Space Marines

My new Space Marine chapter took to the field for the first time this weekend in a Cities of Death battle against the Imperial Guard.

I played the guard and my friend Mike played the Space Marines. Mike will be writing up a full battle report for his blog soon, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to showcase some of the pictures I took of the Marines here.

The models from this force are either very, very old (I've been collecting miniatures for GW games for a very long time now) or are "rescues" from ebay (I like buying up junk lots for small amounts of money and turning them into something playable). As such, a lot of these minis have been used before, stripped and repainted or are conversions which have been severely "mucked about with".

Tactical Squad 1 (below):

Tactical Marines moving through the upper parapet of the Imperial Bastion

Tactical Squad 2 (below):

Defending the objective

  Tactical Squad 3 (below):

Deploying from their Rhino

Devastators (below):

Hold still - I'm trying to draw a bead!

Terminators (below):

Possibly not the best place for a "Deep Strike" to deviate to!

Assault Marines (below):

Defending the ramparts

 Drop Pods (below): 

I have two drop pods, both are identical. Shown here with doors closed...

...and here with doors open.

 Dreadnoughts (below):

A dreadnought deploys from a drop pod and advances on the defending Imperial Guard

Drop Pod opens. "Surprise! <dakka dakka dakka foom!>"

Bikes (below):

Bikes tear up the lee-side of the bastion

An unfortunately blurry photo of the army's general

The landspeeder squadron with "Typhoon" conversion central. Note the canopy over the pilot and the extended "nose" of the vehicle (not my work, but the work of the chap on ebay I bought it from).

The mighty Land Raider - a vintage model from around 1988 with the majority of the side panels on this model replaced with foamcore and parts from the newer Land Raider models. The original lascannon sponsons were very weak and always breaking, hence the chop-job.





A predator

What's the collective term for a group of Rhinos?

Apparently it's "a crash of Rhinos"!

There's still work to do on this army: All the vehicles need weathering, *every* model needs decals (I'm going with a red lightning flash overlaid with a "Ravenguard" decal. The chapter name is "Stormcrow" so that should work).

In addition to that, there are another terminator squad, another bike squad, a scout squad, a veteran squad and a whole bunch of HQ-types (command group, Techmarine, apothecary, librarians, chaplains and alternative general models) to paint up.

So still loads to do. I'm going to take a break from these guys for a while though in order to work on other projects for a bit.

I'll post another page on the work I did magnetizing the Rhinos - they can be fielded as Whirlwinds or Razorbacks tooled up in different ways, as your preference takes you.

If you like what you see (or have any polite suggestions!) please post a comment below and thanks for taking the time to look at this!