Dreadtober: My Salamanders Dread is complete!

Yes, yes...cutting it a bit close to the deadline, but after spending yesterday afternoon painting its done! I don't seem to have made it onto the list of official participants for this year's Dreadtober. Not sure why but ultimately it doesn't matter. What does matter is that after years on the back burner, my dreadnought is once again complete!

Ta dah!!

Those headlights were troublesome as hell!

No matter how I tweak this photo, the upper shoulder comes out looking far flatter than it does in person. This arm was a bit disastrous in the final stages as when dry-brushing it, the bristles hit a still wet spot of the ink, causing an immediate smear! I tried to fix it as best I could, but ultimately this arm looks a little more worse for the wear than I would have preferred.  

Dreadtober WIP (6): The Multi-Melta

o/

The multi-melta arm arrived and I quickly set about bringing up  to the point of the rest of my Salamanders' dread. I had hoped to achieve that by this post, but that didn't happen. I got about halfway though...

The cheapest available multi-melta arm was a Space Wolf one because-who the hell likes those guys anyways right? Right.

Luckily the Salamanders' artificers took to the arm right away, scraping off the imagery of the Emperor's misguided children and the laughable trinket dangling from the weapon's muzzle.

Once cleansed of the offending legion iconography, its was assembled...

...primed, and then base coated. 

Hopefully by my next post it'll be fully painted, but either way I ought to have enough time to finish the dread by month's end.

Introducing one's self via treachery...

Its not recommended, just saying.

Okay time to rant. It's been awhile right? Yeah, I've missed it too. Let's begin:

A new guy arrived at the FLGS this past Saturday looking for a game of 8th. Bob and I were the only 40k players present, and we were looking to forward to a game of Kill Team as (1) neither of us had been able to get in a game of any sort for the past month or so (2) neither of us like 8th ed. Happy to join in, the new guy (to us mind you, he'd been playing since 6th ed) was happy enough to join in. Cool!

Bob's Dark Angels spewing death as my 'Eagle-Eye' upgraded Dire Avenger lines up a shot.

He had his new Tau army he was showing off, he'd gotten it used for a rock bottom price of $150 which was a steal that he couldn't shut up about. Stereotypical gamer I figured, over compensating for the lack of social skills by going on and on about his new army. Though lets be honest we've all done that at some point right?

My Dire Avengers charging forth into the Tau onslaught, few would survive...

After explaining the how to's of KT: 200 point limit and unit restrictions, the guy hemmed and hawed but finally made a Tau list using my borrowed codex (he brought the 8th ed one with him). It seemed like he had an awful lot of stuff in his force: 5 fire warriors with marker light toting sushi (no not an auto correct), 4 pathfinders with 2 rail rifles, and 3 crises suits decked out just about to the max including one with a 25 point shield generator, who can afford that in a 200 point game?

Asking to check his math seems like a dick move so on we went to a 3-player kill point free for all. Game play was fun though the overwhelming Tau firepower was kinda rough, with Bob and I focusing on that threat whilst only trading sporadic fire with one another. It wasn't planned rather a case of dealing with the biggest threat. Ultimately Bob was tabled and by game's end, I had 2 Eldar left. The Tau won handily.

Fist bump, good game, etc. all was good.

Then whilst packing up i was treated to a self-congratulatory monologue on how he used superior strategy to lure us in and pick us apart. Tau turtled up in a corner and pounded anything that came close, yes very original, I've never seen that before.

Afterwards, annoyed Bob and I started comparing notes...and there was an awful lot of Tau for 200 points. Sunday Bob texted me saying he redid the new guy's list in battlescribe and that Tau list was about 350 points! What the actual fuck??? My beloved Wolfy and I were out and about so I wasn't able to tally up the list till later.

The pathfinders, fire warriors and crises suits WITHOUT any weapons or wargear clock in at 210 points! By my reckoning his list clocked in at 330 points, either way, that's more than 50% over by a veteran player who knew how to build a kill team. So yeah, he won thru superior strategy: cheating. Not shady dice shit, that happens periodically, but luckily we haven't seen that locally in quite awhile, but seriously? Wow, he actually cheated...that hasn't happened in what-years?

There's no way he didn't know he was fielding almost as much as the two of us combined. So word to the wise, if something smells fishy (and we're not just talking Tau in general) with a new guy's army, don't go purely the 'nice guy' route and ask questions before rather than later.

Also: A note to the locals, we will provide name description, etc, of this guy to give you with adequate warning so you'll know to be on your toes.

Dreadtober WIP (5): The one armed bandit!

o/

No blog post Monday as I had accomplished exactly zilch on the hobby front (not even a game played) from Thursday thru Sunday. Not wanting to repeat that, I ignored my various responsibilities and tossed out my sad excuse for time management shoehorned some hobby time into my busy schedule to make some progress on my dreadnought.

Suck it Iron Warriors, the Salamanders have hazard stripes too!

As always there were more touch ups followed by the application of decals. One thing of note on that subject: I absolutely suck at applying decals! Seriously, look at all the decals I have used to adorn any of my minis, and rest assured that half again as many of them were fucked up in the attempted application and were summarily removed before trying again. Excessive use of profanity also accompanies the decal process.

Also, a ways back I bought a bunch of decal 2nds from Fallout Hobbies and whilst some of those are indeed no good, a fair few of them are no worse than the frequently out of register decals that GW oh so often puts in it's boxes of minis. The bastards!

