RC Bodies - first steps

I've now done a couple of lexan bodies for  remote controlled electric cars, for three chassis a colleague of mine uses.

Lexan bodies are different to work with than anything I previously hit with my airbrush. Firstly, they are painted from the inside which also means that one has to very carefully plan colours for each part of the body and take even more care to mask anything that isn't supposed to be hit with the current colour.

My first attempt was made on a big 1:10 chassis, which came supplied with window masks, which is a great convenience indeed. My buddy wanted the body white with yellow mirrors. All other paint would be stickers.

I used the supplied masks and Fascolor paint for this. This paint gave me a spot of trouble, since it didn't seem to be impressed with my airbrush cleaner at all, I had to flush the paint mechanically, with Q-tips and valliant use of the destilled water squeeze bottle. I realise that there will be a cleaner and thinner for this stuff, but I've stayed clear of it for now for this reason.

The result was good though, even after shoe goo was used to reinforce the bodies edges and stickers were applied, the body weighted in lighter than another one done with rattle cans.

Next was a cheap 1:12 body, with the request to hit it with "any colour", which I understood as green light for an extra manly paint scheme. This is quick and dirty over night with rally stripes masked with blue tape.

Following the purchase of a new chassis called X-Ray, my colleague wanted a red and white paintjob with some chevron style borders. I tried to mask these borders with tape and regretted this when I discovered some bleeding paint. :/ 

 

This was rather deftly fixed by my colleague with strategic use of the supplied decal stickers. =]

For the second X-Ray body I was supposed to follow the Team Force India scheme. This was the first time using liquid mask for me. This worked great, no question, but is also a skill to improve where small details matter. Unfortunately I messed up one of the colours in this body. The red was supposed to be orange, but I used a non-opaque neon yellow instead of an opaque yellow and ended up with basically just red parts. Since I'm unable to properly see red and green colours and failed to do a mix test and proper dry comparison... it's red. Ah well. The clear and neat separation of the green, white, red and black areas does look nice.

The previous results must have been sufficiently good to make some more bodies come my way. Six 1:12 bodies reached my desk. My first step here was to apply liquid mask to all of them. I bought finer markers, since the one I had were not fine enough to define a line for the exacto knife. The design is marked from the outside on the clear foil which protects the body from accidental overspray.

I got creative, admittedly with the use of Google Image Search for inspiration, and ended up with the following results.

 

My takeaway from this batch is that it is a good idea to separate colours with black lines. :)

Battle Report: Vraks Unending Host + Renegades vs Orks 3000 Points

This game was meant to be another test of new or unfamiliar units, both for my opponent and for me. We agreed on a game size of 3000 points and a random maelstrom mission. The Ork force was spread across two CADs. I apologize for not having a proper force list, but here is a line-up snapshot:

The orc force included: a unit of meganobs and a unit of nobs, both lavishly kitted, boys, commandos, lootas, burnas, a bunch of killa-cans, a def-dread, one of the new big walkers, grot artillery with a bubble-gun, a snotzoga with grots, some grots with herder, two trucks, a tank and a dakka-jet.

Since the last game, I primed all models black and applied Vallejo Primer desert tan very lightly with a low angle and heavy as a zenital highlight, resulting in getting a start on getting the lot painted.

On my side, I played the same 1500 points Vraks Unending Host list in the previous battle-report and tacked on an contingent of regular Renegades based on IA13.

The addon list is using a blood-handed reaver demagogue with a nurgle covenant, since I wanted to try grenandiers (as shown in the picture above) and a bunch of plague zombies as troops - having a boatload of infantry platoons on the other half of the list. I wanted to try some tanks and a valkyrie. I brought  two vanilla Leman Russ with battle-cannons, lascannons and heavy bolter sponsons, a Leman Russ Punisher with heavy bolters and a stubber, a Executioner with plasma sponsons as well as two hellhounds.

We played mission 4, the orks the deployment/initiative roll-off.

Turn 1.1
The orks advanced - shocker! - pushing forward as far as possible and blew up a hell-hound!

Turn 1.2
The heretics blew up the mega-nob trucks and fired the executioner at the lot, which promptly got hot, and lost a hull point. The remaining hell-hound fired it's cannon into the ork artillery hiding in ruins - without much effect thanks to without much effect since DS4 didn't impress the carriages 3+ too much.

Turn 2.1

Turn 2.2

Turn 3.1

Turn 3.2

Battle Report: Vraks Unending Host vs CSM 1500 pts

This game was intended as a test of the second edition of the Imperial Armour Vraks battle-forged detachment "Vraks Unending Host" from my side, and testing some CSM HQs by my opponent, who usually plays Khorne Deamonkin.

My List consisted of four troup units of renegade infantry with three 20 man squads each. I swapped five gits per unit for a chaos sigil carrier and two heavy weapon teams each. This left me with 4x2 lascannons, 4x2 autocannons and 3x2 rocket launchers and 192 T3 infantry without armour but with flashlights. Three sentinels with heavy flamers did away with the points otherwise needed to buy each git a 6+ armor save, I did spent the points for militia training though. As my one heavy support choice I picked 4 quad-launchers with three crewmen each.

Knowing a week ahead what I'd be doing (since I didn't want to play something this unorthodox as a surprise), my opponent brought Fabius Guile, Arkos the Faithless, four bikers, one eight and one ten man squad (with the ten man squad being Fabius-buffed), twenty cultists, autocannon havocs, a mauler fiend, a Sicaran with heavy bolter sponsons and a lone baleflamer helldrake.

The shared idea was to have a giggle. Right on!

We diced off the random stuff, got maelstrom mission one. My opponent set up the terrain, I won the first player turn.

After setting up I discovered quickly that I deployed my lascannon units wrong, since they caused a traffic jam of units that couldn't run forward properly due to this. The Quad-Launchers killed all but one of the cultist units thanks to a lucky roll of the scatter die.

My opponent advanced, with the mauler fiend taking the first volley of fire and being wrecked in the second round. My quad launchers took out all the autocannon havocs, leaving the aspiring champion alone. My sentinels got blown up, all but one. I failed the roll for the return of the first completely wiped out infantry unit. HA!

The Chaos Space Marines then got into melee and slashed through quite a few units like a hot knife through butter.

After that can of woop-ass was cracked open, I had five units eligible for respawning on 2+. I made all those rolls and brought the units back from the flanks. That's a hundred wounds bouncing back! However, since those models moved, that means neither assaults nor as accurate shooting as BS 3 permits. A mistake, since I forgot to take my maelstrom cards into account, I could have not rolled for at least one of them to bring it over my table edge and seized an objective.

After turn five, I was behind on points and would have clearly lost the game had the dice ended it there. In turn six, the units that respawned in the previous turn were firing at full ballistic skill and wiped out the remaining CSM units.

While the movement phase took a bit longer (doh!), skipping the psychic phase and being done quite quickly with shooting meant that game progressed nicely.

The quad launchers played out significantly above average, wiping out cultists and havocs down to one dude each and blasting another marine unit to smithereens. My opponent also taught me the proper way to do multiple barrages, I had the hit mark wrong. Being able to cut down on scatter with hit blasts really helps.

The chaos sigils are worth much more than their point cost (3 base for the guy +5) and also worth more than the opportunity cost of special weapons. Being able to reroll failed tests is a great help with 4+D6 random leadership.

Overall this was a fun game, playing markedly different from what I'm used to. The list definitely has potential for entertainment. Motivated by this, I primed all the infantry models black and gave them a zenital highlight of desert tan on the following weekend and wrote this report. Right on!