--++ Legio Solaria Titans ++--

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

Well, some of these detailing updates are a real pain - partly my own fault for taking shortcuts and doing things the quick and dirty way previously, leaving me with a load of "hidden presents to myself" when i come back to these things 2 or 3 years later!  Also doing some housekeeping, like creating blocks where necessary and tidying up drawing layers etc.

 

Having already updated the track section for the Sicaran as part of "Project: Elephant", i foolishly assumed this would be quick.

 

Turns out not, as the bulk of the time was spent on the Omega trying to sort out the horrific turret i'd previously bodged into place, which necessitated a rebuild of almost the entire plasma gun.  And then, to cap it all off, I decided that the Omega shouldn't have the hull heavy bolter and the sponson lascannons; instead should have a hull multimelta (it's a tank hunter variant after all) and sponson volkites...

 

All finished now, and onto the next updates:

 

Sicaran:

 

Omega:

 

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

Quick message to update people:

 

I've started a new job, and i have less time at work to play with my models than i used to - mainly because I've actually got interesting work problems to keep me entertained these days rather than being bored stiff.

 

The project, such as it is, hasn't dies however.  It will continue in the background.  I do have more updates - having redetailed the Land Raider - and i will be going back to the Mastodon / Spartan / Sicaran variants to add some more "standard detailing" that has developed from the Land Raider updates.  I'll then, when I've got a bit of time, be moving onto updates on the Thunderhawk, Transporter and the Stormbird...

For lore purposes, assume that the vehicular variations on the STCs for the Blood Angels vehicles make them all either Baal- or Unverrdt- pattern.  Those Techpriests on Unverrdt IX love a supercharger almost as much as the White Scars...

[Firedrake Cordova]

Congratulations on the new job - good that it's more interesting than the old one!  

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

5 hours ago, Firedrake Cordova said:

Congratulations on the new job - good that it's more interesting than the old one!  

Thank you! Very much appreciated!

 

I still intend to continue with this. I do want to pimp up some of the detailing a bit, particularly in the Titans that are my own inventions, as I maintain a vague desire for them to become 3d printable at some future time, albeit that is in a potential Blender-based future timeline!

 

I also have the vague outline of an idea brewing in my head for something Astartes flyer related... Lexicanum and the 40k Wiki have a lot to answer for after informing me there are other Stormbird patterns out there, and also the "custom" drop ship that Fulgrim used during the Great Crusade... Sanguinius deserves a pimped-out ride! I also want to look again at the Kratos tank to see if I can turn it into something a bit more visually appealling.

 

While sat watching a footy stream and listening to US Election coverage however, I realised that mostly what I'm generating here is not a 40k force, but is illustrating the kind of pain that the Imperium could bring 10k years earlier... But that means my Stormspeeders needs looking at again! And then I realised that the 30k speeders and jetbikes for Astartes don't really match the rest of the 30k vehicle aesthetic, and that they look more like Custodes than anything else. So I might have a try at making something a bit more 30k for the speeders... Or I might just remove them from the render as you can barely see them anyway!

 

Open to thoughts on this last part. Might need to delve back through the thread a bit to see what my interpretation of a jetbike looks like!

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

Just to prove I'm not dead:

 

 

I had been unhappy with the update to the Spartan, but wasn't really able to say why.  The nose wasn't right; the detailing was still underwhelming, the treads were wrong in some way...

Having spent some time tidying up the Land Raider, i think my eye is back into the aesthetic, so the Spartan has been tweaked, further details added, and now i'm much happier.

 

Sorting the treads on this also means an update to the Cerberus at some point, but that's more detailing than anything.  There remain a few little bits to resolve on this before i can fully put it to bed, but it's 95% there now.

 

Sadly, this means while i'm "in the zone" of Astartesian Tank Aesthetics, it means going back to the Mastodon and Mammoth and adding yet more greebles and details to the plates and panelling.

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

 

Well hello everyone!

