Salute 1: Forgeworld

In the first of my posts about Salute, I thought I'd post up the lovely new models from Forgeworld.  Perhaps most interesting to me were the assault weapons kit for the new mkIV pattern terminator armour (or Tartaros Pattern as Forgeworld like to call it). 

In the pictures above and below, you can see some general pictures of them.
Note the power-maul, as featured on the Chaos Terminator sprue from GW.

100th post

Well heck, I've reached 100 posts.

I'm pretty amazed that I've kept this going for so long, there's been gaps and fits and starts at posting, but I'll definitely admit that trying to keep this blog going had definitely helped me keep up with my hobby.

I don't have anything special planned as this has crept up on me a little, so instead I'll just look at how the blog's done over that time:

Traffic over time

You can see just how much of an impact going to BlogWars had on my traffic (big thanks got From The Fang for that), that spike is the few weeks after the tournament when I was posting the battle reports and army images.  Otherwise I've managed to keep a relatively steady traffic flow.

As for posts, my Thunderwolf review is far and away the most popular with almost 1,400 views.  The combi-melta conversion post comes in second with over 500 views, and placing third is my conversion of a Thunderwolf mount.  Seems like those Space Wolves and their giant wolfy mounts are still popular.

Finally, "mad props" have to go to Ron over at From the Warp as both the top referring site and url for my little old blog, so a big thank you to Ron for the continuing, amazing work he does to build our blogging community.

So, thanks all of you for looking in when you do, I'll be back to posting regular content very soon as I have a lot I want to show after Salute at the weekend.  I'm also going to be trying to post mini-updates to my twitter stream that you can see on the right, or find here.

Cheers - Andy

Salute 2012

A very quick update, tomorrow I'll be trekking down to London for Salute2012, Europe's largest wargaming trade-show.  Its going to be a busy day just looking around all the stalls I'd like to see, let alone the other 100+ other stalls, and all the games.  I'll be hoping to take loads of photos and will try and tweet anything interesting that I might see, so if you are at all interested, check out my twitter feed on the right (@iron_legion) or just keep an eye on the #salute2012 hashtag.

Updated One Force paint-scheme & new paints review

Here's my first guess at how to achieve my One Force look with the new paint range.  As I haven't really started the force, and had only bought 2 pots of paints for them, I'm just going to accept the loss of the old scheme, and start from scratch.  As the local GW didn't have a full selection of the new paints to trial, I just had to spend a long time comparing the actual new paints through their pots to try and work out the combinations I needed.  I've also changed my style slightly, shading a lighter basecoat rather than layering a lighter colour over a dark base to try and speed up the process.  Comments on the paints at the bottom.

Castellan Green - basecoat, this is a perfect colour for the overall colour-scheme, very glad for this release

Conversion parts for "One Force"

Part of the vibe I'm hoping for with my One Force marines is a fully veteran force, one that has seen combat a lot, and has the scars to prove it.  As such, I plan to use a lot of bionics in the army, which means to keep variety, I'll be needing to make use of a lot of 3rd party products.  I've been compiling a list of parts that I plan to combine, with the ForgeWorld early marque armour variants, to make up my marines.

First up, ForgeWorld only do 2 types of jump troop (MkIII and MkV), so for the other armour variants, I'll be using some of these jump-packs:

maxmini.eu - bronze pattern

maxmini.eu - iron pattern

bitspudlo.com

maxmini.eu

chapterhousestudios.com

Roughnecks infantry squads

Just a quick couple of pics I snapped of the infantry squads after priming them but before painting.

 

I discovered just how quickly the painting can be as when I did get to sit down with these guys, I managed to do all the fatigues and armour on them in about 2 1/2 hours from undercoat to dried washes with only the flesh left to do.

I never did get these finished, but I'll try and get some more pictures of these as they are painted.  One difference between these guys and the pics of the other squads (and its pretty subtle) is that I've removed the ends of the lasguns which makes them look much more like the rifles in Starship Troopers.