The Yantar 8th A.K.A. Why didn't Bonehead do this while he was building and painting them?

[The Pounder]

Nice WIP pics!

 

How many do you own?
 

 

[Bonehead]

Ten horsey lads in total. I was thinking I'd like some more to make a proper platoon of them, but now I've found out how much work they are to paint, forget it.

I'll just do some light artillery or something.

[Tallarn Commander]

Looking nice! My Rough Riders took about 3 times as long to paint as it took me to paint a Tallarn infantry trooper.

Edited March 26 by Tallarn Commander

[Bonehead]

I think these are going to come in somewhere around the 7-8 times as long to paint range- for half as many. Man alive, there's just so much detail on them.

Managed to get a bit of minor progress in this week, as predicted, green and brown highlighted.

Flash:

No Flash:

We're getting there...

[Bonehead]

Mid-week painting progress?

Yeah, don't get too excited, it's just the eyes, and blacking in the metallics.

Still, with a bit of luck I'll be doing the horseys before the end of the week.

No flash:

Flash:

I think they're really starting to look pretty decent by now. Let's hope I can get the horseys as good as the riders.

That said, I'll definitely be taking a break once I finish this squad. Got backed up traitor guard for the baddies to finish.

 

[The Pounder]

Coming along nicely! Not too far from completion.

 

I’ve just finished building my first 5 Deathriders. 
 

I know what you mean about needing a break, they were a big investment in time.

 

 

[Bonehead]

Well, if mine end up looking as good as your command squad, it'll be worth it.

[The Pounder]

Thanks man, I’m sure you’ll nail it!

Edited April 10 by The Pounder

[Bonehead]

Nailing it non-confirmed.

But, I've made some decent progress. One of the horseys has served as a test model and I used up some of the mixes I made adding a little more detail on a few of the others.

First lesson learned: Mixing black with the zandri dust to pre-shade and add a darker muzzle is alright, but it would be better to add some brown to that mix. Probably quite a reddish brown. Second lesson learned: mixing reikland fleshshade with nuln oil is alright as a way to come up with a shading wash for the horse, but good old agrax is probably better on its own. Maybe diluted a little with wash medium.

It was late afternoon and the light was a bit funny, washing things out a bit, so my blending was abysmal, but I think it should be pretty easy to bring it back into spec with a little care.

Also having a bunch of reference pictures of horseys right there on a screen did help a lot:

Flash:

I'm thinking I might drybrush the mane and tail with black to get a nice effect going. We shall see. Rergardless, it's not bad for the first horsey I've ever tried to paint.

Here's the others, alongside him. The blending is more obviously bad in this shot (on the one with literally any blending at all on it):

And without flash:

I really do think the colour combination absolutely works.

 

[EmprahsStrongestGuardsman]

They turned out really nice. I like the choice of colours for the horse too.

[Bonehead]

Went to WW with a pal for a bit of food on his birthday today. Was inspired to do a little photography on one of the more swanky tables they have.

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Augustone Crusade, Mid-Period, Ardent offensive, late in the taking of Nuevo Chisinau.

Ardent, site of one of the only notable succeses of the Augustine crusade's grueling mid-period, was far from a rapid success by the standards of the early crusade. But compared to the other theatres of the crusade's long and costly mid-period, it was a lightning-fast, decisive victory. 

Ardent was in fact unusually heavily defended and took a heavy toll in lives, materiel and momentum from the crusade's late-activated and somewhat improvised tenth army. That the Red Hand leadership were prepared to expend an entire Mari armoured regiment in the earliest days of the loyalists' landing offensive -the so-called 'tolling drop'- and lose major portions of several more Kur and Mari armoured units in the subsequent campaign, speaks volumes regarding how hard the Red Hand was prepared to fight for the world.

Later intelligence analysis of the crusade records estimated that the Red Hand had possibly as few as a hundred units roughly analogous to a regular regiment during the timeline of the entire crusade, and that as little as a dozen of those may have been armoured formations. Yet the same analysis was comprehensively unable to establish any firm motive for that extraordinary expenditure of a dramatically limited resource on Ardent. No places of great heretical worship were identified and no great population base or manufactury capability were discovered anywhere on the world, though it remains in imperial hands to this date.

The only hint of a potential cause for its stubborn and costly defense has been the tenuous so-titled 'theory of unholy misadventure' put forward by the crusade's senior astropathic consultadors and withinlookmen; that the bizarre and inexplicable disappearances, displacements and ill fortune suffered on a more than merely disproportionately regular basis by tenth army forces on world were due to Ardent itself having some sort of totemic nature and reverence for the heretical cults of the Red Hand. The imperial governors continue to report such events, albeit in highly encrypted and exclusive communications to the Ordo Malleus, to this date.

