Skyhook Retrieval Boat - Valkyrie conversion

A return to re-posting my 40K Roughnecks articles, and this time its all about the landing craft from the Starship Troopers movies.

Back when I first floated the idea of my Starship Troopers themed IG army I got loads of great feedback from other members of the blogging community.  Amongst all of it was some great contributions from Darkmolerman (who sadly seems to have been lost in the warp since he sent me this), who too the idea I had for a Valkyrie conversion in the theme of Starship Troopers and gone ahead and shown just how it should look and could be done.  Below are the pics he sent to me, they're great:

What can I say, he pretty much got the whole idea in one.  Massive kudos to Darkmolerman for the work and encapsulating ideas in my head into one image far better than I ever could.  This image is of one of the really large landing craft that they use, but considering the size of a Valkyrie compared to guard, I think I'd try and make something closer to the smaller troop transport that Carmen uses to extract the troops from Whisky base on planet P.  You can see some of the actual models for the film on the website Starship Modeler, and this is a Flickr gallery from a fellow modeller who seems to have worked on the actual film!

As far as the conversion would go, I guess it might be something like this article which shows a brilliant conversion of a Valkyrie to make a Stormraven Gunship from before the actual model was released, and I think there is a lot there that would go perfectly in creating a Skyhook Retrieval Boat.  I have an old Valkyrie I got from someone at the local game store, and I'm going to see if I can't pull it apart and have a go at making something from it before I go and buy anything for this, when I get around to working on this again.

Cheers - Andy