Predator conversion and magnetization [The Rogue Trader]

Originally this was just going to be my take on magnetizing a predator.  After I saw how cool the forward mounted turret on Redscorps predator looked I figured I had to do a version of that too.  All of this was pretty easy, the magnets really easy.  Actually the only problem was when I discovered I'd got the polarity wrong on one and the superglue was doing a phenomenal job.  Anyway, the full story is below the fold.

Mars-Pattern Storm Talon Conversion - Fin [Redscorps]

Hola,

Finished my take on the Storm Talon this morning, the wings showed yesterday but I didn't get a chance to get to it. They are two Storm Raven tails with the fuselage section removed and have been mounted in the same position as was intended for the wings.

If I had the tools I would probably be chamfering the leading edges but I don't and I am happy enough with this to let it slide without feeling guilty, I still think it's a vast improvement on what we were issued with anyway.

I am calling it a Mars-Pattern as the design is quite different as is the configuraton of the weaponary. This would be more of a 'flyer' than the helicopter that GW intended it to be, climbing and diving, strafing ground targets and being a general menace. The main engines/wings will still go up and down but only for take-off and landing so the position of the Assault Cannons is perfect. 'Hover Strike' will be coming from the thrusters on the underbelly. Game wise though I am still going to use the WD issue rules.

I got a bit lazy on the tutorial side of things this time as I was distracted by other stuff this week (Tartatros Terminators showed up, 25 of the sexy beasts!) but if you have any specific questions about the project drop me a line in the comments and I will answer there.

Hope you have enjoyed my take on the model and until next time,

'Crises Precipitate Change'

Cheers,
Redscorps

P.s. Painted pics up on my Red Scorpions blog ASAP. 

WIP Storm Talon Conversion [REDSCORPS]

Good afternoon everyone,

I'm going to write a bit more about it once the new wings arrive (2x StormRaven Tails), for now though note the shaved and extended tail (I wanted to use the original but it didn't get removed well), the lack of a bulky and unattractive front end through the use of a StormRaven Typhoon Missile Launcher mounted on the chin in place of the AC's turret, (cut narrower with a plasticard housing), The StormRaven Assault Cannons mounted on the engines (spaced out with the HB ammo clip from this kit, shaved down and glued on).

I used the previously tail mounted landing gear in the rear, made a plasticard housing as though it extends from the fuselage. Widened the front landing gears stance by mounting them on the previous weapon mount positions.

What do you think?

[REDDDDDSCORPSSSSS!!!!!!] The Storm Talon, uhh, really?

I had secretly hoped that the BoW guys were just terrible at drawing the new Space Marine Flyer, I was close, but as demonstrated by the cheeky preview photo below from BoK earlier today it seems that the culprits were in fact the designers in charge of the latest creation.

The proportions are a mess and the weapon systems on the front are really poorly positioned and make the model look cluttered. I think even the Stormravens weird little servitor turret was a better look than this weapon arrangement.

Once again they have ignored all basic aerodynamic principals and mounted the tail rudder in the dead air behind the fuselage, one of my main gripes with the Stormraven actually and the reason I cut and mounted my tail section higher and further back.

Someone needs a kick in the butt, it's not likely to happen and would actually really be pointless at this stage in the game but it's a bit of a shocker that this design made it off the drawing board. I doubt we can rely on Forge World to bail us out this time (Stormraven -> Storm Eagle) but I already have a few ideas of how to fix it ...AND... I actually think it's great that we have a new addition to the Vanilla SM Codex line-up, even if it's mediocre I think it will have it's uses if only in friendly matches.

So with that in mind, I have just ordered the bits from eBay I think I need to convert the model into something that looks at least a bit better and it won't take a whole lot of extra money to get the job done.

My plan is to extend the wing area and maybe change the orientation of the engines a little, I am going to use the assault cannons from the Stormravens turret that I have left over from the piece you can see above and mount them underneath the new wing sections next to the engines. I'm going to cut the tail section apart, extend it as long again and mount the vertical stabiliser in the airstream and not behind the fuselage.

I will document and photograph the process and with the parts ordered now, I'm hoping they will be here in time for the release weekend and I can get to it right away.

So, never fear, MWC is here! We've got your back on this one and hopefully you will be inspired to attempt your own conversion on the model once you see what I'm up to. Plus going off my other stuff you know I'll be after a 'factory finish' so it's not going to be out of the SM style.

Stay tuned.

