Tau Battlesuit

With the use of the Gamer's Grass, I was able to finally finish off my first Tau battlesuit, which was painted a while back, but lacked a finished base.  This is a conversion that I had planned when the Tau were new, but never got around to doing.  OK, so it has been a few years. I used one of the first model suits to build this guy, so it has limited posebility and weak ankles.

I added some rescue markings like on a fighter plane

Elongated head with rear antenna 

Gamer's Grass, sprue brick, and wrecked hardwood floor

You might be able to tell that I have cut off the jetpack and moved it in, as well as added the spinal antenna array. In addition I made a new head from bitz, and made the gun hand held rather than affixed to the forearm.

The original idea was to make over all of my battlesuits to this standard, but that still has not happened... so we will see what happens when I get there. (hopefully before I have owned them for 20 years)

Tau Army Thus Far

This weekend past I had a few bits of time, and a little bit of light, and took a picture of my Tau army. Well, not really so much an "army" as a reinforced platoon.

Stealth suits, command squad, and two pulse rifle squads

Pulse rifle squad A (with attached ion blaster)

Pulse rifle squad B (with attached burst cannon)

Command squad

Forthcoming, first battle-suit and sometime further along pathfinders, breachers, drones, and some specialists.

Friday - Painting in Progress

Pictured is a figure I planned to make about ten years ago, and what lead me down the whole "Tau" path in the first place.  I have been painting it this week with a succession of thin brown-violet layers.  (and gluing that damn gun back in place every day)

That I am so close to finishing it seems sort of unbelievable at this point... just some washes, sealer, and affixing it to its base to go.  I will endeavor to get a whole army picture when I can.

Tau XV25 Stealth Suits

A small expansion to my Tau forces, in the form of a Stealth Suit team.

 However since I plan to use these predominately in other rulesets (mainly Stargrunt II), I gave the unit leader some alternative wargear, and magnetized the weapons to allow for this to work out.

Burst cannon, flamer, and meltagun for the arm, and a sensor/plasma mast

In the 40k rules, stealth suits can cloak themselves, and many (better) painters show this by painting the figure to match the background and then having them "decloak" into the standard army paint scheme, but I just went with the easiest paint job so as to get it done.

However, being a bit nuts, I went a bit overboard with basing this guy, and built a picket fence for him to be tromping over.



I got this box as a gift from my sister a couple of years ago, so it pleases me to "put them to bed" so to speak, and finish off the project.

Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer: Damocles Gulf Edition

Just a quick one today, but earlier this week I read the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer: Damocles Gulf Edition which is a slim book from Games Workshop published "in universe". It purports to be a guide book given to each recruit in the Imperial Guard, which lists some of the basics for lasgun stripping, aliens (Orks: brittle boned cowards, much less muscular than they appear!) and the like. The book is rather dated now in terms of 40k background, but it was still fun to read, and I appreciated that I was able to get it from my local library, rather than spend the money needed to buy it on Amazon.

This edition of the book adds information about fighting the Tau, which was humorous enough, but it did have a couple of pictures of suitable interest that I copied them here.

The first picture shows the difference between a fine citizen of the Imperium, and a Tau sympathizer.  There are not many pictures of Imperial citizens, so this was interesting.  The second one shows the Tau "blood god" to which captives will be sacrificed.  It occurred to me, that it would indeed be interesting to have Tau cultists, subverting the greater good for their ancient gods, but alas, current 40k has the space commies as being fairly "clean" aside from possible trickery with regard to the various subject/ally races.

Anyway, a fun little book if you can read it for free, but surely not worth $200 to buy it from Amazon.

Forthcoming Tau

Rumors of Tau models in the future are apparently correct, as these leaked images show:

New really big guy "KV128 Stormsurge"

New mid sized stealth suit "XV95 Ghostkeel" Seems like rumors of this being a Riptide upgrade spue are incorrect (or there is yet another large kit coming)

New firewarriors

Now you may recall that I have a bunch of Tau, and that I even painted some... so I am of mixed emotions about these new guys.  On the one hand, new kits might be more things I am interested in adding to my army, or at least new bitz, but on the other hand, I am not really keen on these new firewarriors, and large battle suits are pretty pricy. We will see how it goes in a month or so.

