On the Workbench [July] - 29th Zetic Tigers

With summer upon us here in the US Northeast, I find my hobby time limited but not gone.

Having run across a blog article about using nail polish display racks for organizing hobby paint, I set about Amazon to find myself some racks!  I have a lot of paint and other hobby product put away in various cases, bins and what not.  It never gets used, and I keep picking up new stuff like Nuln Oil pots when I don't really need them.  So after a brief wait and a tiny bit of labor I now have this...

I picked up two racks from Amazon after looking through various options.  There are many suitable choices.  These were inexpensive and hold a good amount.  They are deep enough for GW pots and still hold Vallejo and other bottles just fine.  The shelves have a low lip that keeps things from sliding/toppling off easily which is also good, especially since this wall is part of the stair case going back up to the first floor and so sees a fair deal of jostling as we go up and down to the basement.

The mounting holes in the racks were 16", perfect for standard wall construction here in the US (studs are supposed to be placed in the wall 16" on center) , so I could have screwed them directly to the exposed studs.  However, I couldn't have mounted them side by side using a single stud that way and would have had to leave a big gap between the racks, wasting wall space.

Instead,  I cut some left over 1"x8" shelving boards to make two horizontal straps to mount the racks to.  The boards were mounted to the wall studs, and the racks were then just screwed to the top board using their mounting holes. The bottom board running horizontally behind the racks is not attached, but gives support.  Since they are a brittle hard plastic, the racks may otherwise have cracked at the top if I inadvertently push too hard on the bottom while organizing/grabbing supplies.

I originally intended to spray the transparent blue racks black.  But after getting them I decided they looked innocuous enough in my basement hobby den and so left them as is.  If I ever hang dry wall and clean up the space so it looks more finished, then I'll likely revisit this decision.  My only complaint with how everything turned is that I could use two more racks just like it to hold stuff I still have put away! :)  This will have to do for now though.  I have limited wall space.

So that's whats over the work bench...now let's move on to whats actually on the work bench.

I got another game of Shadow Wars: Armageddon under my belt.  It was another tragic loss for the Death Korps of Krieg at the hands of the Necrons.  The game taught us a bunch. I realized we were ignoring the pinning rules (very important!) and that I was ignoring the abilities of the Astra Militarum kill leader to direct the shooting of the team (when within 6"). One thing about shadow wars, there are a LOT of dice modifiers...and a team like the Astra Militarum can suffer it seems ot me from all the minuses to hit.  I knew I had to rework my team to better accommodate the realities of the rules.

The Death Korps, being all resin, don't have a tone of options and I'm about out of spare parts currently after building the latest team.  Then it struck me...I have a decent force of Tempestus Scions that just scream "Make us a Kill team!!".  And so I plucked a few models from my existing collection and built a coupe more for the ones I couldn't represent accurately.  Then I set about reading their 7th edition codex to choose a regiment.  After some time, a kill team form the 29th Zetic Tigers was born!

Photo Credit: Games Workshop, ltd.

Here is the team after priming.  Eight models for now.  If I enjoy playing them then I'll model new members as they are recruited. I'm choosing a strategy of using the leader, at least initially, to buff one or more specialists. So to start, he has only his base equipment and nothing else.  This freed up points to spend in the team...things like red dot sights to improve my chance of effecting other models in the game!  I also gave up on trying to be good at both hand-to-hand fighting and shooting. This team is armed for shooting.

The team is mostly armed with lasguns, hots hot packs and red-dot sights (represented mostly by all the scopes).  Not sure how to represent the red-dot sight for a plasma gun, I just left it alone. That gun is funky enough...

Then I took the new recruit and tried out a color scheme for the cloth uniform. As with other projects, I'll post up a paint recipe once I'm finished.  I like where it is heading, so on to the rest of the team.

The recruit above, the sniper and the Tempestor Prime (leader) were built from scratch for this project.  The Prime is built stock, so he doesn't count really.  The only notable thing was to furnish him with no weapons other than a knife for WYSIWYG.  I have spare parts for a new leader if I choose to re-arm him later on. The new recruit stands out with a beret (hasn't earned his full kit yet) and a standard lasgun, no hot shot pack, no red dot sight.  I clipped off the scope and the wires running from gun to back pack to represent this.  The beret will make it very easy to spot new recruits in the team.  If this one gets promoted I'll swap the model out with a proper Scion and re-purpose it for another new recruit. 

The real fun was the sniper.  Why is it that there are no plastic Astra Militarum snipers?!  Anyway...I clipped the barrel off the lasgun and drilled out the hand grip as you would a gun barrel.  I then clipped the barrel from a Space Marine Scout sniper rifle and glued it into the front hand grip of the lasgun that I drilled out. I did not think to take WIP pictures, but you can see the sniper above on the right side of the back rank of Scions.  I added the support legs from a Space Marine Scout heavy bolter, and replaced the lasgun battery "clip" with a true clip snipped from a Space Marine bolter. This last modification was to help the weapon look a little more sniper-like and a little less lasgun like.

The shot above shows some detail of the work on the inside of the leader's coat. I'm figuring some element of the Zetic Tigers were dispatched to the sprawl on one mission or another and got pretty messed up.  This remaining band is held together by a surviving Tempestor Prime and continues to do the Emperor's work. I'm currently floating the kill team name "Tempestor Rock's Fuggin' Few".  

Overall, if this team comes out well I'll adopt the scheme of the 29th Zetic Tigers for my full force of Tempestus Scions in the future.  For now, this has been a great way to enjoy these brilliant models in my games of Shadow Wars: Armageddon.

So that's what I'm working on this July.  I hope your own hobby projects and games are going well.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!