2 PHIG missile teams and a Psyker are complete!

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Sorcery-in-progress!

This week I have an update on the slow progress of my Pointy Helmeted Imperial Guardsmen (PHIGs). I painted up a pysker, and finally finished two of the three missile teams for the heavy weapons squad (I can only do two at a time as I'm limited to just four of the tiny bases I temporarily glue them too). 

First up, the Psyker.

Feel the Force flow thr-oh wait, wrong genre. 

Note the runes on his/her kit. 

The witchery does not extend to the back of the hand...

Rune inscribed Force Hatchet.

As always there a pistol for shooting in close combat. 

This mini will serve as a Primaris Psyker. As I'm really limited on sculpts with this bunch, I just did a hand swap on a superfluous standard bearer. To help him stand out from the rest of the oh so similar infantry, I added a witchfire-esque glow to both his/her (like you can tell under all of that gear) hand and emanating from the grill of the helm. 

I rather like the effect. His/her kit is also inscribed with several runes of...warding? He/she is also equipped with a rune inscribed force hatchet.

The team's gunner is prepped to fire with the loaders each carrying a spare launcher.

This will be the red squad which seems like an appropriate color for fire support. 

The Ammo Crates hold spare rounds, presumably enough to carry them thru a standard 5-turn game.

I got a little ahead of myself on these guys and forgot to add any unit decals. I'll likely carry this omission on to the last team as well. 

Next up are two of the heavy weapons squad's missile teams. These missile teams are the only option that these minis come with in regards of heavy weaponry. That said these look good and luckily missile launchers are good against both armor and light infantry hordes. I also like the 50mm weapon team bases over the prior 60mm bases which seemed like a bit much for an Iggy weapon team.

Target acquired, fire on my mark!

Next up for this army will be to finish the last weapon team and maybe the final four grunts in my first infantry squad. After that, perhaps a 2nd tank will be in order.

Star Wars Legion Mudtroopers

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My apologies for the crummy lighting & backdrop,

it is usually just about dark when I get home (or raining outside). 

This week I've been trying to finish off the menagerie of half painted minis that have been loitering on my desk for the past few weeks. I'm almost finished with a couple more PHIGs, but as that's an almost, I'll save those for my next post. Today I instead present to you another four Mudtroopers. 

Seriously Atomic Mass Games, why are there no official models for these guys yet? 

This bunch includes the blue squad leader, another grunt from the same squad, as well as a pair of specialists armed with a DLT-19 and a E-22. The latter isn't much of a support weapon (hell, Shoretroopers are armed with them as standard). But...those guys are kind of elite whereas Mudtroopers, are more like rookies. As such, its a support weapon. That said, its cost is only a single point more than a regular grunt.

This is the part where they run away!

The DLT-19 is your standard, issue Imperial long ranged anti-armor weapon for infantry. There's one mounted on my Occupier tank's pintle mount as well. I only have four Mudtroopers left to go, another E-22 gunner, a scatter gunner (same stats & cost as the Rebel Fleet Troopers upgrade), and a pair of Mortar emplacement troopers. 

This is the stat card that I made for the mud troopers. As you can see they're similar to that of the Stormtroopers, just crummier (the same can be said for their mortar emplacement Mudtrooper). There's no automatic point calculator for custom units, so I tend to aim high on my point costs. As such, I used the same point cost as standard stormtroopers. The mortar emplacement is the same cost to that of the Shoretooper variety as well. Such are the costs of proxies.  

Never tell me the odds!

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No, this isn't another Star Wars Legion post. Rather for the second time now I've won an NOCF charity raffle! Ya know, I had been donating to these raffle for years to no avail. Only about $15-$20 at a time and win or not, its always for a good cause. 

After this, yes I will go into that asteroid field!

About a year and a half ago I won a pair of Iyanden Warlocks which now reside in my display case. This time around, I won a Salamanders Infernus marine. It's a great paint job, though I find it a bit curious that a Salamanders' Icon decal was not applied. Or painted on, given just how good the flames are freehand painted onto the other pauldron. 