After decals were dry, I slathered on the ink wash...going so far as to apparently re-wet the '44' on left chest plate enough to cause it to move atop of the Salamander icon above it. Luckily I noticed this tragedy-in-progress and was able to move it back before it dried. Unfortunately that put some ink beneath the decal discoloring the clear film around the number. Still, the final layer(s?) of yet to be painted on weathering ought to minimize the damage (I hope).

Waiting for the multi-melta...

Lastly, the more I thought about it, the less I liked the Ironclad CCW arm. The claw is just too big and really upset the visual balance of the mini in my opinion (and my Beloved Wolfy's as well, though in truth she didn't like it from the start). So off it came and onto ebay it went. Instead a multi-melta replacement arm is currently enroute to me to replace it. That'll then get a crash course assembly and painting/inking to bring it up to speed with the rest of the Dread before I do the weathering.

With the arm currently lost to vagaries of warp travel, my Dreadtober progress has ground to a sudden halt. All I could really do was paint over the excess dried inking on the base and clear coat the model as is. If all goes well, the new arm will arrive this coming Saturday and construction will commence once more.

Dreadtober (WIP 4), a few splashes of paint...

o/

Just a quick hit this time (to steal the phrase from Mordian7th).

Real life has been a bit time consuming the past few days which has slowed my Dreadtober progress. All the hoses are now painted sotek green, a bucket load of minor (but necessary) touch ups between the gold and green have been done, and the leg armor insets are properly painted black (not just primered).

Yes I'm milking this project for all its worth...what of it?

Most significantly (if I can claim that), the base has been painted with flat earth per my new norm for bases. The helmet and lightning claw have also been repainted in Iron Warriors' colors, but that's all I got for this go round. 

Dreadtober WIP (3): Somebody call the bling police!

Seriously...

Bleh, too shiny!

Sigh...the gold's looking a bit weak, that means painting yet more of it on.

This dread's got enough gold paint on it to make the Emperor's Children blanch (and this is just the base coat)! As you can see, I've laid down the metallic green and ton of gold trim, as well as a bit of sotek green on some of the hoses.

My, what a big claw you have...

The CCW arm arrived earlier than expected and has been brought up to speed as well. My Beloved Wolfy commented that the new arm looks bigger than the rest of the dread! It does look a bit out of proportion, but such is the norm with the Imperium's need to overcompensate. The arm itself is proportionally no different than on any other Space Marine dread produced in the past few decades, just the claw itself seems to be larger.

Silver and hazard stripes to come!

I also painted over the Space Wolf colored bits on the base. Despite exterminating a wayward and misguided (though ultimately loyal) Legion, Russ' puppies are nonetheless considered to be loyalists themselves. Thus it makes no sense to have their discarded equipment lying at the base of a Salamander's dreadnought's feet. Instead these will be painted in Iron Warriors colors as I have done previously.

Dreadtober WIP (2)

o/

Rather than try and tape off and reprime parts of my dread, I decided to just start base coating it instead. True, this might make the green a tinge darker than it is on the infantry due to the black primer, but as there are so few vehicles in my army to begin with I’m okay with that. Beyond picking out the Vallejo heavy green areas, everything else got a thorough dry brushing of GW's Iron Breaker.

I haven't done any work to the base yet.

One thing you’ll probably note is the twin-heavy bolter arm is missing. I wasn’t really keen on using it and perused eBay to find some other options. I found a right-side dreadnought CCW arm and thought the idea of having the ‘gun’ and ‘CCW’ arms reversed from the norm to be rather novel. Thus I opted for that along with an underslung meltagun (both of which ought to be arriving this coming Saturday).

I do wonder just how much of the metal work will be painted gold before all is said and done...

In hindsight, having the main gun simply be a twin-linked missile launcher backed up by a master-crafted meltagun (when using the Covenant of Fire RoW) and a dreadnought CCW is if anything, even more mediocre than the original twin-heavy bolter and missile launcher combination. Oh well. I’ll just run with it. Besides, it can’t be any worse than the Furioso-type dreads that Blood Angel players field, right?

As for the missing twin-heavy bolter, if you want it then you can find it here. 

DLWDG joins Dreadtober!

...and now with a digital gun to my head, I might actually do something productive on the hobby front!

Well, I presume I will, haven't heard back yet but I only emailed them about 15 minutes prior to typing out this post. Neverness posted a link to Dreadtober in our local gaming groups's FB page, asking if anyone was interested. About the only response though was Kushial who replied with a pic of his vast collection of Dreads (seriously dude, you need therapy)!

I on the other hand I have an old, woefully neglected dread that I haven't touched in a little over a year that seriously needs to be returned to glory! With the demise of my Alpha Legionnaires for 30k, this venerable beast will instead go to my fledgling 30k Salamanders army. Sorry Rainbow Warriors fanbois (all 2 of you), those guys are Kill Team only.

Here it stands is in its current state:

All of the constituent parts, primed (not green) and sorta ready....

I may tape off the mechanical bitz and reprime it green actually...

Whilst the missile launcher will be a welcome addition to the Salamander's dreadful (lolz) lack of anti-tank weaponry, that twin-heavy bolter is kinda superfluous.

Appropriately enough I was thinking of Neverness when I worked on this base, since as you can see those are Space Wolf bitz lying at its feet.