Kick the tyres and light the fires

The air support is here! My Landspeeders are finished:

These are configured for heavy fire support, designed to deep strike in behind enemy vehicles and blow them away before providing fast moving support for the rest of the army. At a hundred points each a lot of people tell me that they are too expensive but consider what they put out. 4 missiles a turn creating either 4 anti-tank hits or 4 blast markers, add this to two multimelta shots and you have a great deal of firepower. Compare this to a Devastator Squad. If you want two multimeltas you will only have two missiles and for this you will pay 150 points. They also cannot move and fire, I would say that 50 points is a small price to pay to have all that firepower drop out of the sky and zoom around blowing stuff up.

Painting wise, the colour scheme is the same as my normal Blood Angels vehicles. Something that will cause raised eyebrows among Blood Angels purists is the decision to paint the crews as devastators. The studio scheme has them in the yellow of Assault marines. This has never made sense to me, this unit does not take or hold ground, does not engage in assaulting. The only vaguely assault related thing is that it moves fast. To my mind this vehicle provides fire support, regardless of its speed. Thus, Devastators. Oh, and I had already painted twenty third company assault marines but only five devastators.

Markings were added with a mixture of freehand and transfers, I tried to get an aircraft feel to the markings by adding small warning labels such as you see on fighter planes. The weathering also needed thought, rather than chips and dings I went with scratches as though from flying object damage. Dust and grime were added in streaks as though from flying through explosions and smoke. The streaks were added by dragging a sponge dampened with Graveyard Earth across the paintwork.

The missile launchers also received weathering. They are magazine loaded so they repeatedly fire, the burns from the missile exhausts have left scars on the paintwork level with the missiles.

I wanted to do something extra with the bases. The clear plastic flying base is just fine but I wanted to do something a little extra with these. The scenic parts on the bases are old, old resin componants that I just can't remember the manufacturer.

I had a lot of fun with the burned out shipping contained, layer upon layer of brown, grey and black stippling went in to creating the burned effect. The peeling paintwork was accomplished by simply rubbing a paper towel over the almost dry Tausept Ochre that I had applied over Jeffrust. Both bases were drilled and fitted with a steel pin made from nails that I dremmelled down (nails, a very cheap source of hardened steel wire for heavy pinning). The lengthy pins secure the Landspeeders nicely while allowing me to remove them if I want them to be up a building of flying over a forest or whatever.

With these finished it brings Project Blood Angels to requiring just 2 sanginary priests and 3 half painted drop pods to be finished. I also have a Death Company dreadnought assembled from left over parts of the Furioso that isn't technically part of the list but is being added for variety (and because there was a dreadnought shaped space in the figure case. No really...)

TTFN