The Mrs. rather liked the discolored metal of the pyreblaster.

The strangely blank pauldron.

This one however is just perfect!

Nice base too!

And he is off to scour Screech's display shelf of dust bunnies with extreme prejudice!

Nice as this is, I have no use for it other than to decorate my display case. As such I gifted it to Screech who is now the proud owner of his first painted Salamander! I told him that he ought to be a sergeant or something despite the green helmet, to which he replied: 'Like he's ever going to leave the shelf'. 

Can't be risking that pretty paint job with a potential fall from the table I guess. 

I finished my Star Wars Legion El Camino!

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This may be the first time for this blog, where I have a painted model sitting in the snow. 

Before I talk about my latest project, I was hoping that maybe some of you would be able to help out my personal friend Neverness. Had his supervisor not decided to take him to the ER as a precaution last week, we might have lost him forever. While he's in much better shape at the moment, the both physical and financial ramifications of his sudden bad turn of health has turned his world upside down. As such, his family has created a GoFundMe for him and if you can help him out a bit we would all be grateful. Also a word of caution on GoFundMe: the 'suggested tip' at the end is both unnecessary, and does not go to Neverness' benefit. GoFundMe keeps that for themselves on top of the fees that they collect, the sneaky gits!

*****

This was one of the first minis I that I bought for Legion, and unlike the rest of my early models, this was the only one I didn't either sell or trade away. I'm glad I didn't as it is a really cool looking model, not quite sure if it qualifies as a proper tank though. 

Unfortunately the sponson guns are fixed forward, whereas I think they ought to be able to fire backwards as well. As for the chin mount, I don't think that would remain functional on anything but the smoothest of terrain! 

Kyber crystals all loaded up and ready to go. 

Or are they just boxes of ration packs?

In all likelihood, the containers will just be used as scatter terrain.

The Occupier is more of an armed transport in my opinion. Sure it has guns because what Imperial vehicle doesn't? The Mudtrooper crewman seems more appropriate as I see this as a second line unit as opposed to say an AT-ST.

About the only sort of cargo that this would likely carry in a game would be an infantry unit of some sort. I hear weapon emplacements are popular with these as it gives them some much needed mobility.

I swapped the stormtrooper crew out for a 3D printed Imperial army/Mudtrooper crewman, though I think he was supposed to be the guy that Chewbacca tossed off of the top of that AT-ST on Endor.

Hopefully I will get this dirty ol' rust bucket on the tabletop some time in the near future.

All in all I'm pretty happy with this model. This is the last of my unpainted Legion vehicles. Indeed, I think that I have little more than a dozen or so minis across all three of my factions left to paint!

B1 Battle Droids (and stuff)

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Progress on my Star Wars Legion armies continue, this time with my third army entry: the Separatist Alliance. 

The yellow trimmed droid is the squad leader. I had to quickly snap these pics as there was a serious chance of a gust of wind blowing these off of the deck's railing!

Whilst this isn't this faction's first post on here, for a little while there it was in danger of being it's last. These fragile little fuckers aren't only a bitch to assemble, they're no picnic to paint either! Especially as I'm dry brushing these which puts a bit more stress on these spindly minis. 

This chunk of droid will decorate something's base.

Two broke during the painting process, one irreparably. This means my second, otherwise unpainted squad will include the backpackless OOM Security droid. Indeed, in a fit of nerd rage I almost boxed the whole lot of them up and posted them to eBay. Luckily for these infernal minis, I was too busy with the holidays and instead they just got shoved aside.

The little blue swatch on the back of their heads is my way to identify the different squads (assuming the other one ever gets painted). 

Speaking of this force, I had intended to use the Experimental Droids battleforce under the auspices of they're just old, somehow still functioning and thus rusty droids. However teh interwebz' meta gamers insist that that this battleforce list sucks! 

Whereas in my case, the Experimental Droids list is restricted from including spider droids. Spider droids are my favorite droid model, so I'm right there with the meta gamers, albeit for entirely different reasons. Thus I repainted the their guns to not look rusty, and these will instead run (theoretically someday) as a standard issue droid force. 

