Tutorials for Techguard?

[Alexos]

I read the first Soul drinkers book in the omnibus, and had read about how there were skitarii, and then the tech guard. The Tech-Guard are cybernetically enhanced, but they still retain emotions, feelings, etc. They can tell if their gun is overheating through there skin, as if their body's temp was the gun's temp. They feel how full a magazine is through the fullness of their stomach, and other cool things.

 

How would you guys go about modeling these? I was thinking a mostly Guard look, though with alot more wires.

[bad buddha]

in the book i felt they were robed figures with heavy weapons for arms, but my memory arent allways the most reliable.

[ghosty]

Skitarii is the broad term for the military assets(except the titan legions) of the Adeptus Mechanicus, so the tech guard are the same thing as the skitarii. Skitarii tech guard, Tech guard, Cogboys, Hypaspists etc. it's all the same thing, really.

 

Modeling the techies in the first soul drinkers book? having not read that series I wouldn't know exactly, but I'd suggest using the cadians as your base and making use of gratuitous use of guitar wire and bionics. Necron, eldar, and marine parts are good for this, or you could order some Iron Brotherhood minis from microartstudios.com(I think that's the site, not sure, google and find out)

[ArchHeretic]

To me, they seem to look like cyborg-cadians or storm troopers in red robes. All of the books seem to describe them relatively the same.

 

ghosty is right, Skitarii is the broad term for the foot sloggers of an AM force.

 

The Soul Drinkers books give a really limited view on what the Tech guard were. All they faced were the guardsmen I'm pretty sure. Read Mechanicus and Titanicus to get more of an army perspective.

[ghosty]

Dark Adeptus from the Grey Knights trilogy gives a decent account of what the Skitarii troopers look like, and their dark mechanicus counterparts.

[Walter Payton]

Dark Adeptus from the Grey Knights trilogy gives a decent account of what the Skitarii troopers look like, and their dark mechanicus counterparts.

 

 

Meh. Titanicus gives a much better account. I have been looking for a suitabke model for a Skitarii-Commander Lau for ages!

[Taerij]

Here's my method:

http://www.mywargame.com/2010/01/05/creati...rii-hypaspists/

[ghosty]

Dark Adeptus from the Grey Knights trilogy gives a decent account of what the Skitarii troopers look like, and their dark mechanicus counterparts.

 

 

Meh. Titanicus gives a much better account. I have been looking for a suitabke model for a Skitarii-Commander Lau for ages!

Just finished reading Titanicus and I must say I agree, a much clearer account of them, but somehow it feels a little off.

 

The descriptions in the book make me feel like the Titan Legio Skitarii forces are a different breed altogether from "regular" fore world skitarii tech guard.

[Walter Payton]

I would imagine they probably are. I think of the Legio Skitarii as being an Elite within the Skitarii. A bit like the Paras in the British Army, or the Delta Force in the USA

[RexTalon]

I know there's no real point in arguing on the internet but as a US military person I have to say that we don't divide ourselves into two distinct groups the way most civilians tend to divide us. There is a spectrum of different skills that we may possess that I would imagine are difficult to simulate on the table top and I believe that the Skitarii in Titanicus represent one of these shades.

 

In the real US Military you might have a security forces soldier and an infantry grunt. Both of them are fairly common and to a civilian might both be considered the average soldier and lumped into one class. This would obviously be wrong to us because we would know that the security enforcer would be better at protecting a static target, like a base, with light vehicles, while the infantryman would be better at moving and assaulting with heavier vehicles. Even among "common infantry" they have a special role to fill and we need a lot of them to accomplish the mission. So, while it may not take more intellect to stand in among them, it certainly takes a lot of guts.

 

On the next tier might be people like rangers, while to us there is a distinction, there are also subclasses and other nuances within the class. For instance, there are the airborne variety, and then there are people who travel with them, such as combat camera and combat weather. There are radio operators and recon patrolman. There is actually a huge variation between what each of these specialized troops is trained to do. If you sent one of these guys to protect a base they might make mistakes in doing that because that's not really what they're trained for, so in reality, they aren't a class better than the infantryman. They're simply a class apart, because they're trained to operate in a different way.

And here is where I think the Titanicus Skitarii fall. They are trained to work around Titans and so are viewed as better, but really they're just different.

 

Then there are the special operations forces (or SOF). They're highly trained in several of the specialty areas. This wouldn't be any Skitarii. You don't train and field a core of troops to do a lot of jobs because that's a waste of the troops and the training. SOF are fielded in small groups and trained to do several jobs specifically so you don't have to field a lot of troops. When I was in SOF, I was trained to do the jobs of four different people. As a result we deployed with a quarter the manning it took for a normal unit to operate. We weren't better than rangers, because they too had their position in the grand scheme of things. We knew we couldn't operate alone because the enemy would just have a smaller, easier target to hit. Sure we had more training, but that didn't really make us better or worse than anyone else.

 

Anyway, my impression was that the Skitarii in that book represented a group of special infantry with a specific role to fill. They might have been different from Skitarii from a FW, but I don't think they were inherently "better". But then that's just my opinion.