Status of Forces

I was getting my marines back into order so I decided to count them up. Currently I have quite a few built

Power Armored: 149
Terminator Armored: 25
Scouts: 38
Bikes:6
Tanks/APCs:5
Dreads:2
Skimmers:2

I also have about 15 power armored marines, 5 termis, 5 bikes, and 2 tanks in some stage of the build process. I really do not want to think about how much money this represents.

Remainder of Scout Box

Here is what I did with the other three scouts from my valentines day present. Pretty standard close combat scouts to get my cc scouts up to 10 since I moved several shotgun scouts to a shotguns only squad to cruise around in a Storm.

This gut is the only one unusual where I took the grenade arm from the scout biker box and switch the bolt pistol from standard right handed to left handed in honor of my lefty wife.

Bit Box

The hobby part of this game quickly runs into storage problems. When you are just starting, all the little left over bits of plastic fit in a sandwich bag. As your armies grow so does your collection of tiny random pieces. You might move from plastic bags to some type of divided tray. Then to multiple divided trays. Now I am working out of this portable set of 4 trays I got at Costco. For a while this held all my paints and modeling tools but those have now been displaced into another plastic container. Here is how my bit box looks right now:


Tray 1: Space Marine Bits. Pretty clear, I have a ton of space marine bits.

Tray 2: Planned Minis: This tray is where I group bits for minis in assembly. I stole this idea from Ron at FtW.
Tray 3: Catch All: This tray has a ton of random stuff from rubble, space marine vehicle bits, warhammer bits, chapter specific space marine stuff.

Tray 4: This tray was one recently cleared out of paint to make room for my Nid bits from my Assault Brood box. I have really not gotten this of the ground mainly because I have not been able to decide how to build them.

Ofcourse this is not all my bits. I have a few bags of bits seperated out for this project or that plus a bag of cities of death bits. I also have a small pile off uncut sprues still that I am working on.

My Telion

Here is a quick and dirty Telion conversion. I do not plan to use him much but I wanted to have the option to drop him into a list without dropping the cash for the metal model. Four dollars seems better than fifteen for a model just for an occasional game. I like the eye of vengeance rule and think he might be a good addition for games against Eldar to try to pick out upgrade charcters in aspect warrior squads. If Nobs did not have those pesky 2 wounds he would be good for Orks also.

I mainly just cut up a spare sniper rifle from the scout sniper kit to get the silencer for the barrel and the more detailed scope. I put the cloak bundle on the back to represent the stealth skill and the rocket is there to represent the voice of experience rule. His specially balanced rocket helps the youngins find their target. I want to use a normal space marine head from the commander box but I could just not get it cut down correctly to look right so I just used one from the scout biker box.

Powerfist Shotgun Scout Sergeant

My wife was nice enough to pick up a new box of scouts for me on Valentines Day. Does this guy just say Love or what. With the new codex if you are going to be giving a scout sergeant in a close combat squad a powerfist, he should get a shotgun to go with it. Compared to the bolt pistol it has 2 shots for the loss of AP 5. That is more than a fair trade.

This guy will be joining 4 shotgun Scouts in a Storm in my Shrike list. Mainly a harassing unit with the multimelta hitting the transports and the scouts picking off anyone who gets out. If need be they can fly 12, hop out 2. Fire the shotguns then charge in to pull campers away from objectives.

The Shotgun Powerfist scout is a tougher model to get together from kit bashing. Space Marine powerfists look fine on scouts without the big shoulder pad but getting the right shotgun is harder. This one is from the new scout bike kit and is about the only one in the space marine line that can be used to get the right look easily. A holstered shotgun might also work with something else in the free hand.

Combat Patrol List

Quick Patrol List
I am going to a Lunch combat patrol game today and the list I am using is a pretty basic space marine list since I have no idea who or what will be there. I have never done a combat patrol before so I figure I will lose badly.

Tac Squad: +5 Marines, Missile Launcher, Flamer, Serg with Power Weapon
Dedicated Transport: TL HB Razorback
Bike Squad: +2 Bikers, Meltagun, Serg with Powerfist

Plan is to combat squad the tac marines with the Flamer and the Serg with power weapon in the razorback. They will move up as the bikes turboboost into position to do any anti tank work. Remaining marines will try to provide fire support.

Terminator Apothecary

Here is the complete Terminator Apothecary model. In an early post I detailed the arm based on a chainfist. Here I constructed the rest of the model using standard termi parts matching the skull on the knee with the skull on the arm. The stormbolter was stolen from a Black Reach termi. I cut the apothecary accessories from the power armor apothecary front to add here. They probably are not necessary but were not going to used on my command squad biker apothecary since I thought they would get in the way of the seated position.

