Deathstorm Drop Pod

[Gurth]

For an upcoming tournament which reportedly will have plenty of horde armies, I wanted to include some Deathstorm drop pods in my list. As I had one unbuilt drop pod in my pile of kits, I decided to buy a second one and converted them both to Deathstorm pods. Then I decided that while I was doing this, I might as well build enough weapons to use both as either type.

Basic Drop Pod Conversion

My initial idea was to build them much like they appear in Imperial Armour Volume 2, and thus also like the Forge World versions: a launcher with almost a dozen missiles or an assault cannon aimed out of each opening when the doors are down. This soon proved impractical due to the number of weapons needed (about 80 to 100 missiles and ten assault cannon) and my desire to make the weapons removable. Instead, I settled on the weapon being mounted centrally in a turret-like way, allowing it to fire in any direction.

The two pods were built per the instructions, except that I didn't fit the central console or harnesses for the occupants, nor the storm bolter suspended from the "ceiling". I filled the holes for the latter with putty (the kind from a tube, intended for filling gaps) before installing the parts in the pods. As I was still intending to build the pods like the Forge World examples at this stage, I assembled the whole model — which turned out to have been a bit of a bad idea when I changed my plans. To make the turret-like weapons rotate, I needed an axle in the middle, which would be simple to make from a length of plastic tube. This requires a hole in the middle of the floor, else it will never be strong enough for repeated use in a game, but with the top of the pod fitted I couldn't simply drill through the floor for it … What I ended up doing was drilling through the pod's bottom and then through the floor with a 5.5-mm bit in a table drill, which was hard to get right because the pod is almost impossible to keep exactly vertical when it's upside-down even with someone else holding it while I operated the drill. (Because of the five-sided design of the pod, it is just as hard to clamp it in anything to keep it steady, so we settled for simply holding it firmly.) In the end the axle is off-centre on the inside, but not very noticeably so. However, if you want to follow my example, I suggest you drill a hole in the floor before assembling it to the pod at all — that way, you'll make the conversion a lot easier for yourself :)

The axle itself consists of a length of 5.5-mm diameter plastic tube (with its bottom end plugged with some round sprue from a model kit) glued through both holes in the pod's floor, and with a shorter bit of 7-mm tube glued over it for increased strength. The photo below shows what this ended up looking like:

Missile Launcher

With the pods completed, I turned my attention first to the missile launchers. I had been trying to find a good source of things to use as missile tips, especially when I still figured I needed 80 or more, but with the revised plans I needed far fewer, and found a ziplock bag containing a full set of 1/35th scale 155-mm ammunition that came with the AFV Club M548A1 tracked cargo carrier kit. It had 32 shells in it, which can easily pass for Whirlwind missiles in 40K if only the tips are showing. Here are just some of them:

The shells have a small eyelet at the front, which on real artillery shells is attached to a plug that closes the well for the fuse, preventing dirt from getting in while also allowing the shell to be lifted by a crane. These would be silly on 40K missiles, not to mention too fragile for gaming, so I simply cut them all off with a hobby knife.

32 shells meant I could build two, sixteen-shot launchers, for which I sawed 7-mm plastic tube into 1.5-cm lengths — the shells are longer than that, so I could glue the tubes to a piece of plastic card and have the shells' tips showing. In order to get the tubes to (almost) identical lengths, you will probably need a modeller's mitre box and jury-rig some kind of stop in that, else you may find the tubes' lengths vary too much to be useful.

Once the tubes were cut to the right length and cleaned up, I glued them into strips of four, making sure these strips were flat and all the ends were even on one side. This created some unevenness on the opposite side, but I was planning to hide that side anyway, so it did not matter much. I then glued four strips together in a staggered pattern to resemble that of 40K standard Dreadnought missile launchers, as well as of the Deathwind launcher that comes with the drop pod kit:

A piece of 1.5-mm-thick plastic card then formed a good backing to this whole thing, creating both more strength and something to glue the artillery shells to later on. Make sure you glue the uneven side to the backing, so that the side that will be visible to your fellow gamers is nice and even.

