Three fast cars

In the classic 60s heist caper, The Italian Job, a British criminal crew put together a collection of vehicles with which to steal a cache of gold and drive it across the Alps. As well as the iconic 3 Mini Coopers, they also get hold of an Aston Martin DB4* and two Jaguar E-Types. These three fast cars, as Michael Caine's Charlie Croker explains, were on standby in case anything goes wrong. They were to be used as emergency escape vehicles, presumably for rapid redeployment of the senior gang members, should things go belly-up.

This idea of having fast back-up vehicles in case of trouble is not entirely dissimilar to something my dad once told me about motorcycling. If you're going to ride around on a bike, at some point you're going to get into trouble. So try to make sure the bike is quick enough to get you out of that trouble, before hospital or the morgue catch up with you. Of course it's not flawless logic, but in my time as a biker it definitely came into play on at least one occasion.**

Civilian motorbikes should play out in a future project, but for now the idea of quick, nimble transport, that isn't military in its design, is going to concern itself with vehicles of the four-wheeled nature. It's something I've wanted to bring to my Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargaming collection for a while, as it fits well with my interest in the domestic side of life in Games Workshop's far future. Of course, in the game, we rarely get to see this civilian side, and the setting only occasionally reveals the existence of what it refers to as groundcars. There are scattered mentions in some Black Library fiction, but the only official models I can think of that come close to being actual cars are the Achilles Ridgerunner for the Genestealer Cult armies and the Tauros and Tauros Venators from the Enforcer and Astra Militarum ranges. And to be fair even these are substantially more like military buggies than civilian cars.

Achilles Ridgerunner and the old Elysian Drop Trooper Tauros

So what might civilian groundcars actually look like? The first time I saw any kind of model to represent this was probably way back in April 1990, in White Dwarf issue 124. In the 'Eavy Metal section we were shown Dale Hurst's scratch-built Genestealer Cult Coven Limousines.

Dale Hurst's seminal Genestealer Cult

This sparked a wave of similar-looking converted vehicles, that used contemporary cars from other toy companies as their basis. Eventually smaller wargaming companies got in on the act, and some truly incredible models were produced. Most notably for me was the line of civilian vehicles made by Grim Skull, for use not just by the aforementioned Genestealer Cultists, but by Inquisitorial warbands as well. At the time of writing, these models can still be purchased over at Wargame Exclusive. I might well take another look myself at some point in the not-too-distant-future.

Gothic sci-fi vehicles from Wargame Exclusive

The models include a wealth of incredible detail, from armour plates, to hood-mounted weaponry, caterpillar tracks, vents, spikes and even wings. But they were not quite what I was after for this project. I wanted something a little less ornate. Something that looked fast and utilitarian.

When I first heard Necromunda was taking to the Ash Wastes, I thought it was going to be a vehicular combat game, along the lines of Games Workshop's much earlier Dark Future. I had already made a handful of civilian vehicles (for use as both generic working sci-fi vehicles and as burnt-out terrain), so I was inspired to finish another small batch. But most of these earlier projects were about getting something finished, or exploring a paint scheme, rather than pursuing a specific design idea. So this time I wanted to go a bit further, taking The Italian Job's three fast cars as a starting point, and seeing what they might look like, ripping across the wastelands of the far future.

Enter the somewhat niche concept of customised, off-road sports cars. 

This was pretty much what I was after. But maybe not quite so pristine. So for the general condition of the vehicles I looked to the 2008 movie Death Race (the Jason Statham remake of Death Race 2000). The cars in the movie sported cool-looking guns, which were very tempting to appropriate on my models. But I had promised myself that my three vehicles would remain civilian to look at, being used for the deployment of gunmen, gangers and heavies, rather than carrying obvious mounted weaponry. Thus the cars themselves needed to be unarmed. So from the Death Race aesthetic I just wanted to incorporate some of the scratched and damaged panels, and hastily welded field repairs to give my vehicles a bit of much needed dark future flavour.

I was lucky enough to already have an unfinished model car in my collection that seemed like it might fit my desired look. It was the Marua Nemesis from the sadly now defunct Antenociti's Workshop. It's the black undercoated model in the below photo, and you can see my initial clean up of it here, from way back in 2016. After some scouting around in my local pound shops I managed to find another couple of fast cars that looked like they might be roughly the same scale. The red one is plastic, whereas the orange one has a metal shell. 

