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A Very Special Valentine: Custom Castellax Robot Maniple

N1SB

By N1SB
in + HALL OF HONOUR +

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N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

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This is a very special valentine, a custom Castellax Robot Maniple, especially for @Atia.

 

I returned for real to The Hobby awhile back, largely due to Atia's coverage on the Skitarii and Cult Mechanicus codices.  Previously, I toyed with the idea of even a Black Templar force, which I failed to follow through with (although the groundwork laid there lead to another, even more interesting, project, which I hope to share with you all soon).  Since then, I've been introduced to 30k's Mechanicum, where I'll be using these models.

 

Thus, I humbly present the Casteddyx Class Battle-Adoremata Maniple:

 

http://oi65.tinypic.com/oqlxc0.jpg

 

From left to right: Teddy Rustskin, a yet-unnamed Magos Dominus, and the Atia-Hugger 2000

 

 

Alright, let's make up some fluff for these bad boys:

 

The Shadow Wars of the Horus Heresy cast the Imperium into even greater uncertainty.  Whereas the betrayal of the Warmaster and his followers already drew battle-lines between loyalists and traitors, the emergence of shattered legions of Astartes "Blackshields" with unknown allegiances lead to further paranoia.

 

These unexpected elements threw the carefully calculated computations of the Mechanicum's empire resource planning into flux.  Among the Tech Priesthood's numbers were those that desperately tried to re-balance the new status quo's equation and equilibrium, scrounging and scavenging whatever war assets to their cause, even those that they had previously deemed worthless...or too dangerous.

 

Thus it was that their Explorators re-claimed a lost, unpronounceable planet beyond their comprehension.  At first glance, it seemed an abandoned Forgeworld, but rather than having cyclopean hive factory-cities, the land seemed open to the elements.  Their conveyor belts were abnormally twisted into illogical curves, obscene to their optic sensors, surrounded by the maddening gibber of looping laughter.

 

Even among these Tech Priests that saw only cost in chance, only consequence in coincidence, it was clear that fortune favoured the bold, for the bravest of them delved deeper to discover a treasure trove of tall automata, bearing strange shapes from presumably lost STCs.  The greatest mystery?  These mighty machines of war bore NO apparent weapons of any sort!

 

However, once more the Machine God was proven to have blessed all his creations, no matter their form, for the Explorators found these robots' limbs could be retrofitted with standard armaments.  These "Casteddyx Class Battle-Adoremata", despite their many quirks, had Machine Spirits that demonstrated to their operators the rarest asset during the Shadow Wars: an unquestionable loyalty.

 

Now if they could only get their vox tracks to stop nattering on about "hugz" and "wuv".

 

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TL;DR - in the grimdark only-war far-future, Techpriests found theme park mascot robots and assumed they were warbots, lol.

 

Happy Valentines Day, everyone, thank you for reading, I invite you to leave comments below, and a name for that Tech Priest please!

N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

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Good to see the Bearguy finding its way to the Grim Times of the 41st Millenium. tongue.png

They look really nice, especially with the choice of color. How did you make the mechanicum symbols on their legs?

biggrin.png Thank you! You're very observant. Almost everything here was an experiment of new ideas.

The colour itself was both an experiment and a design choice. I felt a challenge of painting Castellan range of robots were these smooth, round surfaces (but that comfortable shape is why they're so friendly-looking)as traditionally miniatures have lots of details and hard edges to take our highlights, etc. Thus, I used a spray made for model sports cars: Tamiya TS-18 Metallic Red. Then I had some battle damage just to make it look like I did something.

Now the Cog Mechanicum...it's a little tricky. It's a Forgeworld brass plate from the Iron Hands set. 1st, I had to bend the brass plate into a round shape by pressing it with my fingers around a pot of paint. You know how like world-class strongmen can bend a coin with their thumbs? It was like a far weaker and geekier version of that. 2nd, I primed it and painted the yin-yang black-white pattern; technically, you only really need to paint the front, but I primed it back and front, which caused problems in the next step. 3rd, I sealed it with a light spray of varnish. 4th, I glued it onto the leg, at which point a cog fell off because the glue was on its painted backside...and paint really doesn't like to stay on brass. The brass plate actually ripped off of the paint, and I anticipate it may do so again.

