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.

Muddy Trukkers

So, you're an Ork warboss, and you've got to get a squad of boys from one side of the battlefield to the other, as fast as you possibly can. Unfortunately, as much as they all like running, charging, shouting, getting into close combat, and generally behaving in an aggressive and belligerent manner, those little legs of theirs just aren't going to get them there quick enough.

Enter the first of my trukks*.

This was based on the Ramshackle Games Half-Ute, but I decided to make it a bit chunkier by splitting the original model in various ways, inserting spacers, adding extra detail to hide the joins, jacking the whole thing up a bit higher on its suspension, swapping out the tracks** and replacing the wheels with much larger ones taken from some toys found in a Pound Shop.

It's another one of those projects that, for a very brief moment right at the beginning, looked simple and straightforward, but in reality turned out to be way more work than I would ever have considered worth it.

Seems to happen to me a lot.

*I've only just completed the trukk, but I did post a work in progress image of it about 3 and a half years ago.

**To give an insight into the kind of ridiculous timeframes I work to, the tracks that I removed from the Half-Ute eventually got used on a model, that I posted here about six years ago.

Deffkopta jetbikes, part two

"Why float around da sky on poxy rotors when we can tear it in half wiv jets and frusters and stuff?"

This, or at least a question a bit like it, was what I imagine the warboss in my Ork armoured brigade asked his meks at some point after tasking them to come up "wiv a way of 'urting fings from abbuv". 

I also imagine it preceded a point where several brave* Ork test pilots were accidentally retired or sent to the doks for snazzy, but much-needed Cybork "upgrades".

As with a lot of my Ork army, I finished the original, test model (on the right, in the picture of all three, above) a long time ago, possibly even before the birth of my eldest son, who recently celebrated his tenth birthday**. It then took the release of an assortment of jetbike parts from Ramshackle Games, some years later, to help me complete the next two conversions.

Plus the mek-bashing of a bunch of flying 'splodey things, before I could even start

And then another few years before I got the paint on them, touched up the original, rebased them all, and finally reached the stage shown here. It's quite a timeline, so it's a major relief to finally get a whole squad finished. There can't be that many units left now?

"Right lads, where are dem Cyborks? Let's get 'em to da front lines. And also dat Dread Mob? Cost me a lot of teef, dat – lotta boyz eatin' nuffin but soup. Which reminds me, where's all da grots round 'ere? And where are all my trukks? And 'ardboys? And Meganobz? What is dis, an 'oliday camp? Let's get movin' before I try fitting a boot-shaped fing in a butt-shaped hole."

*Stupid

**Happy birthday big guy. You're the very opposite of an Ork, you're a bright, talented, caring individual, and it's a pleasure being your dad

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.

A great big can of greenskin: the Forge World Ork mega dread

It's nearly the end of Orktober and I haven't yet posted a damn thing. That's partially down to the usual reason: I've been busy doing non-hobby stuff; but also because when I have had a free moment, instead of continuing with my Undead War Mammoths, I've used that time to bring some of my background projects a little further forward. It's arguable whether this is efficient time management, but I guess when inspiration strikes on a stalled project, you should make good use of it. Seize the moment. Never look that gift horse in the mouth*. Grab the ball by the horns and run with the bull. Or sumfin' like dat.

So, although a couple of old projects have progressed a notch or two, the upshot is that I have nothing new I'm willing to share right now. Thus I'm going to have to post another old model instead. 

But what a model! One of Forge World's finest. And only fitting that we take the Ork theme, and smash it face first into the walking heavy armour of that other famous hobby appropriation, Dreadtober.

I won't go on about it, except to say that the bike in among the junk on the base is an old model from Ramshackle Games; the target-headed skull logo painted on the shoulder guard is the unit badge of my Ork Dread Mob; and, if I remember correctly, the model itself was really tricky to build, but a joy to paint.


*Unless you are from Troy, of course.

Waaagh bikes don't leak oil, they mark their territory

Following on from my previous post about the arrival of the Death Guard, I'd like to introduce the other faction that's been plaguing my little corner of the Warhammer 40,000 galaxy. Although, this time, when I say 'plaguing', I mean less in a bubonic sort of way and more biblical: masses of angry things, springing up suddenly and infesting entire regions.

This bike squad belongs to an army I first started collecting at the very birth of Warhammer 40,000 – back in 1987 when Rogue Trader was originally published and the Orks made their first appearance in the RTB02 boxset*. Although I've had lots of Orks kicking about the place since then, this little gang are probably the first unit I ever actually completed for them.

Back in the early nineties, after I saw the warring motorcycle gangs in the film Akira, I remember thinking that something similar, with a ragtag, post-apocalyptic, Mad Max Road Warrior look, would be a really great fit for Orks.**

Fast forward something like 22 years and the models shown here were finally complete. As with most of my modelling projects they use a variety of bits from various places.

