More 40k Primaris Marines for the Raven Guard

Another group of Intercessors for the Raven Guard.

Here is another small, five-model squad of Raven Guard Space Marines for GW's Warhammer 40k setting. As with the batch in the previous post, they Primaris "Intercessors", but they carry a different variant of the bolt rifle - these Marines are carrying the "auto bolt rifle", a slightly-higher-rate-of-fire assault variant of the weapon.

Officer pointing at something to be...appreciated? No...probably something to be shot - in the name of The Emperor, of course. 

Marine with an auto-bolt-rifle, upgraded with an attached grenade launcher...the only "heavy weapon", it seems, that you can add to these squads (at least for now). 

As with the previous squad, the Sergeant is wearing a "beakie" style helmet, and all of the Marines are sporting embossed shoulder plates featuring the Raven Guard symbol. These shoulder plates came from Chapter-specific upgrade kits.

The plastic Primaris Intercessor marine kits lend themselves to these kinds of ominous and forward-moving poses. 

Trusty bolt pistol on the hip, and classic-style "tactical" marker on the shoulder plate.

The bolt rifle looks great, and this version of it, with the large, drum-type magazine, is probably my favourite version of these newer weapons. These plastic multi-part kits are very well done - GW at its best.

I really like how this pose came out...looks ready to lay down some heavy covering fire.

View of the rear, showing the assorted pouches you can add to the Marines. 

As with the previous bunch, these fellows are looking a little glossy thanks to the varnish undercoat I apply underneath any decals in order to prevent silvering effects. The gloss will disappear after a spray of Testors Dullcote, but that won't happen until it's safe to do so once the humidity recedes.  Given that we are at the end of August in Canada, that shouldn't be long now!

Thanks for reading, and stay safe!

40k Raven Guard - Primaris Marines

Primaris Marines from the Raven Guard Chapter for GW's Warhammer 40k setting. 

Well, my blogging pace has dropped to pretty much nothing during the summer...sorry about that...there has been no shortage of activity, just not as much painting. I've been spending time at my cabin on Lake Superior near Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, and the assorted outdoor activities tend to reduce my painting production - and dramatically reduce the amount of time for posting on the blog...

Primaris Seargeant, checking his email while holding a bolt pistol (as one does). 

Marine sporting a bolt rifle (and an ominous countenance).

Marine prepping to chuck a grenade...

But my brushes have not been idle - I have been messing around with more of the new (or, at least, new to me) "Primaris" Space Marines for GW's Warhammer 40k setting. I have finished a number of the figures, and managed a few photos to share. Up first is a 5-man squad of Primaris Intercessors, armed with bolt rifles. These are multi-part plastic kits, enhanced with some Raven Guard-specific shoulder plates and decals.

Swapping in a new clip...I quite like this pose. 

Grenade launcher (a little blurry - he's moving fast!).

You can still see there is a glossy finish beneath the decals - the humidity out here is much too high these days to try spraying with Testors Dullcote or any similar product, so that final step will have to wait for a few more weeks.

View of the back side, showing the power packs, the pouches, pistol holsters and other accessories.

These plastic Intercessors are very nice kits, and I tried to make use of some of the varied poses available...the officer is checking a comms read out/data slate built into his wrist. One of the marines is slamming a fresh magazine into his bolt rifle. Another has an auxiliary grenade launcher mounted underneath his bolt rifle.

A lot of gloss coat under the decal locations...these fellows will get a dullcote spray once the humidity dies down in a few weeks.

The plastic upgrade frames are great - for the Raven Guard, you get some "beakie" style helmets, which I still love, and you get embossed shoulder plates with the Raven Guard logo on them. I love the embossed chapter symbols - they are so much nicer than decals, and I wish GW would make a little more of a coordinated effort to make them consistently available.

For the Emperor!

These are the first of a very small force of Raven Guard who will, at some point, participate in some 40k gaming (who knows when - I won't need to hurry). I'll have some more progress on this progect to share in other posts as August concludes and we head into September.

