I have been doing lots of posts on this blog about my home brew Space Marine Chapter but I have never posted a group shot of the army. Mostly this has been do to not having enough done to make a group picture very interesting. In the last couple of weeks, however, I have added a Heavy Support, a Fast Attack, an Elite and an HQ. I finally have a unit for each force organization slot. This picture represents about 5 years of collecting and painting. This army started out as a couple tac squads, some scouts and a speeder for my Daemonhunters army, but has now grown to a full Space Marine force.

Here is what the army consists of today.

HQ

Space Marine Captain with a Command Squad
Chaplain

Elite

9 Terminators
Dreadnought
Techmarine with Servitors
10 Sternguard Veterans

Troops

3 - 10 man Tactical Squads
5 man Scout Squad

Fast Attack

10 man Assault Marine Squad
Landspeeder
Landspeeder Typhoon

Heavy Support

Land Raider

Dedicated Transports

4 Rhinos
Drop Pod

There are many more items in the collection waiting to be painted. I still have a couple more Rhinos, a couple more tac squads, about 20 more scouts, scout bikers, regular bikers, a couple more speeders, two more dreds, 5 more terminators, a Librarian in terminator armor, a couple of whirlwinds, a razorback, another Drop Pod and at least 2 more captains. I have so much stuff left I am debating starting another Space Marine army or painting all this up for a Knights of Eden Apocalypse force.

I finally have a command squad for my Knights of Eden Captain, which I just realized I have never photographed and blogged. Anyway, this unit took way too long to get painted. It seemed that each time I would start to work on it I would quickly loose interest and move to something else. I think the banner scared me and I was subconsciously using this as an excuse to not finish the unit.

I have been taking a drawing class and it inspired me to take another look and doing the banner. I have also been inspired by Ron Saikowski's banners. Take a look at the Tutorial section a the ++ From the Warp ++ blog for excellent examples of what you can do with hand painted banners. Armed with new-found confidence I jumped back into this project and finished it up! In the end the banner is not as good as I had hoped but I think it looks good considering it is my first hand painted...well...anything really.

Another thing that I like about this unit is the 2 Power Fist guy. With the 5th edition rules the only way a PF can get an extra attack is to have 2 of them. I figured that with the current selection of models and parts your were unlikely to see this combination on the table. It seems that all the models currently available from GW either have a left hand PF already or you can get the plastic PF arm with is also left hand. Searching my references I could not find a model with a right hand power fist. The only way this could be modeled, that I could see, would be to use a Lightning Claw model and remove the claws. This seemed like a waste to me.

After digging through my vast collection of junk I found an old Blood Angels Sargent with a raised Power Fist. It was still a left hand power fist but it was different. It was smaller than most. I then remembered that the original plastic Space Marine set had a right hand power fist arm and it to was small. I dug through the bits box and bingo! there was the answer. The old RT era power fist is right hand and it matches the early metal PF version well. After a little modification to the army I was able to get the model of my dreams (OK, not of my dreams, really). It should be fun to spring this one in a game and see how it works.

I have finished another Elite option for my Knights of Eden Space Marine army. This is my Techmarine and Servitor squad. In all my years of playing 40K I have never really used a Techmarine. I used to take one in my old third edition Dark Angels because he was a close combat monster but I never took one because of the vehicle repair rules. I am still not sure he is worth it considering most games I have played are over after 5 turns. There just does not seem to be enough time to use his special rules.

Here are the converted Black Cat Bases Able Seamen. These guys are sci-fi miners that will play the role of generic bad guys in our Cirian Legacy campaign. With the completed Tech Priests I know have the cast for the first scenario complete.

My Land Speeder Typhoon is done! This is another salvage project from my collection of old Imperial Fists. This model has a similar story to the Landraider. Again, huge amounts of superglue and yellow paint made this a challenge. After 24 hours in the freezer I was able to get the original crew out and the missile pods off. I had enough parts to replace the crew and the Multi-Melta. The missile pods spent the night in the Simple Green to strip off the paint. I decided not to try and strip the paint from the speeder. There is not enough fine detail to have made that worth the effort.

The antenna was broken so I replaced that with the radar dish from the vehicle accessory sprue. This is actually a good thing because the speeder will be serving as my spotter for my Suppression Force for Apocalypse battles.

Not a perfect job but it looks pretty good.





Edit 9/18/2009: Here is an old before picture of this model. No a great picture but it gives you an idea of what it looked like.

My Knights of Eden Space Marine chapter finally has some heavy support. I have been working on this Landraider for a long time and it is now ready for battle. There is an interesting story behind this model.


This model started life as one of the original Landraider Crusader models. The original owner was new to the hobby, and model building, when he started his Space Marine force. He was doing Imperial Fists and everything in the army had a thick coat of bright yellow paint. This covered up huge amounts of superglue and very poor assembly. The Landraider was not built correctly, missing sever parts and not having been assembled in the correct order.


When the original owner got out of the hobby my friend Lonnie bought the army as an opponent force. He wanted to experiment with different Space Marine armies so he would know best how to wipe them out. He changed around the army, adding new units and modifying existing ones. One of the changes was to rob parts from the Landraider to do other conversions. When he tired of the Space Marines he donated the entire collection to me to expand my army. By the time I got the Landraider it was missing the Assault Cannons, the Hurricane Bolters and the top hatches.


I started collecting up the missing parts to turn this into a standard Landraider configuration. It took time and I was not able to find all the right parts. The ones that I could not find I had to convert. I wanted to take the entire model apart to and build it fresh but there was so much superglue on it I could not get it apart. I ended up adding lots of battle damage to cover the bad assembly. In the end I am happy with how it turned out but it took way too much work. This is the last time I do a salvage project on a Landraider.