Fire Raptor - progress

So I have been working hard on getting the fire raptor closer to being completed and since I have now been invited to take part in a battle this weekend there is even more pressure on me to get it done.

So here is some of the progress to date, I have hopes to get the finalised model ready to rock by the weekend.

Some aspects of the model I am extremely happy with but there are some areas I do wish I had made a better job of and I am slightly worried about the shear mass of the model and being able to glue it together in a way that holds and does not require constant repairs - something that is generally less of a problem with plastic models.

Battle and Army pictures

So yesterday my friend and I met up for a 3000 point battle in which I would be bringing approximately 2000 points of Night Lords and 1000 points of astra militarium against a significant force of daemons which I was not confident about. We had exchanged army lists beforehand and I knew my opponent would be bringing five flying monstrous creatures which is never going to be easy to deal with.

To start off on arrival I pulled out my Night lords so I could grab a couple of shots of them including the drop pods which were not going to be fielded in this battle but which have been painted and here are those shots. Sadly the terminator sergeant has suffered some issues with his power sword which is going to have to be worked on carefully to reverse without damaging the weapon if at all possible.

 The following picture shows the additional models also appearing in my army, not as impressive but needed until I can get my arse in gear and get a significant quantity more models completed for the Night Lords, fortuneately I can confirm that this battle has given me the kick needed to get back to work on the fire raptor and now most of the fuselage is base coated.

This is my opponent’s army, certainly not optimised but a serious threat for my force. It is a somewhat intimidating force and very well painted, my friend not being an expert painter tends to purchase his armies off the web which gives the benefit for compensating for his lack of aptitude/patience with painting. The only issue I tend to notice with this is expanding his force is somewhat difficult since it is hard to get anything with the same style of painting and basing.

The battlefield was the typical city ruins we tend to like and had plenty of terrain.

The mission we rolled was another of the maelstrom of war ones in which there are increasing numbers of objectives every turn. I won the dice off for table edge, deployment and managed to avoid my opponent seizing the initiative from me.

I am not going to do a turn by turn report but essentially what happened was the Night lords got off to an early lead constantly getting excellent objectives which were easily achievable and it looked like it was going to be a cake walk but my I rapidly lost units and coming to the end of turn 5 I was running out of units to block my opponent from scoring objectives and he was able to score 5 different objectives and rack up 7 victory points in one hit. This meant at the end of turn 5 he was a point ahead and the game continued, at this stage I had my librarian with one wound remaining, one terminator, a contemptor locked in close combat and two vendettas and while I was able to take down fateweaver with concentrated lascannon fire (he only had one wound left at this stage) to claim monster hunter and slay the warlord my opponents turn 6 saw him draw 5 easily achievable objectives and the game was called.

Realistically I was likely to be tabled in the next turn if it continued and there was no real way I was going to be able to fight my way back in to the game sadly.

Legion tactical squads churning out savage amounts of shots was very effective as was the Knight Commander Pask in punisher squadron which I have used in the past so effectively but the main thing for me was in one fight where a tactical squad were desperately fighting some bloodletters and bloodcrushers I managed to break my streak on artificer armour saves as the sergeant managed to pass something like 15 2+ saves on the trot before finally dropping, it was a truly epic achievement and while the sergeant was felled I think he is armour is going to be salvaged and passed on to a new potential hero of the legion.

I made a number of mistakes during the battle and as much use as the battle was the analysis between me and my friend afterwards was probably more useful and as always I think I learn something more about the army every time I field them and eventually I will get them to the point where I can field a proxy free army, and possibly I may even win with the night lords but I am not expecting miracles.

Librarian

I finally got some more painting in, mainly since I am due to be staging a 3000 point battle against daemons this weekend, and I got the librarian completed.
Working on the fire raptor would have been good but I doubted I would be able to complete it in time for the battle and I was certain that if I did it would not be to a sufficient level so instead I focused on getting the librarian completed since he was sitting around half painted and this is the end result.

 

If you know the heresy miniature line from forge world you will probably recognise this as the terminator praetor from the praetor set, I purchased the praetor set to convert the power armoured one to be a jetbike rider and I always thought the paragon blade on the terminator would look perfect as a force weapon and thus my librarian was born.

I went for a slightly more subtle lightning effect on the model and i think it has worked reasonably well, I am hoping it will get some positive feedback at the battle.

Given the natural abilities of the centurion which gets upgraded in to the librarian in a heresy list he is naturally a very fighty psyker and as such I have a tendancy to pick powers from the biomancy disciple, I know that divination is probably the more thematic night lord option but I do like the idea of the character tapping in to the full power of his gene-seed through his psychic power and for brief periods achieving almost primarch power levels.
He will generally join the terminator squad I have already painted, this has been tried previously in a battle against daemons and worked pretty well.

I am going to take the camera to the battle and make some notes and take some pictures, I am also planning to take advantage of the space to take along my whole night lord force and get a couple of pictures of it all together on the battlefield, there is still a long way to go with the force but I think a couple of complete collection pictures could be good.

Some progress

Well it has been a while since my last post and I have not made as much progress as I should have done but I can share what I have achieved so far on the fire raptor.

 These first two are of the gun pods from the flank of the fire raptor, I made a point of working on them first since they need to be completely painted prior to insertion and they require a minimal amount of airbrushing. I think they have turned out OK.

 Now here we have a decent view of the flight stand, I have modelled it in line with the bases I did for the contemptors and the ones I have done for some of the infantry models and I think it has turned out alright, the only issue is that I may have stacked the features a bit too much and as such it will be awkward to fit in to the KR multicase tray I have purchased for transporting the fire raptor.