That took care of the front — what I needed then was a back to the launcher. I could have easily built a box from plastic card and added some exhaust details to it like those on the Dreadnought or plastic Whirlwind missile launcher, and if you don't have something you can use off the shelf then I would recommend doing just that. However, a few months earlier I had been taking apart a lot of old notebook computers and discovered some nice radiators in them, soldered to the heat pipe system that cools the processor and video card in these computers. Naturally, I had cut these off and saved them, thinking they would come in handy for a SF model conversion. Digging through my supply I found two identical ones that each turned out to be almost exactly twice the height and half the width of the launcher I had already built … I carefully sawed off the remaining ends of the heat pipe with a small hacksaw and then also sawed through the middle so I had four equal pieces, two of which put together created a very nice and intricate-looking exhaust, as this picture shows:

The four pieces were not perfectly identical and one of the two radiators had been damaged a little, but on the whole they looked fine. I stuck the two pieces together with two-part epoxy glue and also used that to glue them to the backing plate on the forward launch tubes:

Note the arrows on the tubes on the left launcher, which serve as a reminder of the sides that should point forward and up. If you forget to place markings like these, you may find you're assembling things differently than you had in mind.

Once the epoxy had set, I cut a 1.5-mm-thick plate to serve as the top, plus two strips of the same thickness to go along the sides of the tubes, with sloped bits at the tops. These had two purposes: one is to make the launcher look more like a 40K weapon, like for example the lascannon mounts on the Land Raider, and the other is that they hide the gaps between some of the launch tubes and the backing plate, as well as cover the parts of the exhaust that are just a little wider than the launch tubes.

A second, smaller, piece of plastic card was epoxied to the launcher's underside, and a length of 8.5-mm plastic tube glued to that. This fits over the axle in the pod, allowing the launcher to both stand upright and rotate. I glued short lengths of 7-mm and 5.5-mm tube inside it for added strength where it glues to the launcher, then sawed the top of the tube at a slight angle so the launcher is tilted backward, which makes it look more interesting. Finally, an elevating arm was made from some leftover suspension parts from 1/35th-scale tank kits. Anything goes, really, as long as it believably looks like a mechanism for doing something.

What remained was to glue in the shells into the tubes — simply done by putting a dab of tube cement onto the back, then dropping the shell in and visually centring it in the tube. I also added some 40K bits such as purity seals and similar to the launchers, to give them a bit more detail.

And here's the launcher in the drop pod:

It just fits: it has to be tilted backward to insert it through a door opening before it can be placed on the axle, but in place it looks good and will turn through 360 degrees.

Assault Cannon

The easy way to do the assault cannon would probably be to adapt the ones from a Land Raider Crusader kit, but I didn't have any of those available and ordering bits would probably take too long, given that I was building these drop pods for an upcoming club tournament that was about two weeks away when I started. So, nothing for it but to scratchbuild these guns as well.

I started with 2.5-mm diameter brass tube, of which seven pieces are needed per gun: six for the barrels and one for the central axle they mount on — times four, because I wanted two assault cannon per launcher … That meant sawing 24 tubes of 2 cm long and six of 3.5 cm. I used a small hacksaw for this, clamping the tube in a padded modeller's vice — you're not going to do this holding the tube with one hand and the saw with the other.

Now I had the problem of how to put these together to create a six-barreled gun … ? I knew i wanted the central tube to extend a little beyond the barrels, but it is hard to line everything up properly without some kind of jig. As luck would have it, the bundle of seven tubes fit very neatly into the 8.5-mm plastic tube I had been using for the launcher mounts, which means I could use that as a jig. I first made a 2.5-mm hole in a piece of 1.5-mm plastic card and cut a piece of tube to about 1 cm length, then put all seven brass tubes (without glue!) into that. This way, I could put the central tube into the hole, and then glue the plastic tube to the plastic plate with liquid cement run along the seam from the outside. After the glue had set, I could remove the brass tubes and had a jig:

Next, I put six "barrels" into the jig, without glue and leaving the centre position free:

That done, I applied epoxy glue all around one half of one of the longer tubes, taking care to stay a few millimetres away from the end, then inserted it into the middle of the bundle of barrels:

Be sure to press all the barrels down into the jig so their forward ends line up, but also take care that you don't turn them, else you may get glue between the barrels and the jig — not something you want with epoxy glue, as it means you'll probably need to destroy the jig to remove the barrels. In any case, leave the glue to harden and then repeat with the next set of barrels. Once all were done, I ended up with four sets of barrels like these:

You could also use plastic tube, which is easier to work with than brass, but may not be as sturdy; plastic rod is also an option, but you would need to drill out the barrels if you want them to look convincing. However, the main reason I used brass is rather mundane: the model shop I went to didn't have plastic tube or rod of the diameter I was looking for, so I settled for the brass instead :D

Now for the gun mounts. I started with the shields that go around the lascannons from a Land Raider and glued a piece of plastic card into the gap in the top, then filled the seam with putty that I filed smooth after it had hardened. You may have these as spares if you've built a Land Raider Crusader kit, but in my case they came from the Land Raider Prometheus conversion I did several years ago.

