Project: Strike Force Wollondilly

Remember one of my first posts, when I talked about Full Thrust? I mentioned that I had two fleets. The alien Sa'Vasku with their bioships, and the Oceanic Union - Space Australia (and friends).

Oceanic Union Strike Force Wollondilly

Here they are! I finally got around to getting some photos taken.

The Oceanic Union are a federation consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and a host of Pacific nations - Tuvalu, Vanuatu, &c. Given the balkanisation of the former United States in the setting, I like to think that Hawai'i was a late joiner. This also handily explains why the New Anglian Confederation and the Oceanic Union aren't as close as the modern UK-USA-AU alliance. As we'll see, I've also included Timor-Leste as a member, although the former Portuguese Timor had yet to succesfully leave Indonesia when Jon wrote his timeline.

Jon never really detailed the minor factions, but the Full Thrust community has agglutinated a kind of quasi-canon. One such detail is that Oceanic Union Defence Force ships (OUDFS; 'oddfuss') are usually painted in designs indigenous to the regions of the Federation. When combined with the flat, panelled surfaces of OUDFS ships, this gives a great deal of freedom for striking freehand designs.

This project was actually finished in May 2018; you can see the project unfold in real-time on the old Tumblr.

Below the cut for more individual photos!

Those Who Rule

Sometimes a family is a lord, a lady, their baby, their homonculus, and their other... baby.

Lord Greiss, Lord-Governor of Colony 87, and family

Last time, the civilians were the intelligentsia; scholars, priests, adeptus administatrum. I've split my civilians into class-based groups (sort of, as we'll see) to create batches that are easier to manage. This week was the aristocracy.

(Well, and last week. It's been a bit of a tough fortnight.)

Let's take a closer look below the cut.

Those Who Study, Those Who Pray

Back in February, I rambled excessively about old-school terrain and old-school wargaming aesthetics. It was a bit much.

a Moebius scene from La Cité Feu, 1985

I'm still working on how I'll put together a table of terrain to match my big mouth, but I've also been working on some people to populate it. I've gone a bit off doing big, tedious army-scale projects at the moment (aside from my ongoing work with the Old World Army Challenge), but doing small-scale projects like Kill Teams or Blood Bowl teams are definitely juicy and fun.

Last year, I backed a Colony 87 kickstarter to get myself a huge range of Science Fiction civilians. The range was originally conceived by noted #oldhammer luminary axiom, who has since passed the governorship of Colony 87 to Crooked Dice Miniatures. The range is a beautiful set of space folks with old-school aesthetics, and I've been keen to paint them since I got them.

I also have a handful of Rogue Trader-era sculpts and some sundries I've picked up along the way. I'm sure I'll add more as well. I will split them all into rough categories (workers, aristocracy, bourgeois, intelligentsia, &c), and paint them in lil' groups.

I am trying to steer clear of the 'browns and grey' #grimdark aesthetic and toward something brighter and more old-school. I would like to think these would fit as easily into Rogue Trader-era Warhammer 40K as a Moebius crowd scene as anything in Modernhammer. We'll see.

Here are the first few I finished. They are administrative workers, priests, scholars and the like:

Chamber Secretary Felix Saponya, Administratum

Botanist Hereward Osman, Mechanicus

High Priestess Cardinia, Ministorum

Recordist Junger, Administratum

Wandering Alexei, (poss. Mechanicus)

And this fellow is a Rogue Trader-era sculpt (whose hand seems to be slightly miscast):

Astropath Yerl, Astra Telepathica

Tranquility

One of the better things about the Rogue Trader-era of marines was the camouflague.

It gave a real sense that each engagement by a Chapter was its own setting, that every Chapter - while broadly similar - would engage with its enemies in a different way. Some of that is coming across in the modern rules, where each First Founding family has its own codex (/supplement), but a lot of modern stuff makes everything the same. Nearly all equipment is used by every Chapter. Somehow every tiny skirmish involves three Captains and the Chapter Master (and the three Captains all have thunder hammers and jetpacks).

Tranquility Veterans

One of the things I absolutely had to have in my Mantis Warriors project was a squad of snipers in Tranquility Campaign camouflage. They are a mix of different pieces - five Forgeworld Recon Marines, a Vigilator for the sergeant, three kit-bashed snipers, and the Rogue Trader-era Brother Gorshin with his needler.