*****

In other Legion progress, I painted up the Speeder's unused Rodian rifle gunner. While I was tempted to make a card using him as a rookie bounty hunter or the like, I'll likely just use him as a grunt in my rebel trooper squad.

Online, Rodians seem to be one of the most hated of Star Wars alien species. I'm guessing its due to the seemingly useless suction cups on the ends of their fingers.

As you can see, I also painted up two barricades. These two are a different color than the rest which are grey. The reason for that is because they were used as stands for the X-34 in my last post, as it was receiving a second coat of primer. 

One of these barricades was blown off of the railing by the wind. Luckily they're both solid pieces and well varnished. Thus no chipping was incurred.

Star Wars Legion X-34 Rebel Landspeeder

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This speeder may have dipped a bit low to dodge and incoming round (or tree branch?) and judging by the windscreen, went thru rather than over some muddy water!

Well this was both fun, and a relatively quick paint job! Now that I have new hobby lighting, I'm back in business when it comes to painting minis. We even had some warm-ish weather the other day enabling me to prime as much as I could (in between rain squalls). 

Visibility, who needs it? Also, in hindsight I ought to have put that fern to the left rather than under the speeder, but oh well. 

I've never liked the blaster cannon mounted on the hood and so opted to put it over the starboard 'wing'. Note, said wing and engine nacelle are mostly blue. Clearly this X-34 took some damage in a past engagement and another machine was cannibalized for parts. 

The blaster is glued in place, so no ion options for these Rebels.

Due to the blaster's position, the Rodian rifleman was omitted from this model. I had to have the Twi'lek gunner with the RPS-6 rocket launcher though! The Rodian will likely end up in a trooper squad or something.

The camouflage was created using some old stencils from Fallout Hobbies and two layers of primer.

Basically this is the Star Wars equivalent of the the modern day, insurgent technical. Fast, fragile and sort-of effective. I'm thinking that this will work as a high speed distraction, hopefully getting into the enemy backfield and causing problems.

'Look lady, I'm driving, so I get to pick the radio station!'

Hobby-wise, my 2024 is so far a bit of a mixed bag...

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My previous Black Dragon pauldron icon decal sheet was down to less than a squad's worth!

On the upside, my Black Dragons army has been saved from certain doom due to a lack of decals. My remaining decals from the now defunct Silver Drakes turned out to be a hellova lot less than I had realized. As such I had stopped painting any more Black Dragons as I agonized over which eight infantry models would get the last of my precious decals. 

Fallout hobbies has stopped their completely custom decal service that I had used a few years back. I was fruitlessly searching for a replacement decal provider when an Etsy seller suggested Death Ray Designs. After asking the latter a few questions in regards to what I wanted, I received the sheet above. I highly recommend them! Now I have more Black Dragon icons than I'll ever need!

I rarely see this in online battle reports, but I opted for the 'rule of cool' and bought it anyways.

On the holiday acquisitions side of things, I bought a Rebel Landspeeder and some Legion barricades for some scatter terrain when visiting Knoxville last weekend, as Sci-Fi City was having their annual, end-of-the-year 30% off storewide sale. I also got a few random GW paints as stocking stuffers for Christmas, and Screech gave me a $40 Gift card to our local Hobbytown which was awesome. 

Trending downward however, I was looking on GW's website to see what I could buy for 40K for $40. Quickly, I changed to my search to what can I get a $40 discount on for 40K. Sheesh! The prices of minis for 40k are really just shocking! its no wonder that I buy most everything second hand or 3D printed these days!

So many projects, yet so little light...

As much as I would like to work on my new toys and previously on-going projects, all painting for me is currently on hold. After ordering a new LED bulb after I thought it blew, it seems that instead it was my hobby lamp that died. As such it is too dark in my office to paint anything (which is ironic considering my wife's vast, stained glass lamp collection) until the replacement lamp arrives this weekend.