Inside the shields, I added a front and back piece of 1.5-mm-thick plastic card. The dimensions for this are easy to establish by measuring up the insides of the shield — they are about 2.2 cm wide at the lower end and 1.6 cm at the top, though because there is an angled bit at the top, it takes a little more careful measuring than usual. I also had to drill holes into the plates for the centre tubes; to make sure these were even, I marked them out on one plate and then carefully stacked all four of them so the tops and sides were even. Clamping the stack tightly in the vice let me drill one of the holes through all four plates, and then I could (carefully again) remove the plates from the vice and turn them over to drill the other hole.

To glue them into the shields, put the barrels (or remaining bits of tube) through the holes, and leave them in until the glue has set. This will make sure everything is lined up correctly.

After that, I glued in the barrel assemblies using epoxy glue and added a rectangle of plastic card over the bottom of the mount, with another bit of 8.5-mm tube underneath like for the missile launchers.

Next, I built the bar that runs under the barrels to the muzzle, which is very typical of assault cannons in 40K. I made these from a length of square plastic strip, 2 mm wide, with the front end cut to a 60-degree angle using a Chopper II to more easily get the angle correct. I estimated the length and cut the strip too long on purpose, so I could cut it to size once it was ready to be fitted to the gun. The short, angled bar at the front was made in the same way, with 60-degree cuts on both ends. After gluing the two pieces together, I added a length of plastic rod that fit inside the brass tube, giving the end result shown below:

When the glue had dried, I could slide the rod into the centre tube of the gun assembly and then measure and cut the long strip to the right length so it fit to the back of the gun body. With that done I glued the strip in place with plastic cement and superglued to rod into the brass tube. Do this one strip at a time, though, and glue each strip to the barrels you measured it for — don't measure and cut them all and then glue them to the weapons, because you run the risk of some not fitting properly because you mixed them up.

This left the backs of the guns bare and with ends of brass tubes showing. Since they also had no ammo supply, I rummaged around my vehicles bits box and came up with ammo boxes from Predator heavy bolters, together with belt feed chutes I had cut off the corresponding bolters (the bolters themselves had been used for the Prometheus conversion). These fit nicely onto the back of the gun, with the feed chute sticking up above the shield behind one of the assault cannon, so I added the chutes cut from the bolters as a second ammo feed:

The only thing to do now was find or build something to connect the feed chutes to the cannon. I settled on the ammo boxes for heavy bolters from the plastic Devastator set. With the handles cut off the boxes and end of the the feed chutes cut to a 45-degree angle, they fit very nicely on top of the gun shield:

And that's it! The conversion might seem a bit complicated, but it really isn't — it's just that that I'm going into a fair amount of detail here.

Edits: Fixed some minor mistakes etc.

[Dorns Padawan]

Mate this is an excellent tutorial! Very detailed & well thought out. Thank you for providing this & best of luck with the tournament!

[Chaptermaster Graymantle]

I really like this!

Will definitively have to try making a couple of these!

Well done! ;)

[Ironfoe]

B)

 

Wow.

 

That looks amazing.

[Gurth]

Just for fun and completeness, here are some action shots of these same drop pods, in a club tournament yesterday:

 

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7123/7083314443_6638ab2898_c.jpg

(That's not me, BTW.)

 

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5192/7083317635_e9565ecd23_c.jpg

 

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7224/7083320697_f32c5423f5_c.jpg

(For the eagle-eyed: yes, this third photo is from a different game than the other two, and that Land Raider is the singing and dancing one mentioned in the article :D)

[my_face]

pink marines?

 

*an i think the ac looks siiiick..needs a laser pen :lol:

[my_face]

just looking through that link for the chopper... what the hell is a chamfer! PMSL

[Kierdale]

Outstanding work!

The end results look very impressive.

Hope they did well in the game!

[Gurth]

pink marines?

This keeps surprising people, for some reason :)

 

what the hell is a chamfer!

cham•fer |ˈCHamfər|

verb in carpentry, cut away (a right-angled edge or corner) to make a symmetrical sloping edge.

noun a symmetrical sloping surface at an edge or corner.

 

Outstanding work!

The end results look very impressive.

Thanks :)

 

Hope they did well in the game!

My advice: don't use Deathstorm drop pods if you know you'll be facing any kind of Space Marines or similar — both games I played against these, they didn't do much of anything. On the other hand, against Eldar, Imperial Guard and Tau they worked very well :)