RT01 Space Marines, from White Dwarf 99 (March 1988)
Courtesy of The Stuff of Legends

I finally got the bits to finish the last member of the squad - actually armed with a combi-grav gun instead of a sniper rifle - a few weeks ago. He's also a member of Kill Team: Renegade.

my painting desk lights are not great

combat shotgun as sidearm

no stripes on this chainblade; just a brutal weapon

die

Kill Team: Renegade

I keep forgetting to update the blog!

Kill Team: Renegade

In my defence, the past couple of months have been crazy.

One thing I have finished is my Mantis Warriors Kill Team, Kill Team: Renegade. In consists of a demi-squad of Rogue Trader miniatures, a few Tranquility snipers, a handful of scouts and several veterans in custom-built armour. I'm also using the models for Lieutenant Commander Gwak Chae'u and Brother-Swordmaster Mifune as their weapons work as relic blades.

the fury of the righteous makes worlds tremble

These four were finished in early March. We have a sternguard gunner with a missile launcher, a company veteran with flamer and chainsword, a veteran sergeant with storm shield, chainsword and storm bolter, and a veteran with bolter and storm shield.

The veteran sergeant is a former member of the Deathwatch, although his shield is the worse for wear.

The basic list for Kill Team is below the cut. It probably has some errors, as I've not actually played a game with these goons.

Tanks for the scenery

Managed to finish off some terrain recently.

yeah take that space sharks

not affiliated with any raiders, at dusk or dawn

More photos of each under the cut...

Terrain: Planning

..right, let's try that again. Last post, I rambled on about how great homemade terrain was and shared a handful of examples of the sort of thing I meant. I mentioned how Star Wars: Legion and Infinity were showing up Warhammer 40K as speculative fiction wargames, by remembering that colours other than black, grey, or stained orange exist. I completely failed to mention why I was rambling about terrain.

Same photo as last time; some pieces I bodged together in 2019.

I've always wanted to have a set of terrain to match my armies. I wanted a green and verdant fantasy board for my Warhammer Empire (and when I get around to sprucing them up, I'll do just that), back in the day. These days, I don't play any fantasy games (despite having about four army projects. yeesh.), but I have managed to amass quite the pile of Mantis Warriors.  I've given them ochre desert bases, and I'd like to start accumulating a set of desert terrain to go with them.

How do I do that?

On Terrain

A hundred years ago, there was a great series of DIY terrain articles in White Dwarf. I forget the name and even the year the articles came out, but if you ask anybody who has been in the hobby since the late '90s, they'll remember them: a bunch of articles on Lizardmen jungle terrain, including a small village, a pond, some ruined temples on the edge of hills, and a giant castle to wrap the whole thing up.

The articles a smooth, easy to read, easy to follow and were at least one clear factor in my hoard of polystyrene nonsense that I collected in the last months of high school and early university, before a succession of moves meant that I scattered them to the four winds.

Now that I'm back in the hobby (and have been for about two years now!), I want to figure out how and what to build to get a similar end result...

A few pieces I finished in 2019, made from... stuff.

+ + + Border Skirmish with Outlaw Mutants! + + +

The underhive creaks, a stirring of dust trickling through seventeen layers of ancient civilization, abandoned factora, desecrated shrines to petty military-industrial divinities. Soon, this borderzone just past Dust Falls will become a scene of blood and death. For now, a three-spined rat grooms itself under the dust shower...

The cohort of scavvy muties that call themselves the Cult of the Three-Eyed King face down Dust Falls United Metalworkers on a scrappy borderlevel of Hive Primus, as a chance meeting between Herne and the Goliath Shin goes pretty much as you'd expect...

Herne, lit by the glare of some fading Solar-esque™ floodlights

Kill Team: Renegade

Kill Team: Renegade, Mantis Warriors chapter. circa 910-930.M41

Over the past couple of years, I've slowly assembled a small handful of Rogue Trader-era marine sculpts that I really liked with the intention of making a little Mantis Warriors kill team. I'd picked up the chap with the shuriken catapult and the brother in customised armour already. I knew I wanted the flamer warrior with one arm bare, and from there it was a matter of deciding to get two more to round the squad to a game-legal five.

The advent of Kill Team also means that I can use this squad as a hardcore team of veterans, where their customised colour patterns and lack of orthodox armour makes more sense. I'm hoping to expand the team, using a combination of miniatures already existing in my Mantis Warriors 'Winds of the Desert' army and converting a couple more with meta-friendly storm shields so that I can use them in the local 'scene'.

Anyway, let's go through the team and look at the inspiration behind their unorthodox armour patterns...

Gnome-uary

The first month of the Old World Army Challenge is up! Go thither to see more of my gnomes and check out the other entrants! They are much better painters than I!