Opus Update; broad side

Just a short update on the progress of the Opus Magna. To get the sides of the hull ready for plaster and detailing I need to add the weapon sponsons for the broad sides. In total there will be 18 mounts, 10 for the main lance batteries and 8 for close defence. The lace batteries consists of 10 quad linked "plasma lances" counts as lascannons or something similar. The other 8 points carries hurricane bolter arrays, in total there are 96 bolters, the equivalent of an entire marine company. Appart from this there are also 12 heavy bolters mounted in the hull itself.

This is only the weapons mounted in the hull below the flight deck, there will be more guns in the tower and around the battlements.

Now I just need to drill out the barrels of some 84 bolters...

Marine Talon prototype done

 So, I finished the prototype. For the real versions I will make some changes in how I build this type of pattern for the Strom Talon and in the colour scheme. I am not really sure about the placement of the wings but with the weapon pods painted in a distinctly different colour than the fuselage the wings pop a bit more then other wise. From a aerodynamic point of view they will not give much lift but then again, the empire does not care about such minor things as aerodynamics when it comes to designing aircraft. I will also make some adjustments to the tail plane so that the hinges are on the top side where they can be seen. I am also thinking about shortening the engines as the are a bit over dimensioned in this build. It would have been nice to have some larger folding wings but I think this will do. It is more of a close support aircraft like an attack helicopter any way, and I will use the Nephilim fighter as a more conventional large wing air supremacy fighter. As it is the Opus can hold 6 to 10 of these air crafts in the hold. The larger aircraft will have to be stacked on the deck unless I can make them fold up enough to fit in to the elevators. Forge World also has some nice fighters but I am not sure about the size and weight of these. They might also be more difficult to adapt to a "Marine" version. In the end I might just stick to plastics as it much easier to work with. Well now it is only the pilot that is not done but I think I will wait a bit with that. I will probably also have to do a Nephilim prototype at some point just to see how large it is compare to the Marine Talon and the Opus. Well, now I just need to make some progress with the Opus build itself so I have some place to put the fliers.

Marine Talon; update

As I was not happy with the way the Marine Talon turned out I let it rest for a few days to see if I could come up with some thing to make it look a little better. So to day I just painted the blue grey areas black and trimmed them with a yellow border. This is not what I would call a discreet paint job... but it does lock better. I think the problem with the old paint job was that I did add the different coloured areas but with out the contrast it looked bad. In the end I am not sure if the flight wings will have something like this or if they will be a more uniform grey. I would also have like the base colour to a bit lighter so I will test another recipe for the missile pods to see if I can get them a bit lighter than the current grey.

WIP, Marine talon paint

 As you have seen on the previous posts I have made a prototype Strom Talon called the Marine Talon. Now I have tried out some paint scheme for the talon. It did not turn out as I wanted it! I am not sure exactly what went wrong but is not what I had envisioned. This coupled whit some minor things in the build will probably promote this talon to some museum of pre production concepts. Well I give you the sequence of events and you can judge fore your self...

 Base coat

First wash

 First dry brush

Second wash

  Second Dry brush

 Wear

Pods (with out wear, so far)

A "Marine Talon" for the Opus Magna flight wing

 

I know that there are myriads of different versions of the Storm Talon that people have built for some specific reason. Now I have added another variant, the Marine Talon. I thought that I really should make an effort to get some where with the Opus Magna during my vacation. I am currently in a stage where I am trying to lock al the large building blocks down to each other. This requires me to run beams between the blocks and I just realised that some of these has to cross the flight deck. However, I also intend to have a working hangar deck with elevator leading down to the interior. From the beginning I have always envisioned squadrons of storm talons being lined up in the hangar. The problem now is that the hangar level is only 8 cm in height, hence, no aircraft can be higher than that, furthermore, the elevator I cut out from the imperial sky shield used for the main deck is only 10 cm wide. The original build of the Strom Talon is both taller and wider than what can fit inside the Opus Magna. So I decided that I needed to build a test variant to see how much space I have for running beams once I get the smallest build I can get out of the Storm Talon.