Here is the side few with the arm and the lamp. I built the lamp using a lamp off a cities of death embleshment with part of a searchlight backing. Originally I was going to not use the searchlight piece and use another part of the cities of death stuff which was a skull on a cylinder but this piece was to close in size to the front of the lamp so the imperfect alignment was to easy to spot.

Next to basing. My current basing theme is a scorched earth theme with the characters often highlight with cities of death bits in the with rubble so he will be getting some extra bits.

Blood Bowl Teams: Converting a Lizardman Squad

If you are interested in getting involved in Blood bowl but do not want to drop the 50 bucks the teams now run an option is to convert your own. I personally did not like the look of the lizardman team so I built my own out of the current plastic warhammer boxes. You essentially need about half a box of skinks and half a box of saurus. Throw in a Krox and you are at a full team. Assemble as normal but cut of the weapons and you are ready to go. I started painting them to get ready for an the underworld cup this year which was supposed to be 15 minutes from my house but got relocated to 10 hours away so I missed it.

Blood Bowl Fields

Here is a picture of the my three boards. Blood Bowl calls the field a pitch. So these are the standard blood bowl pitches. From left to right they are the second edition astrogranite board(styrofoam) with lines I painted in 20 years ago, the Krunch board(cardstock), the 3rd+ edition board (heavy card board). Krunch was a intro game the GW came out with at the same time as the SpaceFleet game. It is interesting to see how the board actually got bigger from 2nd to 3rd edition while actually having less spaces. The 2nd edition board has 25 mm spacing but 2 deep endzones. The templates for the game stayed the same so the larger board for 3rd edition made it a little harder on passing teams since the same distances corresponded to less spaces. The krunch board is actually 1 space narrower than the others.

Here is my dungeon bowl tiles laid out in a classic arrangement. Dungeon bowl was a great little expansion with traps, teleporters and exploding chests. It even had closeable doors and rules for passing off walls.

Simple Homemade Drop Pods

Now that the drop pod has a normal kit, this project might not be that useful but if you want to make a drop pod battle company for a friendly apoc game it might be helpful. I made up about 10 of these last summer for such a game. Total cost was less than 1 GW pod. I bought a bunch sandcastle molds, drilled vent holes in the top, covered holes with wiremesh, cut the bottem lips off, and spray painted purple to match my army. I just need to get some transfers on them for labels. Simple but about the correct size and excellent line of sight blockers.

Painting Progress

If you go back to some of my early posts you will see that I have quite a few unpainted marines. I would guess that I am up at about 150 individual marines now. So I have been slowly doing some painting. The quality of my painting is poor but I am just trying to get them to the three color standard. Here I have 3 tac squads of the starter set marines plus a few others. I was pretty much practicing on these so they get better as the series goes.

Here is the latest set from assault on black reach. Certainly nothing fancy but reasonably clean.

Blood Bowl

With the Superbowl and Exponent Wargames excellent pitch making article, I thought I would also do a couple of blood bowl related posts. As you can see from the picture, I have a good deal of blood bowl stuff. It was actually my first GW game. I started playing in the late 80's with the second edition. It was a fun game but a little slow. Unlike the current version of the game, every player could move around 4 squares and throw a block. There were also really no turnovers so the turns all took about twice as long as now. You were also supposed to play til one team scored 3 points. When 3rd edition came out, GW raised the price of the teams significantly (lead to pewter transition probably) and reduced the number of players. This was an annoyance which coupled to the fact that most of my gaming time was with a group of 4-5 other teenagers, a two person game just did not work that well.

I waited about 15 years before picking it up again when I moved to a new city which happened to be starting a league at the local game store. They had teams on sale and I got the starter box on clearence at another store. I narrowly managed to win the league and I started picking up teams on ebay. I got my old stuff out of storage and now have amassed what I think are 27 playable teams. They are not all unique, none are completely painted and I do not have all the teams. I have 4 ork teams(2nd starter plastic, 2nd lead, 3rd starter plastic, 3rd metal) but no amazon, chaos dwarf, orge, or vampire teams.

I always liked the sense of humor and over the top nature of blood bowl. Here is my favorite mini from my collection. A 2nd edition snotling taking care of some business in someones helmet. Very juvenile I know.

Update WIP: Terminator Apothecary

Here is the arm I am working on for my terminator apothecary. Base is a chainfist with a Inquisition shoulder pad where the trim and logo cut off to leave the skull. I think I need to cut down the laser scalpel some more to make it look less like the pistol it started as. I also need to add the controls to the top of the fist with cables running down between the display and the probe which will be part of the smoke launcher. The probe is a scope with part of a krak missile added.

Here is the next stage with some basic controls added to the fist. Next to start the body.