Christmas 2014

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.  I certainly did, although with two little kids, family events, and some illness, it was busy. 

I did not get much in the way of "hobby" materials this year, although I did get a Tau stealth team from my sister, and a Uniform book for the Napoleonic wars from my parents, which should be interesting reading, and useful for future projects. The final "hobby" item is a MetalEarth Eiffel Tower, which uses laser cut metal rather like photo etch to build up the Eiffel tower.  Looks like a fun challenge. 

The older kid got a ton of Lego, so we have been busy building all of that stuff too. 

And Happy New Year!  2015 should be very interesting.

Painting progress

I am in fact still alive, and still working on Tau, albeit a bit slowly.  Previously I had base coated, based, and inked all the figures, as reported here.  Then I laboriously went back and highlighted with the base coats again, wherein the poor definition of the casting for these figures annoyed me again (particularly in the legs).  Yesterday I finished up the armor paint job, and today I painted the feet and hooves, so I am just a few colors away from completion.  At this point I estimate that I will have invested around 25 hours into this project, which works out to be an hour per figure.  Not too bad from sprue to finished project, but a bit long if I were intending to paint up another couple platoons worth for a full company.

When these figures are finished, I have the pathfinders to build and paint, as well as a few filler figures for this platoon (mostly to allow them to be standard 40k Tau, instead of configured for StarGrunt II)

In other news, White Dwarf Weekly and Warhammer Visions both launch on Saturday, so if I can slip out of the house to buy copies of each, look forward to a review of sorts.

GW bitz service

As you might recall, at one time Games Workshop had a massive bitz service, whereby one could buy old miniatures, parts of miniatures, and individual sprues from kits, as well as other ephemera related to the vast Games Workshop hobby.  In the US at least, this reached its peak in the early 00's when the massive "phone book" bitz catalogs were released in all their hardback glory.  This regularly caused me to go on mad buying sprees as I matched this arm with that body and this head to create (at least on paper) some amazing conversions or weird custom units.

However, Games Workshop decided to get out the bitz business right before they decided to get out of the metal business, and stopped the broad swath of what they had available, reducing it to just a few sprues and figures, now priced even higher. Gradually, this lack of available bitz from Games Workshop was replaced by eBay and other online bitz sellers, chopping up kits and selling the pieces.  This year, Games Workshop has decided that the terms of sale to merchants would not allow for this practice, and to a certain extent the availability of bitz has declined from some sellers (matched of course by the rise in price from the remaining).

Tangentially to this, Games Workshop has always had an excellent replacement service. When kits are incomplete, or miniatures are miscast, they quickly replace the missing pieces, often with complete new ones.  So when my new box of Tau Pathfinders was missing one of the muzzles for a rail rifle, I duly contacted Games Workshop for a replacement, visions of a whole new box, or at least that particular sprue dancing in my head. As the weeks wore on,

So I was a little surprised to get the following in the mail:

Faugh!  Exactly what I needed to complete the kit, and no more?  Which was perfectly fine of course, and ultimately amusing when I realized that GW is effectively supplying bitz in the same way as all those online chop shops...

On Army Painting

I was supposed to post this after my Tau painting weekend, but time gets away from us all.

Here are my thoughts on painting a large chunk of an army in one go, which in this case was a short platoon, but could also have been a large-ish regiment, or a full skirmish warband (provided that the colors are restricted).

First, better lighting is needed, particularly when removing mold lines.  Failure to remove all the mold lines will be annoying when the project is closer to completion, so better to spend the time up front and do it right, and it will be easier with better lighting.

Second, get some proper seating, and if you are going to be sitting for 7+ hours as I was during the primary painting session, then you need to mix it up a bit. My back was sore afterwards, and I spent part of the time sitting on a yoga ball to help mitigate this.  Proper Posture Prevents Pain!