Sunset over Goulais Bay, on the eastern shores of Lake Superior.

Thanks for reading, and stay safe.

Emperors Champion

 GregB was kind enough to gift me this Black Templar Emperors Champion model a few months ago. I think this was one of the earlier representations of the model and I prefer this pose to the later ones. He looks like he’s ready to duel as opposed to the newer one which poses like he’s already won the fight. His armour fits in well with 30k so I painted him up as a first company Imperial Fist (they’re basically Black Templar’s anyway). He’s a bit shorter than the rest of the Mark iii armour marines, but his “huge” sword surely compensates for what he lacks in stature!

Imperial Fist Rhinos and Stormeagle

After a slow spring, I’ve managed to increase the painting production here and finished a batch of vehicles. I've had 3 rhinos sitting in the pending bin for months now and it was time to get them done. They took so long because 2 of them were a real pain to assemble and included a model with a hull that was almost completely flattened. I won’t complain because they were found in a chest of buried treasure on some island off Tortuga. The easy one to assemble was from Forgeworld and I still have the white box to prove it!

I was worried that the fist logo on the top hatch wouldn’t work, but copious amounts of micro sol did the trick and I’m quite happy with the result. I continued with the reverse black/yellow color scheme and appropriate weathering to represent a stressed and over stretched legion in the Horus Heresy.

My Imperial Fists collection is quite large at this point and I still have a few units left to paint including Rogal Dorn himself! I wasn't too concerned with this as Greg's Sons of Horus suffer form the same Arms Race mentality. With Greg's traitor forces whisked off to Ontario, I'll have to switch my focus to some traitor legions in the near future.

The 4th vehicle I completed is a Storm Eagle...well it’s a storm eagle conversion actually. The original model was the space marine Storm Raven. The now out of business, Chapterhouse Studios made a conversion kit for the raven that allowed you to elongate the model to make it look like it could actually transport stuff. The top missile launcher is from Puppets War and was also designed with GW models in mind. This model has been sitting for a few years now and it was thanks to Greg and Dallas and their completed Storm Eagles that gave me the motivation to finish it. It’s not quite the same size as a Storm Eagle, but a good enough approximation when compared with spending $200+ on a proper and non-flattened model from Forgeworld.

Team Yankee Soviet Motor Rifle Weapons Teams

Not too much painting going on nowadays at Conscript Towers but I had time to crank out some Soviets for Team Yankee - a set of their Motor Rifle Weapons Teams. The set is cast in Battlefront plastic/resin - a much superior material to the dreadful Warlord "restic" in my opinion. The Battlefront stuff holds fine detail well and requires little to no cleanup. Good stuff.  

Anyway, the blister pack contains three large team bases and figures to make three heavy weapons teams: two AT-4 "Spigot" ATGW teams and one AGS-17 "Plamya" automatic grenade launcher team. There's also two cards with stats for use with the Team Yankee game.

Above is the AGS-17 team. Three grenade launchers and operators, and three riflemen. The AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher went into service in 1971. It fires 30mm high-explosive grenades from a belt, at a cyclic rate of 350-400 rounds per minute. Enough to bring some hurt. Apparently the Soviets intended the AGS-17 to address the expected "human wave attacks" of the Chinese in a future Sino-Soviet conflict (!)

 

The blister also includes two AT-4 anti-tank guided missile teams. Fortunately NATO adopted the designation "Spigot" rather than the Russian designation "Fagot" (bassoon). The AT-4 is wire-guided; the launcher tracks the position of the missile from an incandescent infrared bulb on the rear of the missile and transmits guidance via the wire. This is SACLOS - semi-automatic command to line of sight. The operator keeps his pip on the target and the launcher guides the missile to that point.

Anyway, there you have it - three new weapons teams for the Motor Rifle Battalion. Price tag on the blister was a nickel short of ten bucks which I reckon is good value. Fun and easy to paint and most importantly, represents movement of figures from the lead pile to the painted army drawer.

Hope you're all keeping safe.