Drop Pod Completed

Fiddled with some card stock and some glue.  Actually, 1mm plasticard, 5mm foamboard and some French templates I found.  The PVC pipe components were inspired by Tom Schadle's Drop Pod tutorial.  I reduced the PVC to 2 inch and added the fins, otherwise they'd be the most unstable drop pods without some form of aerodynamic guidance.

The drop pod is 99% complete, it just needs Imperial insiginia, plating, some fans and turbojets and maybe a pintle mounted storm bolter a.k.a. "gubbins".

$2 in PVC piping from Home Depot

Size reference.  It'd be a squeeze but five could totally fit in there.

Bitz awaiting assembly.

Finz dun.

Need gubbins.

Weekend

While running around finishing my To-Do-List this weekend, I noticed that there's a Games Workshop in a mall about 6 miles from my house.  It's there.  Tucked into the corner with barely a shopfront to advertise.  Jackpot.

I then spent Saturday afternoon reading the 5th Ed rulebook.  Great artwork.  I'm such an art whore.  I like the new rules.  True Line of Sight?  Thank god.

It prompted me to review my available models and see how my army would do against competition.  Right now it's a crapload of Jump Pack Marines, four Chaplains, a couple of Rhinos, a Land Raider (that practically screams SHOOT ME FIRST) and assloads of Terminators.

I realize that I'm not going to immediately field a competitive army because it seems like the 40K metagame has shifted a bit.  Which is perfectly fine, maybe GW had to renew interest in their box sales and this helped them do it.  Besides, I like modelling tanks and will get to practice my freehand on some Rhinos. (Note to self: shop for a dual action airbrush on craigslist).

I estimate that once I add another Rhino, two more Predators and another Dreadnought and I should have a decent army that won't get shredded against competitive lists.  My current expectations for this hobby are to get back into the fun, the gaming and the PC&A.  I don't expect to compete against theorycraft.  Yet.

Footnote:  my next army is definitely going to be Tyranids. Maybe, Orks.  Can't decide.  Augh!

Backpacks? Backpacks.

Six backpacks done last night while watching some basketball.  I haven't found my pin vise so there's a lot of offset issues.  However it was fun to get back into the conversion part of the hobby.

The top two should end up with some GS cloak/capes hung from the bottom jaws of the heads to make whatever mini they're attached to feel grander and more opulent.

These won't necessarily go on Alpha Legion Captains since the entire premise of the Legion was one of uniformity and deception.  However, adhering to that AL mantra will make for a really boring army to paint and convert and this aspect of the hobby is all about making it interesting and fun. (My own beliefs about playing competitive army lists are for another update.)

I've got a bunch of models and some might just end up as one-off figures for display or eBay.

Fortunately, I do these well I have another sprue of gargoyle heads off the Chaos Predator kit I've got unopened in the basement.

Preparation

The current to-do list mostly involves; getting a light box prepped so I can document this fantastic project, finding and dusting off the tools and getting the miniatures ready for assembling and painting.

Fortunately I have about two dozen assault marines that have been primed and posed for the last 3 years.  Whilst digging through the clutter of the basement storage bin for what has been affectionally called "the really nerdy crap" I found a Chaos Battleforce and Chaos Predator that I had bought dirt cheap from a game store that was closing down.

This can only mean one thing; CONVERSION TIME!

I predict sore hands, strained eyes and a lot of nicks and cuts from scraping stupid chaosy crap off minis.

Stupid Blood Ravens.

The seeds of this site were planted back in April 2004.  At the time, I had started upon a Blood Angels successor chapter based upon birds as I had tired of my Fleshtearer army and wanted to repurpose my existing miniatures that were encrusted with BA iconography.

The majority of the models I had consisted of Assault Terminators, Jump Pack Assault Marines, a solitary Land Raider Crusader and Chaplains.

Obviously, I was not a fan of ranged combat.

I figured the models would lend themselves to an aggressive and highly mobile army that I could add a few Razorbacks to and would be able to field a fairly fun army.  I had tossed around ideas like Stormravens, Blood Hawks and other similarly ridiculous ideas.  As a Blood Angel successor chapter, their geneseed  would be heavily represented by the copious use of red in their armor.  As a secondary color I decided on tan.

Within a few weeks I had made excellent progress, I had my test squad of scouts and 20 marines done.  They were based, flocked, shaded, pimped and ready to rock.  They looked good except for the scout sargeant with the lazy eye.

Around May or June of that year, Relic and THQ released a trailer for the upcoming Dawn of War and I promptly threw a hissy fit.  So, finally, 5th edition's here time to start anew.

I threw out all the existing Space Marine chapters and asked for ideas.  Grakl suggested Alpha Legion and because I did not want to limit myself to just vanilla marines it sounded like it would be a good opportunity to create a versatile collectible army that could play with the SM Codex as well as the Chaos Codex if I felt like it.  The army had to have a plausible reason for being able to flip between the two.  The fluff seemed to portray Alpha Legion as a renegade army, one of the traitor legions that did not flee into the Eye of Terror and end up in that gender-bending, mutation spawning, septic tank of the galaxy.

So SM Codex version are time travelling preheresy legionnaires of the 20th Legion shortly before the Horus Heresy.  The Chaos version are renegade marines that are trying to free the Emperor from the Golden Throne to prevent him turning into the 5th Chaos God... or something like that.