 

As I've mentioned, progress on my little project has significantly slowed due to having a new job... but i also promised i would have new developments from idea that i have in mind.  Also, there seem to be a couple of people on here that are fond of my "re-imaginings" - presumably because of a shared aesthetic preference and a similar mindset for how canon works.

 

On that basis... you may remember that i snuck this little notion in one of my previous posts as a bit of a nugget:

 

On 11/5/2024 at 9:23 PM, Lord_Mephistopheles said:

I also have the vague outline of an idea brewing in my head for something Astartes flyer related... Lexicanum and the 40k Wiki have a lot to answer for after informing me there are other Stormbird patterns out there, and also the "custom" drop ship that Fulgrim used during the Great Crusade... Sanguinius deserves a pimped-out ride!

 

Well I'm pleased to say nugget no longer, albeit far FAR from finished and only barely past the "blocking out" stage!

 

Sanguinary Dropship - "The Seraphim"

 

 

I have this, in my persona head-canon, as Sanguinius' personal flyer / transport from the Great Crusade, in the same way that Fulgrim had "Firehawk" before he want all slippery.

 

Being the favoured transport of The Fabulous Hawk-Boy - and knowing that the current HH lore has it that the Primarchs got a lot of EXTREMELY FANCY TOYS that really pushed the boundaries of Imperial Technology - combined with Big E absolutely having his favorites, i really couldn't see why they might not have had a rummage round in the Vaults of Moravec to see what might have been usable... particularly for power generation purposes! I see it as an enlargement / development of the Warhawk IV pattern Stormbird, which canon suggests is one of the largest patterns of flyer in common usage in the Great Crusade era, which has then been pimped-out.

 

The Seraphim is, therefore, an absolute BEAST.

 

The intent here is that the Seraphim is basically equivalent to a flying Warlord-class Titan in terms of armament, albeit less heavily armoured but more heavily shielded.  If you go up against this thing in anything smaller than an Imperator, you're taking a hard-L.

 

How much detail you can pick out from the image above i don't know, but the primary weapons load is:

• 2No. fuselage mounted Volcano Cannon (Reaver-class, not Bellicosa!)
• 2No. under-wing twin-linked Turbo-lasers
• 2No. Solex-Magma twin-linked lascannon turrets (one dorsal; one ventral)
• Twin-linked Thermal cannon array in the nose

Clearly there will also be a substantial secondary loadout of mainly Ardax-defensor type bolt-cannon, and some lascannon emplacements.

 

Just to give you a scale shot of how monstrous this thing is, below is it compared to both a Thunderhawk and a Sokar-pattern Stormbird:

 

 

From a design perspective, i've tried to give it design cues from other vehicles in "my range" :D  The body shape is therefore a development of the Mammoth.  The wings are a variation on the Xiphon.  There are other little bits hidden away as well.  Also, being Hawk-Boy's ride, i've tried to give it the look of the Legion "winged blood drop" symbol, without being too overt with it, albeit trying to get a teardrop shaped flyer body while sticking to the blocky Astartes aesthetic isn't the easiest, so you might have to squint a bit to see it.

 

Other than fiddling with continuing the detailing to get the overall shape and balance looking "right", my big decision at the moment is "Gold, or red?"

 

Part of me thinks gold, with some red accents here and there, because that's what my boy Sanguinius wore.  But then i worry does that start making it look too much like a Custodes flyer, and its not linked enough to the rest of the Blood Angel vehicles?  Opinions welcome.

 

That's all I've got for now.  Hope you like!  Have a good Xmas everybody!

[Firedrake Cordova]

That's definitely a lot of pew-pew!  

 

Personally, I'd go with red with gold trim just to avoid the "looks like an Ares Gunship" issue.  

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

4 hours ago, Firedrake Cordova said:

That's definitely a lot of pew-pew!  

 

Personally, I'd go with red with gold trim just to avoid the "looks like an Ares Gunship" issue.  

Yeh. That's the effect I was worried about.

 

I might try it all in gold and see how it looks, but I think I'll angle towards red in my head.

 

Having looked again I'm reconsidering the wings - they look a bit too "butterfly".

