I’ve recently been madly assembling converting, and magnetising some new tanks for my Imperial Guard, so I thought I’d show them off – particularly my converted Colossus and Salamander. More pics in the rest of this post:
First up is the Destroyer Tank hunter, from Forgeworld.
No conversions of the Forgeworld pieces – they’re too nice to change – but I’ve given it a magnetised dozer blade (since Tank Hunters hide in terrain, it seemed characterful, but I don’t normally take dozer blades in my army lists), track guards, smoke, a stored shovel and pickaxe (to dig in), and a pintle heavy stubber for self-defence.
The Mars Alpha pattern hulled Vanquisher is also from Forgeworld.
Again, no conversions, but this will be my company command tank, so I put the company commander in the cupola. He’s the commander from the Baneblade sprues, complete in meme pose.
I’ve had this jacket lying around for ages – it’s from the old Valhallan commander Chenkov model, which I have but I didn’t use the jacket on – and I figured it would work here. A bit of pinning later (and lots of superglue), it fits and I think works well – the jacket trailing from his shoulders makes it look like the tank is plowing fowards at speed.
The salamander was built since I somehow got a free chimera chassis sprue from FW (I ordered the destroyer and the vanquisher, neither of which use the chimera sprue!), and I don’t have a salamander yet.
The weapon is magnetised so I can swap it between an autocannon (as pictured above) for a scout salamander, or heavy flamer or bolter for a command one.
Here’s the crew, which are currently just placed into position (they’ll be glued once everything’s painted). There’s just enough space for someone on a 25mm base to stand on the back as well.
The Hellhound, which I’ve mentioned previously here, was due to having all the hellhound parts except for the fuel tanks and the flamer nozzle.
So, I built my own. Unfortunately, I stuffed up the rear tank so it’s not completely circular – there’s a bit of a hump in the middle which I couldn’t get rid of.
The Basilisk is a stock standard kit, and the crew are mostly from the old Tank Accessory Sprue, but I’m using the ammo and brass shell casings from the 06609 Trumpeter model kit (which I’ll be reviewing later).
I’m also updating the crew for my existing Basilisk as well:
Finally, my Colossus.
The gun itself is built from a plastic tube I had lying around, PVC pipe and pipe connectors, and a garden hose connector.
The breech is an old GW tank wheel, with some handles attached. I gave the tank a recoil spade which is a standard Chimera dozer blade, just attached to the back of the tank rather than the front, because the gun looked way too big for a Chimera chassis.
The tiny track guard on the left is the mounting point for the ammo crane:
It’s magnetised so it can swivel and I can remove it for transport (although I think it’s not taller than the gun anyway). I haven’t shown it on the Colossus itself, as the track guards aren’t glued on (I have to put the tracks on before the track guards, and I paint tank tracks separately) so the crane’s weight means it tips over.
Finally, here’s a closer look at the crew – I’ve used the ammo bags and ammo cases from the Trumpeter kit for the Colossus. I don’t have any giant shells that look the part for Colossus ammo yet, though.