Monday, 12 May 2025

Space Marine Vindicator Conversion

 It's a little tank with a great big gun!




Inspired by last week's comments, I decided to have another go at a conversion I did many years ago. It was gathering dust and slowly falling apart at the back of a cupboard, and I fished it out to see what I could do.

Before all that Primaris nonsense, space marine tanks were largely based on the Rhino APC chassis. The two main variants, the Vindicator and the Whirlwind, had a big cannon and a missile launcher, respectively. I must have realised that, if you could make the bits interchangeable, you could, er, interchange them.

So, I had bought a Rhino and got to work building a massive cannon to go on the roof. The "real" Vindicator has its cannon at the front, but this would be easier to swap out and would look more cool/ridiculous. I built the cannon out of a pipe from an old scenery kit, along with parts from various Empire buildings. When I fished it out last week, the tank looked like this:




Very dusty. I didn't really like the ram on the front, so I removed it. I also felt that the cannon looked a bit basic and front-heavy, so I made some hydraulics out of bits left over from a knight titan. Plasticard was used to attach them and space things out.



A bit better. Once painted it looked like this. I used a basic grey shaded up slightly and washed with thinned-down brown to represent dirt. It's nothing very fancy but it helps to bring out the details.




I also added some details from Empire kits and the spare parts from the original Rhino. Then it was time for paint!





Considering how a lot of my marines look, this is pretty low-key. Of course, it's very silly and I don't know how you'd load the gun, but it is sort-of-modular (ie the top falls off) and it fits the look I was going for (a bit like a castle). 

Incidentally, I discovered today that an official chapter called the Brazen Claws uses the same red-and-blue quartered design as my chaps, except all over their body armour. However, they don't sound as fun as my chapter. So there. And on the subject of fun, I think I'll repair the rocket launcher part of this tank, so it can also be a whirlwind - and that looks really silly...

Sunday, 4 May 2025

More Medieval Marines

 Here are some marines. I had so much trouble getting a half-decent photograph of any of these.

This is a "masters of the chapter" model which was missing a head and an arm.




This guy is an unconverted veteran marine.




The two below are lower-ranking marines with basic bolters, based on some pretty battered plastic marines that I got from ebay. This bloke has a Bretonnian man-at-arms head and helmet. 





And the final marine has an Empire shield on his left pauldron. I used chequered patterns for variety and to suggest additional heraldry.





They'll be joining the rest of my knightly marines (named the Shining Knights until I think of something better). I don't know why, but the pictures look as if there's almost no shading on these models. I should get back to painting something more photogenic.