and one army list in particular was utilizing Space Marine Scouts well that got me to thinking about Gaunt's Ghosts a black library publication of a Guard Scout Army. Now my interest was renewed in
IG. I started pawing through what I quickly realized was a outdated version of the Codex they had just come out with Vendettas... I was hooked I wanted to field one right away. I still think there pretty cool but I have yet to find a reason to field one. I started digging through the new codex and this time it made sense. I'm not sure why the old codex confused me so much but it did. Then I started noticing that you could take almost any vehicle in squads. Gone was three heavy tanks now I could field *gasp* nine battle tanks and at least that many medium tanks I was hooked on the idea of guard from then on.
I've often wondered what was the use of 3 heavy tanks on the field could really do... for my play style/tactics they were just to few. I wanted to do a Blitzkrieg not a Sitzkrieg which I felt was the case with only 3 possible (tigers) my nickname for the lumbering behemoths. I knew immediately that guard from my battles with Tyranid curse those bugs to the chaos that spawned them could just eat a Guard alive with out blinking. The lasgun or well better aptly named "flashlight" was just plain weak, 50 shots 10 hits 3 or 4 wounds all saved or maybe if I was lucky 1 dead of... 20... I was toast. (These battles were played out with Traitors who didn't have all the heavy weapon options of standard Guard.) So I knew when I started looking over the breakdown I would need as many assault and heavy weapons I could muster. A plan started to form in my pee brain... Pinning. Pinning weapons were the answer to the guards weakness as long as I could keep my enemy at range I could keep on pelting them with my flashlights and wear them away. So of course like a dumb ass I wrote a "dream" army list full of Sniper riffles and mortars. I started adding up the cost of such an endeavor I quickly realized oh hell no. I was over 500 US just in snipers and mortar crews so I scraped the army list. I started looking around at what guard I had and what Traitor left overs I had lying around. I've hobbled a untested army together from the two. A few grenade launchers, a couple flamers, 3 mortar crews a las and auto cannon crew and shockingly a missile launcher crew. I scratched my chin some... (really) and looked at the
IG battle tank I never finished, and the Traitor Sentinel ("Sherman", cause there cheap as hell point wise and still effective) and another Sentinel I made purely for show at the time... a black sentinel squishing a Infantrymen in a sand bag entrenchment. Of course a bunch of infantry to round it out to about 1k ish points. I have 0 idea of how well it'll fair but I figure I can drop the tiger (Leman Russ Battle Tank) for some more shermans (Scout Sentinels) there cheaper and just as reliable used right. I figure if Paton can win with odds of 4-1 against the German Tigers of WWII with under gunned Sherman tanks I figure while I'm certainly not Paton I can learn from my mistakes and no one is dying on the battle field due to my ineptitude.
While putting together my more realistic army of Guardsman I had an idea pop into my pee brain... a sniper conversion of the standard pattern lasgun. I gave the barrel a bit of length from a chaos sprue part (Skulls on Pikes) and re-glued the tip of the lasgun onto the barrel extension and then made a scope from a little bit above the sponsons on tanks and cut down a pole from I believe a flag from something...
GW... it had a skull hand on it... I don't have a clue where I got it Joey most likely. He gave me all his left over bits to get started. Here is some pictures:
I really like the conversion I did... granted the gun was not painted yet, and the quality of these pictures is severely lacking due mostly to the fact I can't find my effing phone and the one I'm using as backup is from the early 2000's in other words its' garbage...
The conversion:
The skeleton hand with pole and for the life of me I can't remember which Tank these bits are off of because I would really like to know so I can get more! They make a wonderful scope auspex when split in half and glued back together with a cylinder between them.
All I can tell you is there really tiny...
Finally the barrel extension:
these were left overs from a Chaos Pred I never put the spikey bits on. The reason being I painted it to look sinister/possessed/creepy and scary in a way you "can't" put your finger on... that's what I was going for at any rate.
Now that I've talked your ear off and no doubt had to take several breaks reading all this I want to say Hello, I go by the nick of Juddeern and I'm a big blabber mouth.
lol. I love the challenge of conversions and
40k scenery and I'm currently running with Guard.
Edit:
And here they are painted in all there fuzzy glory... sorry about that...