Redscorps

[Rudeboy Redscorps] Red Scorpions Praetorian, a Space Marines Predator variant.

Hey hey,

I thought I would showcase a conversion I did a little while back for the MWC conversions comp. As staff we couldn't really enter, Ron and I might have had some sort of a battle for a staff favourite but we never really got around to it so I thought I would just do a quick showcase here and give a short explanation of what went into it.

The idea came to me because I have been building a few WWII 1/35th scale models plus playing a TONNE of World of Tanks lately and I love the silhouette of things like the T-34, Panther and the Tiger, iconic shapes for armoured fighting vehicles of WWII. I wanted to recreate the predatory look that they had, forward turrets, sloped armour (T-34/Panther) and long barreled main guns with a big beefy engine in the back.

I was rummaging around in my bits box and found a few Land Raider engines which if mounted inline it actually almost fit into the rear hatch of the Rhino chassis perfectly, I only had to cut down the sides a little and it mounted flush. I then went and cut down a Predator hatch so the air vent section sat in front of the engine area (am imagining this to be the air intakes/filter), it's displayed in this pic as hatches but I changed my mind and flipped it. With all that space taken up I then moved the turret ring (cut from another Predator hatch) forward, cutting out the right shape from the drivers hatches, recessing and gluing it in place ready for greenstuffing around the edges:

I probably need to say at this point that I don't measure, plan or sketch anything, I just mock it up then start cutting so I can't give you exacts on how much you have to take off or anything, one side lost a bit more than the other but that's easy for you to figure out with a test fit. You're better of not cutting enough than cutting to much.

So with the engine and turret positions sorted, the next bit I wanted to work on was getting the rear mounted exhausts (similar style to a Panther or Tiger tank) sorted, I cut them from the sides of the Rhino chassis (cutting in from the outside-in along the edge and shaving them flat underneath) and fitted them onto the back hatch. They actually needed to have a plasticard spacer mounted underneath them as they didn't sit flush, you will see the white plasticard under the exhausts in this pic coming up. Loved this bit, at this point I was really excited about the shape!

I also got to work on the gun barrel. I went down to my LHS with the Autocannon barrel measurements (I lied, so I measured once!) and found an appropriately sized alloy tube. I then went about getting another two thicknesses of alloy tubing to sleeve over the top of the barrel to give it some visual interest and realism. I test fitted all of these parts in the store and was pretty happy with how it went together, the OD's and ID's matched up perfectly.

While I was there I also looked at some turned 1/35th alloy barrels but I wasn't happy with using something that was $45 for this conversion and the DIY approach suited the conversion contest anyway. The new barrel was seated using an appropriately sized drill bit to bore out the hole from the old Autocannon barrel (6mm in my case), inserted and glued in place:

I will follow that pic up with some other stuff I did, I made the perforated hatch to the engine bay from the remaining piece of Predator hatch, I cut the guts out and turned it into a frame backed up with some hobby gauge mesh from my LHS. I also GS'd the drivers hatches flush around the turret ring and the top was almost done at this stage save for detailing.

Next on the drawing board was the front end. I wanted something that looked like AV13+, something that had a bit more slope/bulk and a drivers hatch. I was always intending to build this kit without sponsons or side hatches and the crew needed some way to get in. I cut the existing front plate up and combined it with some custom plasticard bits. I then made a plasticard lower glacis plate to meet the new slope and more forward armour. I made a custom drivers hatch and cut down the normal two window plate into a single window and shaved the back down so the angle looked right for the front plate.

After this stage I filled the sides with GS and sanded it all flat, here is a pic of the front though:

Onto the sides, a lack of hatches/sponsons and exhausts meant I could just add a flat plate over all of the holes I had cut, then add my detail onto the top of that, nice and simple but I had to match the sides up to eachother a few times to make sure the dimensions were the same.

Side note: If I did this conversion over I would probably add a few stepped down plates to mix it up a bit underneath the stowage but I am still happy with what I have done here and only really thought about that once the model was completed and primed.

I added all the stowage (tracks, fuel tanks, back packs, storage containers etc..) and recovery cables plus a few spare details from 1/35th kits to give it a bit more visual interest than a standard kit would allow, not really required but you can always benefit from doing that little bit extra. The recovery cables were made using the ends from the Space Marine kit but with bicycle brake cable wire and brass etch tie downs to give it some more realism. The track hangers were made from bits of brass etch with paper clip pins through the tracks:

I could have probably gone further with the baskets for the jerry cans, making some brass ones, but I wanted to keep the conversion as simple as possible so if people were to attempt it they would be able to use what they had in their Predator Kit, plus plasticard and some alloy tubing.

