Warhound update - top half only

Greetings everybody! Having reached a natural pause point on this project I thought it was time to share progress with the warhound with you all:

The arms, torso and head are all together now - heavily pinned in the case of the arms! - and the fiddly cabling is in place. A word of warning folks, the "instructions" in the warhound assembly are outdated. The cabling is needed in two places (the head and arms) and isn't rubber like in the instructions. It takes forever to bend them into place using hot water and you do have to cut them to length.

The colour schemes for both warhounds are from one of the Imperial Armour books and represent a specific pair of warhounds:

This one is Pyladii Alpha. The carapace scheme isn't completely there, I need to fiddle with the flames a little more and the starburst motief of the Warp Runners needs a little more work.

The big ol' plasma blastgun left me scratching my head for a little while. See, those coils around the barrel can only be for magnetic containment of the plasma. Normally I paint them copper in smaller guns but this big 'un wouldn't look right then. You can't scale up wires from little to big and have them work properly - it's a resistance thing - but there they were, all big and wirey. Then a brainwave hit, what if they were armoured glass pipes carrying ferrofluids (magnetically charged iron filings in suspension)? That satisfied the need for realism I crave and looked nifty too. You can also see from this view that I glazed the head windows with plastic sheeting and a couple of layers of water effects.

Next will be the legs, need to be careful with them as the weight balance of the assembled torso is ahead of the waist socket. Thus I'll have to assemble them to resist a forward roll while keeping the "prowling" feel that all good warhounds should have! Until next time folks.

TTFN