Tau custom weapons and mounts

Having recently played in an apocalipse game of Warhammer 40K and only having three railguns in a Tau army of just under 3000 points I decided something had to be done. I have plenty of crisis suits but only two Broadsides for backup so considering that all my regular suits were magnetised anyway what if I built some railguns so they could do double duty?

After some searching around the net for ideas I came across a post on Advanced Tau Tactica in which the author had used Cable ties for the beams of the weapons, noting that many of the other ideas involved components I didn't have access to I decided to give it a go.

As you can see from the picture above I have already created two pairs of guns for suits and something somewhat more substantial for my Skyray, the large guns in the background are a pair of twin linked plasma guns also built to be used on the same mounting but lets start with the suit railguns.

Being all out of fusion blasters, and any Tau battlesuit weapons for that matter, I ended up using Space Marine tank Auto Cannons as the rear of the new guns, partly as I had a number which would maintain a visual style but mostly because I liked the look of the ammo feed, though I new in the end it would probably have to be removed so the gun would mount both on the arms and shoulders of the weapons. The size of the host wepons was also useful as it allowed for the ties to sit next to each other leaving a small gap creating that traditional railgun feel. 

After searching with no luck through my bits box for components that would look good as the front end of thee weapons I settled on just using card and carefully wrapping it around the ties, a coating of superglue is then applied to turn the card into something approximating plasticard. The next stage will be to add more metal plates to the 3 guns I haven't finished yet to allow the magnets to attract them, this first one has metal on two sides allowing for both horizontal and vertical positioning as suspected though the feed had to go which was a bit of a shame.

On the tank front, having rescued a rather dilapidated Skyray I took the opportunity to add magnets to where the missile racks would normally attach. the whole turret mount is also removable and can be attached to both this tank and one other that have both had their top hatches removed and replaced by a modified drone that the turret can attach to. The missle racks and railgun have then had metal added, the plasma guns will probably need magnets sunk into them as they are a little heavier.

Of course the best part about magnets is you can swap things about a bit, though admittedly this particular load out may be a little impractical for most combat situations. It also means the Hazard suits  I featured a while ago can use any of these weapons, they would make cool looking Broadsides though the base size is an issue.

Araby Ogres

The other day we looked essentially at where my conversions started. Today we see some models that are a lot more recent in the form of a squad of ogre bulls. 

As my ogre army is desert themed they needed appropriate attire, being bulls they only get the most basic of clothing so hats and a few hides or shirts. It's always fun converting these guys up, trying to find new variations on what is a pretty standard hat style, or creating some other peice of clothing. The ogres size allows for much more variation than most other armies troops.

To create the standard hats you take a round flat piece of Greenstuff and place it on top of an ogres head then you make a long roll of Greenstuff and begin to wrap it around and in the case of the guy to the left under their heads. Hide coverings are simply just large flat panels of greenstuff overlaid and curved over each other and then marked as needed.

Though I tend to prefer greystuff to greenstuff it seems to have a more organic texture when dry.   

Quick Conversions - Old School

As a new edition of the game imminently desendes on us I thought I would take a look back at some of the very earlierst conversions I created. These were done around the time of second edition  so therefore are only representative of what a very young me was capable of.

So what do you do when as a kid you start a new hobby and only have the starter set and a tank (in this instance not even one that is part of the same army) and could really do with some heavy weapon guys? 

Well as this picture shows you butcher a pair of clip together marines giving one a heavy flamer and tank from a leman russ and strap a hunter killer missile launcher to the head of the other guy. The chaos marine in the picture got a new arm purely by chance I bought a metal chaos space marine terminator one day and he came with 3 arms which even for chaos seemed a bit odd but hey new arm for someone else!

Dante here lost his axe, which as a chapter master was probably a little embarrassing so as a punishment he also ended up loosing his legs. As a first attempt with grenstuff it was a little undefined but everyone has to start somewhere. How he steers or why he is still wearing his jetpack (that makes it a jetbike right?) are anybody's guess.

2nd ed vortex grenades are still the best weapons in the game though.

Quick Conversions - Tau Hazard VF1 head and Magnets

I havent shown many conversions of late so lets rectify that with a look at a simple conversion I did to my Tau Hazard suit that will act as the team leader. 

Firstly we have the head which has had the crest removed and antenna from other Tau models mounted on the sides in an attempt to give it a similar profile to that of the head of one of the Veritechs from Robotech/Macross. a straightforward conversion whos only real issue is that the antenna in question only face one way so if you want the finished result to look more polished you will have to cut and turn one of them around.

The other main element was magnetising the burst cannons, again a relatively straightforward procedure (best to wear a mask when dealing with resin) in this case made more tricky through the lack of a drill bit that matched the size of the magnet. Obviously having gone though this procedure on 2 other suits as well Forgeworld decided that the other weapon options would come fused to the arm elements, sneaky. Still between the magnets and the metal rod pinning the heads in place it did make the suits much easier to paint, and I can always use the weapons on my crisis suits and one of my tanks which are also magnetised.

Ogre Broadside Leadbelchers

The races in Warhammer fantasy never really held much appeal for me compared to 40K, sure there were elements of certain armies that I quite liked but never enough to start the game. 

Escalation leagues are excellent ways of getting into new games so when we started one for Fantasy I was stuck for a battalion to choose for quite some time. In the end I went for Ogres mainly because they seemed to be the easiest race in Fantasy to convert. 

One thing about the Ogres is that you can never have enough leadbelchers  and drawing on inspiration from my Tau army and parts from a Dwarf cannon kit these guys were born.

Relatively straightforward conversion aside from the arms which don't tend to have that much in the way of range in the standard kits. I also tend to extend the stomachs of my more important characters, standard bulls are a little on the thin side.

Stormraven mark III production shots

Here are some shots of the Mark III and its turret near the end of its construction. You may notice a distinct lack of plasticard on the model, thats partly due to the fact its quite dificult to get here and expensive when you do, and partly due to the fact that why use plasticard when you can use regular card (in this instance from a box of chicken steaks), create curved surfaces and cut it with scissors and then apply copious amounts of superglue to make it rock hard. 

Black Adder IG Comisar Conversion

A simple conversion of an Imperial Guard comisar into Captain Black Adder came about mainly due to a joke. Still I found the idea amusing enough to actually make the model and this is what I ended up with, he comes complete with pencils up his nose pants on this head and a trusty stick because obviously you wouldn't want to go over the top straight towards machine guns without one.

I also replaced the front half of his gun with something more old fashioned in this case the front half of one of the scouts guns from space crusade. Needless to say the pencils were a right pain to to position.

Hopefully at some point I will get the chance to convert up the rest of the BlackAdder crew.

Daedalus Pattern Stormraven Conversion

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I'm currently working on trying to get the layout the way I want it once thats sorted i can build the real gfx and start adding content.

Black and orange its so 2003! Still at least its not grey on white...