Praetorian Sentinel

I spent a long time trying to come up with a suitable sentinel for the Praetorians. I didn't want the old egg on legs type walker and didn't think the new sentinels really fit that well.

Eventually I decided to have a go at a Universal Carrier type vehicle. Some very small, (sub-tankette size) tracked vehicle with a two man crew.

Initially I was going to use tank crew mounted through hatches, but decided whilst that would work for the driver it'd look odd for the gunner. So I've dropped the platform height in the back and I'll have the gunner standing inside the armoured compartment.

Main structure is built, I need to put the compartment in place, then I have two side panels to bring the back up to the width of the front. It'll make more sense once that step's complete. Quite excited about this one.

Oh and that guy is the army commander, though he needs a spot of work. Since getting the pith helmets sculpted by Col Gravis, I've been going through tweaking the heads of existing characters. We'll see where it goes.

Praetorian Flame Tank

Ok didn't make it back for the other posts last night, spent two hours debugging the blog layout after posting those photos. Bah.

Anyway, new day new update. And we'll start with a scratchbuild I've had in mind since I started my Praetorians. The Hellhound.

Once I got the urban war chemical plant set from ebay I always had the tank selected, but wasn't sure about the turret. As the praetorian afv's evolved I decided I didn't want a turret. The chimeras have pintle-mounted turret weapons and only the command squad vehicle has a turret. So I went for a hull mounted flame cannon thing.

To differentiate from the normal heavy flamers I used a piece from the hellhound kit, then bulked out the bodywork and mounted it on an old tamiya oil drum.

I'm quite happy with the look of this, I spent a lot of time studying Hobart's funnies to try and get a feel for modifying stock chassis into weird and wonderful ways. Particularly happy with the tank at the back and the little bullet shield for the feeder hose. Seems jury rigged and suitably ad-hoc.

Tank just needs it's tracks, which are now assembled and at time of photo were drying, hence the balancing act in the final pic.

Spot of final detailing and it should be ready for priming.

Praetorian Chimera

Right then, back to it. I've done a fair bit of work on my praetorian armoured vehicles. First up is the Company Command Squads personal Chimera.

I started this probably at the end of last year, but only recently took it up again. It's a very simple conversion from the original chimeras, using a predator turret and a set of wheels from Tablescape (50p a pop, a bargain in my view). I'm quite happy with the result, looks suitably fieldworthy if that makes sense.

I'll be back with more updates after Big Bang Theory ;)

Rise up (and blog off)

Greetings once again. The site has been somewhat abandoned for the majority of 2010, which is a shame. Basically I got sidetracked by Stadtheim for a few months, then some kind soul showed be Oblivion, which led to Fallout 3 and suddenly it's christmas. How'd that happen?

Good news is the 40k production line is fully functional once more, and I'm hoping to document some of the projects.

I've decided to give up on the site as a standalone item, it's just too much messing about to get things working like I want. So I'm going to leave the projects there for now as an archive, but then run everything else through the blog, http://kataan.blogspot.com. The two are linked, in that the site scrapes the blog anyway, but I'm going to add in a few little features to the blog that won't get pulled through.

Eventually I plan to put an archive of projects somewhere in the blog, then pull the site and put up a redirect. For now, view it however you choose :)

Still working on the design, comments page seems a little screwy, but other than that I think it looks ok.

I'll be back with the first proper update later. I have several praetorian tanks to show off, including would you believe, completed builds I had previously started. I know, me completing something. Scary.