Third, proper base coat planning will save time.  Had I used the main armor color as the base coat for the whole miniature, it would have saved a couple of hours of time.  I could certainly have found a flat olive green for this project, and at Walmart or similar it would have been pretty cheap too.

Fourth, and this is something I knew but did not take advantage of, spray coats of primer and/or base coats will save time over brushing.  I brushed gesso on the figures, and it took some extra time and is slightly thicker than spray paint would have been.

Fifth, it is faster to paint by part than it is to paint by color.  By this I mean that painting a single color on all left legs and then right legs and so on is faster than painting all of the parts that use a certain color, and helps to prevent forgetting to paint the hoof of the left leg on a certain miniature or something.

No painting progress lately, as we had Thanksgiving/family/illnesses to get in the way, but I did get in a game of 7 Wonders, and spent a happy 20 minutes fitting together another random Inquisitor warband figure.

Tau Weekend

This weekend, the wife and kids were out of town, and other than waste time on the computer and household chores, I also started a new miniatures project as a sort of time constrained challenge.

Now, you might think that it would be sensible to complete an existing project, and you would be correct.  However, this project did use (mostly) existing miniatures.  As I mentioned a while back, I have a "reserve army" of Tau.  I call them a reserve army, because they are in boxes in shrink wrap, completely untouched (much like dwarves, Eldar, DoW, and more other things than I am willing to mention at this time).  Anyway, they are reserve no longer, because I opened up those battleforces this weekend, and built AND painted a nice little force of Firewarriors.  Although I did buy a new box of pathfinders to go with it...

Crummy Phone Pictures:

 

Pile of sprues waiting to be clipped and realized

after 4.75 hours of clipping and gluing

 


Favorite pose, a NCO using Pathfinder arms

Basing in progress

 

Close up of base work

Brush primed with Gesso and paint mixture

 

All base layer paints finished!

Inked and ready for action

I still need to do a few highlights, finish the bases, and then seal them, but 90% of the work is done, and in only 15 hours to boot.  (~36 minutes per figure) I will post later this week some "lessons learned" about army painting, which may be old hat to you, but seem as new realisations to me.

The Tau

Yesterday, I was browsing bits on ebay (as one does), and came across a good deal for Tau legs.  That started me thinking about the "reserve army" of Tau I have.  I call it a reserve army, because it is still in boxes... most of those are still shrink wrapped.  (just like my Eldar, Dwarves, DOW, and enough marines to be a whole second army)

I have: Two of the old battleforce boxes [each has 3 battle suits, 12 kroot, 12 Tau, 10 drones, and a sprue of jungle trees], 2 more battle suits, 2 broadsides, 2 devil fish, 1 hammer head, and a couple of blisters of kroot hounds.  All bought on ebay long ago, for substantial discounts.

Crummy picture of an old Battleforce box



New box ($120, 1 battle suit, 12 kroot, 12 tau, 1 devilfish, 3 stealth suits, 7 drones) 

The funny thing is, that at current prices, just the battle suits alone would cost more than I paid for the battle forces, making the kroot and tau firewarriors "free".  ($24.5 each for a total of $73.5, and I paid $50-$60 for my battle forces) For that matter, the current battleforce is $120 US, which is roughly twice as much as I paid for the previous one.

Another interesting aspect of the Tau firewarrior sprue (the basic infantry of the Tau), is that it has 5 sets of legs, 5 heads, 6 guns, but only 4 torsos and shoulder pads.  So for the bitz buy of a torso, you can get a whole new figure, provided you are willing to forgo the shoulder pad... which the pathfinders do not have anyway.  Since I plan to have this army work for StarGrunt II as well, it makes sense for me to do that, as I want to have a couple of heavy weapons teams and officers, which would not fit into the normal 40k army list.

I am really curious to see what the army will be like when the new codex and models come out (rumored for early this year).  Aside from the now obligatory flyer and large stompy robot (or Kroot monster?), it would be nice if they had a pathfinder box...