 Finally we have a quick view of the secret weapon 2mm brass etching lettering I have picked up, the intention is to add the name of the fire raptor on to one side using this while the other will have the iconic Night Lord phrase of 'Ave Dominus Nox'. I feel that this will add a bit more uniqueness to the model and will look a hell of a lot better than any attempt by me to free hand up some script.

I am aiming to really push on with the fire raptor in the next couple of weeks, I have plenty more models to work on once it is complete including 20 assault marines and 3 outriders as well as the riders for the jetbikes and I really want to get more of the army complete and ready to deploy on to the tabletop.

Contemptor number two

Well here we go, the immediate inspiration from going along to warhammer world has shown itself in getting me to get off my arse and complete the second contemptor. Well I say complete but there is still a bit more work to do but i think it is definitely a serious step forward and going easily see play on the battlefield now.

I have also pretty much completed the flight stand for the fire raptor so all told a productive day yeasterday and now we just have to see how long I can keep this motivation up for and how much of the Night Lords gets completed off the back of it.

As it stands I now essentially have the following completed....
4 jetbikes without riders
5 cataphractii terminators
2 drop pods
2 contemptor mortis dreadnoughts
1 rhino

And I currently own and plan to get complete as soon as possible...
1 deathstorm drop pod (about half painted)
1 cataphractii armoured librarian (half painted)
1 fire raptor
20 assault marines
3 outrider bikers

Once all of that is done I will in theory only need 10 tactical marines to complete the 2000 point list but I will almost certainly be getting two units of terror squad marines to go in those drop pods so I can ensure I can get good use of them and I may well have to get a unit of destroyers with jump packs accompanied by a moritat as I think that could be a very potent addition to the list and would see good use in apocalypse games.

Once I have that long purchased and painted then I will probably be taking a break from the night lords as I am getting increasingly drawn towards a mechanicum force since they are so different to the other armies out there and they have a lot of really nice models, that army will be covered on here and can always be used as allies for the night lords or visa versa depending on what I want at the time - options are always good. I will cover of the development of the mechanicum on here along with any further expansion of the Night Lords since I am not sure they will ever really be a completed project, legion armies had the potential to be immense so I will never really feel that continued expansion is inappropriate.

Battle brothers

This past weekend I accompanied a couple of my friends to battle brothers in warhammer world. I wanted to see what the event was like and I was also looking to being able to check out the miniature gallery.

I have to say that the weekend was very interesting and inspiring but two days there with my friends constantly busy with games and nothing specific to do of my own was a touch of a drag but it has certainly got the creative juices flowing and following my return I have already started putting masking tape on the fire raptor in preparation for painting.

The armies present at the event were brilliant for the main part with some exceptionally well painted forces and a lot of large models, I spotted a couple of warhound titans, at least one elder titan, more than a dozen knights and some of the forge world greater daemons. What impressed me most was the friendly nature of everyone I met, while I was generally just lurking around my friends table I quite often had their opponents shaking my hand, making small talk while my friends planned their moves and generally bringing me in to the social experience which was brilliant. That said I do not think I will be participating in any tournaments any time soon, I found that the games I watched always felt a little rushed as trying to get a full game in within the two and a half hours permitted often was a bit of a stretch and with so many people in the same room there was so much background noise is was quite grating after a while although it was probably not helped by the fact that it was an extremely hot weekend.

The miniature gallery was amazing, the models were top notch and there was a diorama of a Tyranid assault on a space wolf outpost which was exceptional, every time I looked at it I noticed something different. The forge world greater chaos dragon was also an absolutely stunning model which had been given an exceptional paint job – the only down side is while you emerge from the room with mind aglow with all of the possibilities there is also some humility since I know that no matter how I try I am not going to be able to come close to that level of painting. I will continue to plug away on my guys but somehow I doubt I would ever be comfortable with them being in the same room as the models on display in that gallery.

One other thing that my group did take from the day is that we are definitely going to want to try and motivate our gaming group in to going to warhammer world to conduct an apocalypse battle on one of their feature tables, this will probably not happen until next year since warhammer world is about to undergo some redevelopment but as a plus that gives me some time to get more of my army complete and actually give me something decent to utilise in the battle.

Overall I have to consider it a weekend well spent and a shout out to my friends who had their army nominated for best painted, they might not have won but I think they did a really good job and it did look really nice on the battlefield. 

Next time I will return with photos.

Fire Raptor - components

So I have been working on preparing the fire raptor for base coating and there is still a ways to go but I wanted to get some pictures up of the components out there to help everyone appreciate how good this model is. It is going to take some time to get to completion but at the end of the day I am not really in a massive rush to get it done, much better to take my time and try to get it right.

These aee not all of the components but the majority of the large pieces, as you can see the large portion of the pieces are resin rather than plastic including three of the four main fusilage pieces.

I am aiming to get the cleaning done in the next couple of days and then I can get a small amount of adjustments made to the resin pieces which need it, the only real adjustment required is one of the side fusilage pieces needs bending fractionally to get a tight fit to the rest of the fusilage.
There is a good chance that I will prime the first pieces over the weekend and then I will start to base coat. At the same time I have dug out some old movement trays from my fantasy armies which I am using as nice flat surfaces to test different ideas for getting the lightning effects right, what I have been doing previously is not bad but I am sure I can do something better and I have some ideas of how to achieve that but I want to try out some of the different options on something less critical than the fire raptor.

So keep tuned there will be more pictures to come.