First I needed to reduce the hight of the model. Most of the unnecessary hight in the original build goes from the large gun box mounted beneath the cockpit. Since this is anyway one of the models least appealing features I decided to change that. I cut the landing gears from the box and attached them directly to the fuselage instead. This also meant I had to cut the rear landing stand to almost the retracted position.This simple mod saved me some 10-20 mm in height. With the engine pods mounted the model is almost as wide as the lift and if I add the wings it would not fit on the lift. So I had the option of either making the wings fold or place them somewhere else. There is not much space for making a folding hinge on the engine pods with out increasing the width above the limit. So I decided to also mount the wings directly to the fuselage. There is not much space for this and there effectiveness as actual wings is most limited in this position. But as aerodynamics is not a real concern for the Imperium I thought that that would not be a problem for me either. With the engine pods mounted in the original orientation the almost touch the wings and they can not rotate. This together with the missile pods under the wings made the wings look redundant. So I turned the engine pods upside down, in this way I got some space between the wings and the engines and as the rotation point of the pods now is close to the bottom instead of the top the can rotate without interfering with the wings. As I decided that I would not use the gun box I had to make some other arrangement to hold the nose gun. It turned out the it was not to hard to cut the bayonet mount from the box and attach this to the fuselage instead of the ring sitting in the recess in the nose (this was cut away). I also decided that it would look better with a single assault cannon. So all in all I think it still looks a bit like the Storm Talon but in a smaller more compact version.

The term "Marine" in 40k is normally used as short for Space Marine, but "Marine" can also designate a carrier based version of an aircraft when added to the aircrafts original name. So I though that Marine Storm Talon would be the designation of this modified STC. That is however a mouthfull to say so in short I think I will call it the Marine Talon.

There will probably be some other adaptations of imperial flyers to fit the Opus Magna and its flight wing as a "Marine Nephelim" and a "Marine Storm Raven".

Well I will take some pictures with the Marine Talon on Opus tomorrow when it is light again.

Fallen Dark Angel with Lighting Claws

Last night it was to warm to sleep which meant that I had to start a new model which I finished this night. Now I realise that it can actually be to warm to paint (I have heard it but not believed), not that it is too hard to keep concentration up with over 30 deg in the room, but my finger are so moist that I am actually tearing the paint of the model when handling it! Well some touch ups and some strategic weathering covered up most of it.

This is Fallen Dark Angel with Lighting Claws will be part of a full five man squad once I have enough boxes of Death wing terminators as there are only one set of claws in each box. As I am also building my Desert Eagles guard of the one in each box parts I guess this lightning claws squad will be done when they are. At least I can build two unique squads and use the rest of the models as either Desert Eagles or Fallen Dark Angels.

Below is a group pic with the Terminators from the Dark Vengeance box.

Desert Scorpion, done.

I finally managed to squeeze some painting time in between the rest of my things to do. The Desert Scorpion, as I have decided to call it, is a direct fire, tank hunter, mounted on a six legs self propelled chassis. This model has no real equivalent in the game so I guess that is will just sit in the cabinet as all of my other models =). When I started this project back in I done remember, it was meant to be part of my mechanicum force. It did however not go well together with the rest of my home made kit-bashes design wise, so it was reassigned to my Desert Eagles. Well it has been several years in the making but now it is done. I still have two more defiler based walker to finish, that I started at about the same time. We will see when they get done (my wife insists that I really should make an effort to finish them before starting new projects).

Scorpion update and another GK

Just a short update. Just got back from the last work trip before vacation so I have not manage that much. But I am work along on the Desert Scorpion. The legs soon has the base paint on, then it will be weathering and detailing. Since it is quite tedious to put in so much sand colour, I have to paint it in stages, one area at a time, I also work on some infantry models in-between. This time it is another Grey Knight. This one I built as a apothecary. I did not go for the traditional with work but kept to the grey metallics. Well that is it for now.