I broke all three models down to their constituent parts, in order to see what could be done without cutting anything up. 

Then ordered some additional bits from the ever-reliable Zinge Industries. Mainly wheels and lights.

After this, a quick raid of my bits box, including scouring through any left-over parts from Ramshackle Games, in order to find some extra gubbins to stick on the roof of each model.

And then just one last thing before painting. The two pound shop cars both had see-through windows and interior detail, meaning I was able to create a few armed gangers sitting inside, either driving the cars, or riding shotgun. This really helped, er, 'drive home' the message about ferrying manpower from one place to the next. If you look closely at some of these photos you can just see them through the plastic windows. 

After painting the first two in something approaching the Death Race style, I decided I wanted a lighter, more obviously different colour scheme for the third vehicle. So instead I went for a slightly newer finish, that, although clearly dirty, was only just beginning to take more serious damage. I should probably have used an airbrush to achieve smooth colour transitions between the lighter and darker areas, but to be honest I think I'm still a bit apprehensive of that particular tool. Perhaps more effort with an airbrush can be one of my goals for the year. I guess I can check back in December to see if it has transpired.

In the meantime I foresee quite a few more Orks on the immediate horizon, as I'm hoping to put a significant dent in the remainder of their un-painted army this year. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There'll be more on them and their machinery next time. Until then.

* Apparently the Aston Martin was damaged early on in filming, so a Lancia Flaminia was disguised to look like it for the Mafia hilltop scene where all three cars are pushed off the cliff.
** For the sake of balance, it's also worth noting that the sheer instant power of a sport bike probably got me into trouble as well.

Life is dakka and speed. Anything else is just waiting.

I started my Ork Armoured Brigade many years ago based on the idea of taking the dusty, desert vehicles from the Mad Max Road Warrior bad guys and smashing them head first into the bikers from Akira, changing out all the crew for green-skinned goblinoids, then jamming the resultant mess into plated Rollerball uniforms.

Surely too much 70s and 80s sci-fi goodness for just one army?

As a motorcyclist myself back then, the Akira part of that equation always held particular fascination for me, and so one of the first units I ever completed was this Ork bike squad. 

But of course, for many hobbyists, a unit like that is never truly finished, and I soon found myself tinkering with it, and dreaming about adding extra models.

Last Christmas one of my amazing sisters very kindly gave me the Forge World Ork Nob Warbiker set as a gift. She had grown up knowing that her older brother was into these weird little science fiction toys, and she knew full well that a gift like that could quite easily be the highlight of the holiday season for me. 

So as this Christmas started to approach, I decided it was time to put her gift into action, realise my earlier dreams and add a few more Greenskin bikers to my horde.

Although the set is only really meant to build three bikes, this leaves you with pIenty of spare parts, so I've added a few additional bits and am trying to squeeze out five sleazy riders in total. I've only managed to finish the three shown here so far, but the other two are on their way, so expect another update at some point in the future.

The 'Bork. Persistence is fertile.

"Right lads, fanks fer ya patience. Patients. Geddit? Hurrhur.

You done good, not dying or nuthin. Just lying there looking up at da bloodsprays on da ceiling.

Or at least the 6 of you still here done good. Oh, wait, no, not Snazzbag, da wimp's stopped breathin'. So 5 then. 5 of you done good. Them other lads just bleedin' all over the place, wiv der organs flappin' about, gettin' me gear all wet, an' then croakin' it – dey was just useless. More like grots than 'ardboy nobs. You make a couple of tiny cuts, and pull out a couple of soft pulpy innards... Some Orks just ain't as tough as dey should be.

But da good news is dat I've got da parts. Dat's right, da parts we need to finish your... er, recov'ry. 

And yeah, Radblast, yeah, I knows you only came in for a toothache, but you gotta admit it's gone now, ain't it?

What's that? So are your legs? Well they was part of the problem, see. It's complicated medical stuff, don't worry your pretty little head about it. Well, what was once your pretty little head. Not so much now, is it? Hurrhur.

Anyways, da parts is finally here. Highly spechulised stuff this. Very hard to track down. Took my grots weeks scouring battlefields to find dem armour plates with the right colour yellow and black stripes. You can't just go picking up any old metal. It's gotta be any old metal with the right coloured paint, see?