Conjecture aside, it can be seen unequivocally that victory on Ardent was the last truly decisive such achievement of the mid-crusade to come without ruinous casualty figures attached, and even then it must also be concluded unequivocally that 'non-ruinous' casualties in this case translates equally accurately as 'total loss of three armoured regiments, ten infantry regiments and four artillery regiments, three independent artillery battalions, one entire divisional headquarters group and one independent military police company, the merging of three damaged regiments into other formations to replace casualties and the fatal relieving of his duties of the overal army commander by a subordinate'.

It may also be noted as the last time any of the tenth army's Yantari regiments achieved any notable form of success until the decisive final stages of the crusade. 

While the lamented 38th would not survive the initial stages of the Ardent offensive, the 8th and 14th would recieve their survivors as reinforcements and see the world all the way to compliance alongside the other regiments of the tenth army.

In these surviving pict-captures we see a reconnaissance unit of the 14th patrolling deep into Nuevo Chisinau, first presumably captured from air cover, which was at this stage of the offensive almost total.

While there is some rubble in the streets, the buildings are largely intact. The fact of the matter is that by the time tenth army forces were prepared to take the capital, the Red Hand had withdrawn all remaining regular forces and a significant proportion of the general population. The fighting that did happen was conducted exclusively on the heretical side by paramilitaries and militias and was always decided heavily in favour of the loyalists, and the low degree of armament and tactical capability that remained to these amateur forces left the loyalist forces no need to conduct artillery preparation before engagement.

It remains entirely unexplained to the present how the Red Hand were able to withdraw personnel and material to voidcraft under total loyalist air superiority and heavy in-system interdiction, but this remained the key strength of the Red Hand throughout the crusade and has never been understood.

Armour and artillery units, even some regimental subdivisions, were withdrawn for refit and retraining, and tenth army headquarters made the unusual step of announcing an official tactical doctrine for conduct of urban offensive operations. As opposed to levelling buildings with high explosive, units were issued extra flame weapons and prometheum and ordered to shoot out windows and doors and clear interiors with flame. The remaining belligerent opposition was left the unenviable dual choice of dying to las fire and stubber enfillades in the open, or flames in cover.

This final pict-capture, from the persepective of a secured building mere metres behind the front line, elegantly demonstrates the loyalist forces' total superiority in this final phase of the world's compliance. Without even infantry support, a reconnaissance unit equipped with vulnerable light vehicles nominally entirely unsuited to the rigours of urban combat, simply approaches a suspect building and prepares to jet prometheum through every available window, door and crevice.

Tenth army found urban clearance against sporadic and disorganised opposition so pitifully easy that progress was almost entirely a matter of resupply and repetition. Nuevo Chisinau's generally low-rise construction meant that the few real pockets of resistance were limited almost exclusively to those few structures that stood higher than a flamer could project burning fuel, and by the end of what may charitably called the campaign, the loyalists had made the elementary step of logic required to surround such edifices with mortar teams and pound the upper stories with light artillery while immolating the lower.

By the end of the Ardent offensive morale was as high in the tenth army as it would be until the very end of the crusade. The ad-hoc formation's generally green regiments -with the exeption of several Eblan outfits and the 48th Loxar- had faced a drastic setback that could have been a total disaster, and overcome it and achieved total success on their own merits. This boost to their self-esteem and sense of professionalism was to prove vital preparation for the coming stages of the crusade, especially for the tenth's Yantari regiments, who would, as we shall see, endure a continuous series of setbacks, misfortunes and failures as the crusade continued. Such was their poor performance that Yantari participation in the crusade in general would be reckoned not only a disgrace to the regiments concerned but to the entire world of Yantar, were it not for their spectacular redemption at the crusade's closure.

In later volumes we will discuss how the Yantari military character of dogged refusal to quit led to their later celebration and reward, but the scope of this volume is such that we will in the immediate present learn only how it prevented their total failure and ostracision.

Subsequent to the victory on Ardent, there followed the planned period of rest and refit, which we will see was the last planned stage of the tenth army's crusade to go ahead as ordained for some considerable time.

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Extract from general Haemarchus' history 'The Tenth army of the Augustine Crusade's Strange Birth, Strange Campaign and Stranger Heroes', an approved military tract valued for its insight regarding issues of high-level leadership and logistics. Haemarchus was a mid-level subordinate in tenth army's command and observed firsthand the remarkable insight and capacity of the army's commander, and the text is generally thought to contain much useful inspiration and instruction for the perceptive reader.

 

 

Edited June 20 by Bonehead

[The Pounder]

Your Rough Riders came out great!

 

They really do have some good looking boards at WW.