The squad leader above is based on Golg the Terrible from Ramshackle Games (one of my favourite suppliers of all things Orky or post-apocalyptic). I just gave Golg a head swap, added the extra firepower to the front of the bike, and borrowed an idea I saw online*** for making the 'eyes' on the front fairing more orky.

This one was my take on an Ork version of Kaneda's iconic bike (from Akira). It was pretty much scratch built using whatever parts I had lying around. The back looks like it may once have been a Chaos Space Marine Bike, and there are several bits of the plastic Space Marine jump pack dotted around. The area where the rider is sitting was the original Space Marine Jet-Cycle from way back.

The guy above was a plastic Ork boy chopped up and repositioned to sit on a Chaos Space Marine bike (with the plasticard front fairing and a bunch of other bits added to dial up the Ork quotient).

The next three, above, are the current (and awesome) Games Workshop Warbiker Mob. It's a great kit so I only made a couple of minor changes – mainly to the riders' heads and bodies.

This is another scratch built one. The front wheel and petrol tank look like they were probably from Ramshackle Games again (I told you I liked them), while the back wheel may have been from a toy quad bike I found in a pound shop at the time.

And this final bike, with a pillion passenger, was based on the previous Ork Warbike plastic kit. I never remotely liked that kit so made as many changes as I could realistically manage.

As with the Death Guard, a lot of these models, and others from my Ork horde, started life as drawings and sketches – exploring and recording ideas far quicker than I could ever hope to achieve on the miniatures. Here are my original notes.

Some of the ideas jotted above have probably made it into other Ork models from my collection, so they'll most likely appear as I share more of that in the future.

Sadly for me, everything on this page was completed about 5 or 6 years ago, so my score in the Addiction Challenge remains unchanged. Hopefully my next post will dent it a little.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 95

*A few other Orks were released at about the same time, but surely the first spacefaring greenskin from Citadel Miniatures must be the LE1 limited edition Space Orc, released around 1985?
**Especially as Games Workshop had already inspired the idea with another of their limited edition Orc models. This time the Sleazy Rider – a Hells Angel biker, not meant as an official Space Ork release, but later updated to these guys so as to be included in the range.
***I made my Golg the Terrible conversion quite a few years ago, and lost any record of where exactly that inspiration came from. I've just spent half an hour rooting around the internet in vain, trying to find the picture that I blatantly copied. If you've got an old conversion that looks suspiciously like mine, let me know and I'll add a credit and a link.

A touch of Foss

When we were kids being dragged around town on parental shopping expeditions, my brother and I would often attempt to break free and head for a bookshop. Not because we were insatiable consumers of the written word or anything. More like the opposite: we liked looking at pictures. So in those bookshops we headed straight to the sci-fi aisles to stare in rapt fascination at all the amazing covers with their images of huge starships, covered in patterns and graphics, cruising around the galaxy, towing asteroids, fighting off pirates or docking with glittering space stations.

It was only years later that I realised a significant proportion of these covers were painted by the same artist, Chris Foss.

Not only did Foss paint mind-blowing pictures for the covers of books, he also created concept art for several major movies. His first role in film was providing psychedelic hardware designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's famous, but ill-fated adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. While working on this project he met Dan O'Bannon and H. R. Geiger. The three of them later teamed up again to work on Ridley Scott's ground-breaking Alien (1979) where Foss helped design the Nostromo. He also worked on Superman (1978), Flash Gordon (1980), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2000), and more recently on James Gunn's adaptation of the Marvel comic Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).

His work still looks amazing today, so if you're not familiar with it, and partial to a bit of awesomeness, then look at the images tab at the top of this Google search. Or even better, if you've got some spare cash, maybe grab a copy of this collected art book, a comprehensive retrospective of all his sci-fi work.

But why have I mentioned Chris Foss?

It's to do with my latest vehicle project, another model from Ramshackle Games, the rugged-looking Rhebok APC.

Foss usually painted his vehicles on a huge scale. Ships the size of ocean liners, and trucks large enough to tow them. Unfortunately, not only is it impractical for me to indulge in a modelling project of that scale, but you don't score many points with the missus when she has to clamber over a toy spaceship the size of a car just to get to her wardrobe.

So instead I've chosen to reference something else from his signature style.

Many of Foss's vehicles are painted in bright, almost garish colours, sporting large, geometric patterns covering much of their hulls. It's these vibrant, bold, super-graphics that I've tried to allude to in the paint scheme for my Rhebok.

To keep things simple, I chose an orange base colour and applied black caution stripes following the contours of the middle section. I then tempered everything with a little weathering so it doesn't feel too bright and garish (after all, it's not Eldar).

And besides, I wanted to ensure the finished tractor feels like it belongs to the same world as all my other models.

That world is Ancora Fornax, and the Rhebok model represents a civilian tractor found in one of the larger hive cities, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda. The caution stripes (not to mention the vehicle's general design and robustness) indicate some sort of industrial usage. Perhaps this tough-looking tug is involved in the primary extraction of raw materials, or is designed to transport workers to the more hazardous environmental areas surrounding the city, or maybe it belongs to one of the starports, pulling smaller craft into bays, or transferring cargo and supplies.

