Deffkopta jetbikes

I still haven't got anywhere on my various ongoing Undead projects, so today I'm going to share a few more models from my old Ork brigade – both finished and unfinished. But before I do that I want to start with an article from White Dwarf magazine that really resonated with me. This was just a single page, tucked into issue 304 of the UK magazine, released in early 2005, but it featured some of the best Ork conversions I have ever seen: three jetbikes made by Games Workshop artist Alex Boyd, to take the place of Deffkoptas in his army.

And this article is the inspiration for the models I want to share today. Three or four years after Alex Boyd's jetbikes appeared in White Dwarf, Games Workshop released the stunning Warhammer 40,000 starter set, Assault on Black Reach, and with it their first all-plastic Deffkoptas.

It's probably just me being a nerd, or maybe even ill-informed, but I've always had a bit of a problem with helicopter models where the blades look too short to lift the rest of the craft off the ground. My feeling is that it's cool to invent fictional technology that performs beyond current expectations, but it's not okay to say that something has changed physics.

So, I wasn't entirely taken with the Deffkopta models in the box, and decided to take a leaf out of Alex Boyd's book, cutting the rotors off and glueing a bloody great jet engine on the back instead.

However, after completing the first one, I scrabbled around in my bits box and realised I didn't have enough parts to do the same thing to the other two Deffkoptas.

Fast forward to just a couple of years ago and Ramshackle Games came to the rescue. Their Jet Bike Kickstarter campaign contained a multitude of air intakes, jet nozzles, engine blocks and other fantastic, sci-fi, aeronautical bits – enough to give me everything I needed to complete the project.

I wanted all three flying machines to appear similar, yet distinct – like the mekboy responsible for their construction got bored and tried to vary the design as he went on.

As it turns out, it's an idea that in the real world wasn't that far from the truth.

The Giant Robo Alphabot, part twelve

Following on from my previous entry, last month, I'd like to share another poster. This time not about great movie pairings, but instead the culmination of the robot alphabet project that I've been banging on about since 2015.

We've finally reached the end now, so this will be my very last post on the subject. I promise. 

So much time has passed since I first explained it, way back here, that quite a few of the robots used in the project are now more commonly known from updated source material. What do I mean by this? Well, for example, since I compiled some of the original images, (before I even started writing this blog), we've had an updated Ultron in one of the Avengers movies, a new ED209 in the Robocop remake, and a new Warlord Titan from Forge World. In fact, with this last one, and the release of the Adeptus Titanicus game, we've technically had two updates, in different scales.

It's been a fun journey for me, not just compiling the robots and trying to come up with background styles that feel relevant to the subject, sufficiently different from one another, yet also somehow related, but also delving deep into the history of each of the subjects in order to write the blurb. And the best thing about it is I now have a Robot Alphabot poster ready to hang in the corner of my house where I pursue all things geek.

If you're interested you can see all the individual posters on Pinterest here, or read all the previous entries from this project here.