Company Command Squad

The final figures that I made up for the Roughnecks was a command squad.  I did try to make up some of the characters from the films based on the parts in the box, and also make sure that they were wysiwyg for the special characters I planned to represent them with.  I'm just not happy with the special characters though, and I'm definitely going to have to go back and re-work most of them.

The full Company Command Squad:

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

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.

Roughnecks Army List

I've been thinking a little about how I'd put together my guard army to represent elements of the Starship Troopers mobile infantry. Some things are pretty obvious, like including lots of bodies, auto-cannons, grenade launchers etc.  They there are the characters from the films and which special characters in the guard codex could be used to represent them fluff-wise or by effect on the game.

First Mobile Infantry squad painted

You'll see from here that I'm re-posting up my guard blog posts here, and this is the follow on with the first squad of the Mobile Infantry painted up, very quick to paint, nice and easy, and the colour scheme is pretty close to the Starship Troopers films (ie: pretty monochrome).

The fatigues are Codex Grey, the armour is Adeptus Battlegrey, weapons etc are black, everything gets a good dry brush with Fortress Grey and the insignia get painted with it, washed with Badab Black, flesh then gets a quick coat before being washed with ogryn flesh.
Thats it, painted up, bases will be earth colours drybrushed up to bone to give it that sandy/dusty look of the bug planets.

The painting probably only took me a couple of hours for the entire squad (the trouble was finding that time) so I think I can bash out a decent sized force of meat for the grinder in little time when I get the opportunity. These guys were shelved temporarily not too long after this, but one day I may return to them.

Cheers, Andy

Would you like to know more?

A couple of years ago, I had this thought rattling around in my head for Guards painted up (and perhaps mildly converted) to resemble the Mobile Infantry (MI) from Starship Troopers.  I just love those films, they are so wacky and tongue-in-cheek and I used to watch them while painting quite a bit.  I posted about this a while back, and although not thinking it was the most original of ideas, it definitely got a bit of attention and I just couldn't resist making them up.

I started off with a smallish elites force of guard, Raszcek's Roughnecks, and when I can, would still like to expand into the 3rd MI division in keeping with the film.  It'll probably be a mostly un-mechanised army although that'll change given time I'm sure, and I've got ideas for some light conversions to be done to Valkyries to make them resemble the landers from the films.