You can see the sanded down front with some more detail added in this pic also:

So that was pretty much it for the conversion! Add your chapters logos, salt to taste and you're ready to paint! One thing I forgot to photograph before paint was the addition of handles, I added handles to the cupola, front hatch and tool box, you can see them below.

Here are a couple of WIP pics of the paint work so far, I have painted the engine first as I wanted to see how it looked through the mesh and have just started the block in the yellow prior to the rest of the normal paint work and my usual dirty/damaged/dusty look that most of you know. I went pretty bold on the highlighting and detail of the engine so it shows up a little better through the black mesh, normally I would have spent a bit more time making it subtle but in this case it would detract from the look.

To see more of my work and check in later in the week/early next week for the finished product, head over to my Red Scorpions blog and hit follow: REDSCORPS' HOBBYWORKS

WIP paint pics:

Thanks very much for reading if you made it this far. Get brave and start cutting some stuff up, if you have any questions about this or there is something I have not covered please feel free to get in touch with me via the comments section on either of my two blogs.

Regards
Redscorps

P.s. Total conversion time would have been under 6 hours including the build, not a huge job.

Competition - Last chance for entries

Yeah we said 30th.  Guess we should look at a calendar or something and notice there are 31 days in March.  Oops.  Soz.

The still means though you have about 27 hours to get your entries in.  Plenty of time to glue that last bit of plasitcard on, watch as it falls off, swear loudly and throw the model against the wall.  Good thing you were doing an Ork conversion, nobody will ever know.  Just stop crying, it doesn't look good.

We've had some great entries in the last few days and look forward to a few more on the last day.  Midnight, Central time, tomorrow, Saturday March 31st  (that's next week sometime in Australia according to Red's corps) and we are done.  It'll take a few days to get the entries organized and then we'll get the voting under way.  Been some good entries, it'll be a decent fight.

See, even Forgeworld wanted in so they submitted their Storm Eagle.  Unfortunately they only gave us a painted shot so no win for them.  :)

Thanks

The Rogue Trader

[Redscorps] Kharn-o-saurus WIP Part 2 & Daemon Prince WIP

Hello Earthlings!

Not sure if I'm breaking the rules by posting so much (Your not - Other Crew) lately but I figured I would actually share some conversions as opposed to just posting pics of my Red Scorpions junk.

Well after the last post where I posted my initial WIP of my Kharn the Betrayer conversion I had a look at the photographs and decided I wasn't quite happy (Photos have a great way of doing this, showing your errors, showing scale differences and off angles etc..).

I went back to the model and had a look at some of the areas I wanted to change. For starters, the front belt buckle area and the back pack icons are a touch to big for the model in their standard state. Also the squareness of the icon vs. the round surrounding area of the belt buckle looked out of place. On the back pack I'd just done a quick trim and file of the area thinking the icon would fit but it didn't so I went back, broke it off, trimmed both the area and the icon down a bit and fitted it again.

What else did I do.. I added a few more little icons here and there plus a few skulls and trinkets from my bits box... Anyway, I think if you compare the photographs between this post and the last one you should agree that this is a much more cohesive 'factory' looking conversion. More so when you throw some primer on and unify the colours:




Something else I am working on conversions wise is this Daemon Prince. I like the new kit a lot, I think pretty much every aspect of it looks sweet, though a little cartoonish in its proportions. I think the chicken legs have a lot to do with this and though they look pretty sweet on Tzeentch and Slaanesh, Nurgle and Khorne need something a little chunkier.

This is where the old kit reigns supreme in my opinon, I think also that it better represents the DP's Ascension to daemon-hood and his roots as a Lord of Chaos. The other guy seems a little too daemon oriented to be hanging out with the boys on the reg, where as I think this power armoured behemoth doesn't look out of place at the front of his warband during office hours or meeting the boys for a couple of brews after work.

Parts so far:
Old DP Legs
New DP Upper Body
Old Blood Thirster Belt
New High Elf Dragon Wings
Defiler Face Mask

Pics bro:



What do you think? Coming along alright?

Cheers
Redscorps

Editors Note - We got in all the entries for the September Open Conversion contest. Almost 20 in all! So, we will get those up ASAP with all the excellent descriptions everyone also submitted in the next day or 2. We want to thank everyone that has entered and ask everyone that hasn't, please do check back often and vote!