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

Well I've had a bit of a nightmare.

 

I spent some time over the last few days updating the model, and had got it to a point where I was much much happier with the design - and then something tripped the power for the circuit my modelling PC is on.

 

Bad enough that I wasn't 100% certain if the updated file had been saved, but to cap it all off, something about that incident has seemingly done something to that PC meaning it now won't even get to POST.

 

Far from ideal.

 

Replacement parts have been ordered, so hopefully there will be an update soon.

[Firedrake Cordova]

Oof! That is certainly not ideal! Hopefully whatever went pop isn't too expensive!  

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

19 hours ago, Firedrake Cordova said:

Oof! That is certainly not ideal! Hopefully whatever went pop isn't too expensive!  

I got lucky actually.  The machine is a Dell Precision T7810 that has been fully kitted-out: twin CPUs, gobs of RAM, dual Quadro cards etc. - as far as i can tell, its one of three things.  Either the PSU (or some component of the power system), the motherboard, or potentially the CMOS battery.

 

The latter of those is easy to test and I'#ll check it later.  For either of the former, unless its a power distribution sub-board (which i'm starting to doubt), then a new PSU of the right wattage runs about 70-80GBP, and a replacement motherboard runs about 100-150GBP.

 

However, a quick eBay trawl found me the same model, with hard drive, ram, board, PSU, everything (albeit not as well kitted out) for 110GBP, but eBay has a 15% discount deal on - so worst case it turns out to be the CMOS and i have to re-sell the other machine - otherwise it's not cost me much more than the replacement part for a donor machine, leaving me with additional spare parts,

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

There is a God (-Emperor!)

 

The machine appears to be toast.  Not sure what or why, and I'm hopeful that a PSU swap might solve the issue, but we shall see...

 

That said, thankfully but not without a moments panic, the drive on which i keep all my modelling as a buffer before it gets sync'd to the cloud has not suffered, and therefore most of the changes i made on Friday haven't been lost!  There's a few texture changes that I made late-on which haven't saved, but that's hardly worth worrying about at this stage!

 

Therefore, with some joy and no small amount of relief - here is the newly-recovered Seraphim Assault Ship!

 

 

 

Yes, there is a bit of an X-wing vibe here.    There's a reason for that, being the lack of vertical stabilisers.  Also, in Biblical legend, the Seraphim were the highest choir of angels, and were gifted 6 wings - the 2 on their back for flight, 2 smaller wings covering their feet, and another 2 to cover their eyes / face.  Therefore, for a ship called The Seraphim, it really does need to have 6 wings!

 

The weapons were rearranged slightly, with the turbo-lasers moved to the wingtips.  I reconsidered the Heavy Solex-Magma turrets as i wasn't sure they really worked for the redesign.  Unlike the Sokar-pattern, there's no space for the side-mounted ball-turrets (due to the dirty great Volcano cannons...) so these were instead mounted on the tips of the secondary wings / stabilisers which also serves to provide a visual similarity to the Thunderhawk.

[Firedrake Cordova]

Good to hear it doesn't look like too painful an experience for your wallet (especially at this time of year)  

[Lord_Mephistopheles]

On 12/16/2024 at 2:51 PM, Firedrake Cordova said:

Good to hear it doesn't look like too painful an experience for your wallet (especially at this time of year)  

Thanks!

The replacement machine turned up, and having done a small amount of testing, it wasn't the power supply that has gone.  Could be a motherboard issue; could be one of the CPUs; could be the RAM; could be anything at this point.

 

Over Xmas i'm going to try to find a few hours where i can sit and systematically go through components - but the new "donor" box has confused me, as it boots fine, but doesn't beep on POST!  I don't know if that's just that machine, or if i'm imagining the fact that the old machine used to!

 

Anyway, post-festive period i'll have some more updates both my IT issues, and the further detailing (hopefully!) of the Seraphim!

 

Have an amazing Christmas everyone - and thank you for your continued interest in my work / time-sink / anti-boredom project!