The Cog Mechanicum was probably the most painful part of the process, but also necessary, lest we offend the Machine Spirit and the Omnissiah both. Brass plate is simply different and I am trying to learn more from such experimentation.

N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

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It turns out, the galaxy is a big place, large enough for all of you to be absolutely right.

 

The Casteddyx Battle-Adoremata are NOT Bearguy Mobile Suits, but they're their sidekicks: Petiteguys.

 

Here's a link to a Bearguy with this model type, Petiteguy, on the back: http://gundam-bf.net/mechanics/05/

 

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The story is there's an in-joke in my very 40k-centric FLGS with Gundam Mobile Suits.  Tau are the most popular army here.  There's been a trope to kitbash their Tau Battlesuits with Gundam pieces just because.  It turns out they fit rather well and I was urged by a friend to participate in that.

 

I went with him to visit some local model shops.  Of course, the very best ones were in the worst part of town (2 blocks away were all the brothels in the city), so getting the initial prototype for this project was An Adventure.  The funny thing was the shop itself was very clean and organised.

 

There, I DID buy the Bearguy + Petiteguy box set linked above, but it was very hard to gauge the size of the models.  The shopkeeper, despite being even nerdier than the comic shop guy in the Simpsons, was an uniformed idiot and I was even stupider in trusting him when he said, "It's only thiiis tall."

 

The original plan was to kitbash the Bearguy with a Kastellan Robot from the Cult Mechanicus book, then use the Petiteguy's head to replace the Techpriest, like he's some cosplay furry convention goer.  It turns out they were way larger than expected, with the Petiteguy close to the size of a Kastellan.

 

After much experimenting with various bitz, like giving the Casteddyx Killer Kan parts and the such, our conclusion was, you know what, leave them as they are, they're too perfect to fiddle with, bring them into 40k with a suitable paintjob (that dark red), battle wear & tear, and the Cog Mechanicum.

 

That took care of 1 of these robots, but I needed another as I was planning to run a proper Maniple, minimum squad size of 2.  I wasn't going to enter No Man's Land again to buy a full Bearguy + Petiteguy kit just for the side character; that was illogical.  Then 1 day I went into my local 7-11 cornerstore.

 

The 7-11, in its shelf of knick-knacks that rotates items regularly, actually had standalone Petiteguy models at the time.

 

There are times when the Machine God makes its will clearly known to you and blesses your endeavours.  I took it as a sign.

 

I'm changing from 40k Cult Mechanicus to 30k Mechanicum now (still at the same FLGS, but overall the 30k crowd favours narrative-based battles more), but I'm keeping that Maniple layout as a nod towards how Castellax Maniples morph into the Kastellan squads in the future.

 

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A final thought.  I'm actually happier things turned out this way.

 

The Bearguy is based on the Aggai, a well-known mobile suit dating from the original Gundam war drama anime.  Although it's a matter of degrees, that is fundamentally different from a robot.  A mobile suit is supposed to have a pilot inside.  I think with Tau Gundam kitbashes it was alright; they were slightly the wrong scale, but when you deal with Monstrous or Gargantuan Creatures, they're supposed to be even larger than than the models appear anyway, and there was a Tau pilot inside.  Mobile suits were not really the Imperium/Mechanicum's thing until you reached the scale of Imperial Knights.  That distinction caused a lot of issues for me.

 

The Petiteguy, on the other hand, is...something else.  It was part of a weird non-canonical series meant only to sell toys.  The Petiteguy was not piloted by anyone, driven instead by whimsy and the cheers of small children (whom it obviously protects).

 

TL;DR - when dealing with these sort of cross-overs, there's a range that things are measured upon.  A spectrum of stupid, if you will.  It takes a lot of planning, design, experimentation, re-planning, to accurately find the right shade of dumb that best fits one's own endeavours.

SalvationOfReason Veteran

SalvationOfReason

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Ah. Nice explanation ^^ and an adventure to go with it!

I thought they were Bearguys because I've seen what appeared to be that scale size models of them at a book store here, so was curious if that was where you'd acquired them.

Still, that's absolutely fantastic, and the metallic red fits them astonishingly well.

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