Assault and Destroy!

Firstly, a bit of background to this post.

Last week, Dad Rich posted up a picture of his Imperial Fist Boarding Marine. My wife looked at the picture and said that Rich's painting was better than mine... there was a moment of silence followed by me threatening to divorce her for such adulterous comments!

Some time later after the dust settled, I asked Rich how he got such an amazing finish, and he revealed that actually he'd recently brought light box for taking photos. So although his painting hadn't improved necessarily (I will admit that it is pretty good though), his photos had. Now, I'm not competitive in the least but I instantly went online and brought one myself.

And today, it arrived! So I've had it out to play and here are the results. I'm not 100% happy with all of the pictures so if anyone has any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them.

Now, on to the real content:

After the OSL post I wrote last week, I decided to finish off one of my assault squads... whilst I wait for the transfers to arrive for my Spartan for the Spartan Challenge.
 

I began work on this assault squad about 4 or 5 years ago, before the HH army lists were published. It started as a 10 man assault squad made up of Mk6 marines. To me Mk6 IS the Horus Heresy, because that’s the predominant mark of armour that was around when I got in to the game in the early 90’s. So I scoured high and low for the bits to make a completely Mk6 squad, mixing it with various Space Wolves upgrade bits.

This is arguably my favourite conversion EVER! Made up of Space Wolves marine bits, Space Wolves Terminator lightning claws, FW MK5 head and lots of blood!


Then FW released their books and I added another 10 men in Mk4 and Mk5, mixed with more Space Wolves upgrade bits. More recently I have added some Mk2 and Mk5 jump packs. There’s Mk4 in there too but also 10 of the plastic jump packs. I know these are not HH per se, but I am not buying another 10 FW marines just to replace these, so they’ll just have to stay for now. But I kinda like the mix and match feel, which is what I’m going for throughout my army.


In any case, I love these guys, so didn’t want to get rid of them when I started collecting 30k, which is why I added another 10 men and re-based them to match the rest of the army. And this week, I can finally consider them complete!


This week I added the glow on the jets and blood splatter (using Tamia Clear red, which stays nice and glossy) to the weapons.




The other squad to show off today is my Destroyer Squad. Why? Because they have jump packs too!
 

This was the test squad for my 30k Space Wolves. I like the aesthetic, I like the jump packs, but damn they are expensive to field!! Especially when you have 10 of them.


I was trying to see if I could use gold as a spot colour rather than red. I think in the end I liked having red as a spot colour so although I love the way these guys turned out, I will be using red on the rest of my force.

Would the Space Wolves use Destroyers? Some argue that they are the most human of all space marines so no, but with their ‘Emperor’s Executioners’ title I imagine that when the sh*t hits the fan and they need to censor another legion, the WMD’s would come out storage.


However, that said, I also imagine that these guys didn’t volunteer for Destroyer service, rather they are doing it as some form of punishment. And as such, I modelled them with no individual heraldry, no totems, no trophies, no pack markings. They have been censored themselves and all personal affects have been ritually burned.

They are marked with a black wolf’s head to symbolise they live in the shadows between life and death, and VIth legion numerals to show that they belong to the Legion, to Russ himself, until he deems they have been punished enough.



I hope you like them!