It's a proper valuable commodity. I can't make oddities like you without commodities like that, can I? Hurrhur.

Eh, what's dat? Why couldn't I just paint da stripes on da metal afterwards?

Well, I... er, didn't fink of dat."

Like the Dok in the intro, I'm not afraid to sit on a project for a ludicrously long period of time. These Cyborks are another unit that has taken years to complete. I started building them about the time this box of plastic Nobz was released. Back when the Ork Codex still had a listing for a squad of Cyborks as an upgrade to the regular Nobz*.

I got all excited, grabbed a pack of robot legs from Kromlech, decided I didn't quite like the tracked variant enough, searched my bits box for anything else that looked vaguely like it might pass as a robotic limb for sentient, humanoid fungi, and then didn't get much further.

Death Face 2000

Fragga Ironside

Meat-Hoppa Tuffguts

Stomper Slice-N-Dice

Radblast

But eventually, after an age, I built the models you can see below. 

And then, after another age, decided I didn't like them enough to paint them. 

And then, another age later, just a few weeks ago, I upgraded and rebuilt the ones I wasn't so keen on, before finally getting some paint on the whole bunch, and being able to call them done.

And so that's another unit of infantry completed for my Ork Armoured Brigade, meaning I can now rush out and buy way too many new models that will probably sit around in a dark corner of my house for yet another age.

*Instead of what later seemed to become a singular warrior with a Super Cybork Body. I haven't yet seen the latest version of the Codex. Are there any Cyborks in there at all? Not a problem if not, as these guys will just become regular Nobz, sporting a few snazzy 'upgrades'.

'Ard Boy Ork Breachers, part two

KNOCK KNOCK! My heavily armoured Ork 'Ard Boyz are back. And this time they've got paint on. 

We last saw them a few weeks ago, at the beginning of this year, here, without paint, where I had dug them out of their decade long stasis to remount them on slightly larger bases. Since then I have added an extra member to the squad – the character carrying the battering ram from the excellent Ork Kommandos Kill Team. I tweaked him a bit to sport one of the older, larger faces, with headgear matching the rest of the team, and then removed some of the redundant spikes from the front of his ram.

In the spirit of last month's post (where I compared some miniatures I had painted with their original promotional images from Forge World), I've isolated all the finished, painted shields here, in the same manner that I presented their original design sketches in part one of this post that I linked above. They're not exactly the same, but the sketches definitely played their part in getting me to the final product.

Agents of the Imperium, shoulder to shoulder, side by side

I'm doing something a little different today. I wanted to try out an idea, so for this single exercise I've briefly changed my approach to the hobby. But before I get into that, a bit of backstory.

In late 1998, Forge World was unleashed on the world as a specialist offshoot of Games Workshop aimed at older, more experienced hobbyists. Although it was meant to concentrate on large scale busts and terrain, by the early 2000s it had dramatically expanded its scope to include an incredible selection of 28mm resin models.

There were so many amazing sets available, from just about every variation of Imperial Guard tank you could imagine, to mobile Ork fortresses on caterpillar tracks, huge Chaos War Mammoths, Death Korps of Krieg troops mounted on gas-mask-wearing horses, servitors, Inquisitors, dragons, aircraft and a hundred other models that I really wish I'd bought.

Forge World's Krieg Death Riders and Ork Battle Fortress. The latter is sadly out of print these days.

And the Chaos War Mammoth and Marauder Bomber. The elephant might be one of the rarest kits in existence.

In that last category 'models I wish I'd bought' were the Titan Crew On Foot, consisting of a Princeps and two Moderati, sculpted by Simon Egan. When they were first released they cost something like £12. My younger, naive self didn't know what was to come with the prices of models, and I think I found them too expensive. Yet they stayed in the range for about another decade, slowly creeping up in price to around £17, before eventually being consigned to the big-glass-display-cabinet-in-the-sky in the mid-to-late 2010s.

As soon as they disappeared from the Forge World website, I realised how much I wanted them in my collection. More so than any of the other fantastic models that were still available. A feeling I'm sure many other hobbyists out there are frustratingly familiar with. So I then spent several years scouring eBay trying to find them, in the hope of not having to pay the £70 to £100 they were routinely going for.