As with several of my other models I like to think of it as something that could have graced the pages of one of Dan Abnett's Inquisitor books. Both his Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies bring civilian life in the Imperium into sharp-enough focus to see all the cracks, grime and decay, and have provided much of the inspiration for my ongoing city project.

Outside of those books, but still within the WH40K background fluff, there's the fabled civilian Land Crawler. A workhorse machine that we don't hear much about these days, and one that I probably would have forgotten altogether had it not been for Predrag Vasiljevic mentioning it on Twitter. It is meant to be one of the most ubiquitous vehicles in the Imperium, so could my tractor be some kind of local variant on the standard template version?

Like most of my projects the back-story isn't quite as important as the finished model, so whatever it turns out to be, its more essential that its bulky, hunched shape looks cool on the streets of my urban sprawl.

Henceforth known as the sprawl's rule of cool.

Miniature giants, part three: Stalker platform

What do you get if you cross the Space Marine Thunderfire Cannon with Johnny 5, the robot  from the movie Short Circuit?

Contrary to what you might expect from looking at the pictures below, I did not ask myself that question at any point during this project. Rather, as is often the case, when I started I only had a vague plan, knowing that I wanted to use up some of my left-over bits to create a rogue, semi-autonomous gun platform that has been stalking the derelict areas of my Imperial hive city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda.

But the unexpected similarities between my finished model and both the Thunderfire Cannon and Johnny 5 are not necessarily a bad thing. (Certainly not if you can whip out a bit of last minute post-rationalisation.) To me those correlations simultaneously root my creation in the WH40K universe and hint at the machine having a modicum of sentience.

When starting work on the model my design brief went like this:

1) Make it look dangerous.
2) Make it look beaten-up.
3) Make it out of the Chapterhouse Studios gun turret and the old Ramshackle Games caterpillar tracks that I already had at home.

As with most of my one-off models, there's a story that goes with this. A story that first came to light among huddled hive gangers, whispering secrets and scares around barrel fires during dark nights. An urban legend that spread through the juves, jacks and scavengers fighting over territory in the decaying lost-zones of Kru. It was said that gang members entering an area known as the Twist were being hunted by a lone machine. Confused accounts of a dilapidated yet deadly weapon system, taller than a man, rumbling over the broken rock-crete, relentlessly tracking individuals through the crumbling maze of abandoned manufactorums. Seemingly knowing its way through the labyrinthine corridors and alleys better than any of the locals. Its motives unknown. And perhaps unknowable. Surrounded by a growing aura of mystery. The more reports that came in, the more questions were raised. What is it? Where did it come from? Why the random killings? Was it built in-system or imported from further afield? Could it be a prototype Astartes weapon from a long-forgotten war, or was it designed more recently? Did it reactivate by accident or is there a more malign presence at play? And who or what is keeping it supplied with fuel and ammunition?

Miniature giants, part two: Spider drone

In my ongoing quest to fill the streets of Kru with all manner of weird and wonderful things, this next model is a giant robotic spider from Curtis Fell's Ramshackle Games. I love the original model so much I've done something with it that I rarely ever do.

Nothing.

Not only have I done absolutely no conversion work whatsoever, but I've also ripped off Ramshackle's original paint job. I used their work as the basis for my own, but tweaked the colours a bit and went on to incorporate some of the weathering I discussed in my last post.

I'm quite happy with the finished result, especially as it was a fairly quick process (compared to my normal sloth-like pace) – just a matter of hours (spaced over several days) from start to finish. If I could paint more like this, I'd be a very happy man. And one with far fewer unopened boxes lying around.

I imagine there could be a number of reasons why a strange, four-legged, robotic contraption might be found creeping through an Imperial hive city:

1) Perhaps it's simply some kind of drone, tasked on behalf of the municipal authorities to perform routine maintenance on the city's infrastructure.

2) Or maybe it's a servitor – similar to what I described in an earlier post as a hazard-zone sealed-servitor – a model for dangerous environments, with no organic parts left open to the elements.

3) Then again, what if it's a Mechanicus experiment that's escaped its testing ground, proving far more effective than they'd imagined, and not yet fully programmed to live peacefully alongside the other inhabitants of the city?

4) Or maybe that was the plan? It's some kind of awful Dark Mechanicus weapon that's recently clambered out from a heretical laboratory, hidden in the depths of the city, with murder and mayhem in its mind, sowing confusion before a larger invasion comes from the skies.

Whatever it is, I can see it fitting right in with the look of the city, maybe even providing a bit of inspiration for Inquisimunda style games: A hive gang has to stop it mapping their territory; or the Arbites have to hunt it down before it returns to its secret lair; or a member of an Inquisitorial strike team must make contact with it to download information about a terrible atrocity before it happens.

But it's not just about provoking fresh waves of thinking and inspiring new narrative. At their most basic level, one-off models like this will still add interesting and unusual texture to games – enriching the tabletop experience for not just players, but spectators too.