Hobby Progress, October 2017

October was a busy month. Adam  had convinced me to play some Shadow Wars Armageddon in mid-October, which gave me an opportunity to first find, then assemble my old Tau Pathfinder kits from when I still played 40k. I found them tucked away inside a random box on a random shelving unit after tearing apart most of my usual model hiding spots.

Ages ago, I had thought about doing a 40k Kill Team squad and basing them on Secret Weapon Minatures’ Urban Rubble bases for maximum Tau-appropriate grimdarkyness, and I still had the bases I had bought for them lying around in my bits pile. Some snipping, scraping, cementing, and gluing later, I had the start of a Tau Pathfinder squad.

While I was at it, I did a test assembly of some Heavy Gear stuff to see if the plastic cement worked on the plastic that the Heavy Gear stuff is made of.Turns out, it works just fine! Anyway, I assembled to my Shadow Wars list, which was primarily just a bunch of Pathfinders with pulse carbines and two with rail rifles. I threw in a pulse accelerator drone because the internets have been complaining that Tau in Shadow War are short-ranged.Things didn’t go amazingly well for me in my games with Adam, but I found that I was pretty annoyed with the rail rifle being too heavy to shoot while moving, so I assembled a ion rifle Pathfinder, and rebased my Ethereal and two Stealth Suits on the urban rubble bases.Yes, that’s a Djanbazan and a pair of Sekban, which means that yes, I’m getting into assembling my Haqq. I’m prioritizing a QK force, but can’t seem to settle on a list to start with. Probably a Djanbazan core with Sekban Haris for maximum pew pew. I’m so used to playing Nomads where everything is a useful specialist… Speaking of which, I finally finished painting up the female Wildcat model. It’s not my best work, but it’s “done,” at least to a tabletop standard. I did some blending work on the shoulder pads, like I did on my spitfire Wildcat, but I didn’t have PJ’s expert eye guiding me so it didn’t come out nearly as nice.I think most of the shoulder pad “pop” comes from lining the grooves with some black wash, so I’ll just leave it be. The big thing was that the orange glow effect came out pretty well in person, but looks blotchy in the pictures. I’ll take it.

I’ve been messing around with Tomcats lately, and have a cool shirt to show from it (thanks Nazroth, AikasMX, and the #BromadNation!) from StrikeZone Wotan.

I kinda wanted to have an alternate sculpt to cover the Combi E/Mitter profile with mines, but there isn’t a suitable Tomcat model for that… so I stole a combi rifle arm set from a male Alguacil and… attempted… this…It’s pretty fugly, but will probably look fine once I file it down, do some detail greenstuff work, and prime it. Really the problem is the scale creep in the Nomad figures from old sculpts to new digital sculpts. I have the same problem with my Bandit-armed Reverend Custodier, but I don’t think I’ll notice after a few months of having it painted and on the table. I’ve held off on further work on this guy for awhile, primarily to let the greenstuff sit and to get over the frustration of having fat fingers trying to sculpt all of it together.  Sometimes assembly just super gets on my nerves, especially trying to glue a pair of arms that are connected to a torso… It gets worse when there’s a ton of extra degrees of freedom and no indexing or keying at the joints… Ugh. Really need to be in the right mood (i.e. well hydrated and rested) to do complicated assembly work.

I wanted to get some work done on my Qapu Kalqi, so I finished up most of my Sekban and the two Bashi Bazouk sculpts that I have. The new SMG sculpt is so cool, and the tacticool rock she comes on actually fits my basing scheme so I didn’t have to do anything irritating. I actually bought an amazing new tool, which is a jeweler’s saw. It has made removing the tabs on the feet of Infinity models so much better, as well as safely and cleanly removing tacticool rocks.

On my cutting mat, you can see the body of my 5th Sekban, which is the pistol-holding model. I couldn’t get the arms to line up right (and he’s totally teacupping his pistol which really offended my aesthetic sensibilities).

Since I couldn’t get the support arm to line up anyway, I just got rid of it and stole the sling bag from the Midnight Sun Analyst, figuring I could use this as my Sekban Doctor model. After shaving off the saucer hand, I cut away the pistol that was in the right holster of the the Sekban’s torso (which was a huge pain in the butt). I tried to save the retaining strap on the holster but I cut it off accidentally when my knife slipped. At least I didn’t cut myself!

I like the way it came out, and I’m really liking the way that the bases I got let me dynamically pose the models in a unique way. It adds a vertical element and movement to the minis, and it really makes them look like they’re contending with the terrain they’re moving around in, which I really like.

After struggling with the Sekban for so long, I managed to throw together the Djanbazan box in no time at all. I messed up and put the hacker’s backpack on the HMG, but I figure the HMG guy needs a special backpack to lug all his ammo around. Ah well.What was really disappointing was that I really wanted to put the sunglasses head onto the HMG guy, because… he’s got all of his guns out, which means the sun’s out, and he needs sunglasses. Sadly, the poses didn’t work out and a lot of the faces aren’t complete as they’re mushed into the heavy armor of the Djanbazans. Had I swapped heads like I planned, there was going to be a weird situation where half the bottom of the guy’s face would be missing or his head would’ve been cocked in a weird way, and I am NOT going to greenstuff that. I’ll survive the disappointment.

Some quick filing and clipping later, I have 300 points of QK assembled, sans all the Hafzas I’ll need. I can proxy for now, I’m sure. You might notice that one of the models isn’t a Haqqislam model at all…

Been thinking about how to base my Force de Reponse Rapide Merovingienne, and I think I’ll go back to the snow bases I used for my Khador, right down to using the trenchworks and blasted wetlands bases from Secret Weapon.I’ll probably use a little more snow and… not suck at painting dirt this time around.
I’m planning on using all the Dust Warfare buildings I have to make a snow board for my FRRM, which will be pretty cool… speaking of boards, I threw together this with the contents of a MERCS: Recon kickstatter box. I think it’ll be pretty fun to play an indoor board on, perhaps a Recon or YAMS game. Need to have some heavy house-ruling to contend with cover and the like, but I think it’ll be really fun.

Anyway, that’s it for October’s hobby progress! I’ll be finishing up my QK and starting on my FRRM over November, work allowing. I’ll also have to find time to clip some Heavy Gear sprues… Head over to Lumbering Sprocket for more Heavy Gear stuffs! Thanks for stopping by!