Finally, about a year ago, I found them for not much more than their original store price. Result! The downside was that as well as having been painted in colours not to my taste, they had also been converted slightly. But these were minor gripes, and it was still an opportunity too good to miss. So I bought them, dipped them in Dettol until the paint came off, then stripped away all the extra parts that had been added. To my relief the base models were almost 100% intact.

Last week I thought it would be an interesting project to get some paint back on them. I realised that the original Forge World paint job was pretty much exactly what I was after, so that got me thinking about the aforementioned experiment. I decided to break out my smallest brush and do my absolute very best to emulate the display colour scheme of the finished Forge World models as closely as I could. Obviously having the small brush wasn't enough in its own right, and unfortunately my lack of any real painting talent soon came into play.

Nonetheless I've posted the results here for all to see. Below are the original models, expertly painted by Stuart Witter for the catalogue, and then after that, my somewhat less expert attempt to copy the colour scheme and photograph them from the same angle.

Once I got started I soon realised that these characters sported some serious detail. So much so that I actually couldn't see it, even wearing my strongest reading glasses. For the first time in my hobby career I tried using a magnifying glass, but that made it extraordinarily difficult to coordinate the brush, so instead I came up with a rather foolish looking solution. I wore two pairs of glasses at the same time – and it revealed a whole wealth of detail that I had no idea was even there. Below are some more shots of Stuart Witter's beautiful smooth paintjob, followed immediately by my not-so-smooth effort.

Although this has confirmed my suspicions that I'll never be a superstar painter, I have actually surpassed my meagre expectations and am secretly quite pleased with the results. These guys will be a proud addition to my collection, going in among the various denizens of my hive city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda.

So now I just need a Titan to go with them.

RIP Forge World of old, you will be sorely missed.

'Ard Boy Ork Breachers, part one

Later this year we are due to see the release of the video game, Space Marine 2. It will be the long awaited sequel to the original third-person-shooter-slash-hack-n-slay, that was released in 2011.

Where the new game looks set to feature Tyranids as the main foe, the original game had Orks. Lots and lots of Orks. And it's one of the Orks from that game that has inspired my next set of models.

In WH40K the Ork 'Ard Boy unit takes 'Eavy Armour (and a correspondingly adjusted Save profile) to distinguish it from the regular lads, but in the Space Marine console game the 'Ard Boyz were given breacher shields as well. A simple adjustment that to my mind was a major visual upgrade. Especially as in the tabletop game, even a die-hard stickler-for-the-rules can see it's not much of a stretch to say the shield just counts as that aforementioned extra armour.

Here are some images (from a Space Marine Fandom Wiki article) that show just how tough theses rock-solid brutes looked in action in the original game.

Younger me was immediately taken by the vicious, hard-to-kill monstrosities, and I vowed to recreate a game legal version for the tabletop, armed with Slugga (pistol), Choppa (hand weapon), and, of course, the shield. 

And so where to start? It seemed like the first thing I'd need, after picking up a box of Ork Boyz, would be a bunch of suitably derelict and neglected-looking riot shields – enough to equip a small unit. It seemed only fair and Orky to try to ensure that they all look ever-so-slightly different, so, before I got out my plasticard and scalpel, I grabbed a pen and paper and started sketching.

Once I got to the above stage, it was time to look through my bits box and see what else I could throw together. I figured a few extra plates of armour, some additional pouches, spare magazines, helmets and iron gobs would do the trick. This was still over a decade ago, and back then spare parts were a bit thinner on the ground. You only got a couple of extra pouches on the Ork Boyz frames, so finding more gear for an entire unit of models could be quite tricky. There used to be a small metal 'Ard Boyz upgrade sprue, that had a few extra helmeted heads, iron gobs, and shoulder pads, so I grabbed a pack of them and set about creating some of the other kit with more plasticard. You can see all the troops I managed to build below, plus the larger Nob that I added a bit later. 

They then, as is all too often the case with me, sat in boxes, or on a high-up shelf, looking unprimed and dusty, for what must have been something like 10 or 12 years, until a couple of months ago when I realised Games Workshop was re-basing its Ork models on larger, 32mm bases, so I did the same. 

And when I got them out to do this, and looked at them again after all this time, I realised I quite liked them. So just the other day, while checking my re-basing job, I finally decided it was about the right time to get my paints out. More on that when and if I ever get them finished.