Another Hive Tyrant and a Load More Tyranids

 I found an old tyranid hive tyrant in a cardboard box, which I probably bought about 25 years ago. I stripped it down and rebuilt it.

This is the second incarnation of the hive tyrant, and appeared in the second tyranid codex. Rumour has it that Games Workshop got into trouble with the owners of the Alien (20th Century Fox, I assume) because it looked too much like the queen from Aliens. I'm not sure if this is true, but I do recall an article on GW's website saying that it looked a bit too much like a certain film franchise. The third version of this miniature largely ditched the second's style, and has remained so ever since. And if you think that's confusing, just wait.

Anyhow, it was a right pig to assemble. I ended up pinning pretty much every limb. I gave it two deathspitters and a barbed strangler: I doubt that this shooty loadout would be much good in battle, but it does look cool. The original model came on a tiny base, the sort that is now used for Space Marine terminators. I gave it a much larger base, to suit the model and hopefully provide some small amount of stability.

It got the usual Hive Fleet Behemoth colour scheme - lots of oldhammer red. It was quite tricky to paint, with a lot of hidden parts that were hard to access. Here it is.

Hideous, really. I particularly like the ammo-scrotum for the barbed stranger. Lovely.

*

Here are some other tyranid models that I've been working on. These are von Ryan's leapers, a sort of smaller version of the tyranid lictor. Their job is to creep up and attack enemies in close combat. 

They're recent plastic models. To be honest, they are both good sculpts and massively overcomplicated. I didn't especially enjoy painting them. I used a base coat of while, with dark blue contrast paint over it - looking back, I don't think this did anything that a simple wash wouldn't have done. They'll do.

And here are some more new miniatures. These are "neurogaunts", a new form of tyranid. I've no idea what these things do, but I felt that they'd make quite good hormagaunts. Okay, let me explain this.

Back in the days of the first tyranid codex, the only hormagaunts you could get were big spindly metal things that toppled over if you looked at them too hard. They didn't look much like other tyranids, especially not the little red termagants, to which they were meant to be closely related, and were much larger than genestealers, which are the tyranids' close combat experts. Now, these new neurogaunts are the same size as the little oldhammer termagants, and I think they work well as hormagaunts. And if you've read this far without getting a headache, I salute you.

Anyhow, here are some. They're really nice models, with a good range of poses. They were extremely quick to paint, since they've got no eyes and only a couple of colours.

And here is a big swarm of these guys. They don't come out well en masse, but you can see that a horde of these things does look quite impressive. A case of quantity being a quality of its own.

Anyhow, that's enough space bugs for now. Next time we'll have some more Stargrave conversions.