My Tank! Has a Great Big Gun

WARNING - if you lovingly customised a Games Workshop Leman Russ model with tons of extra guns, detailing and crew, painted it in a wicked arctic camoflage scheme and if you just sold it yesterday on the Britcon '11 Bring & Buy stand, then you may not want to read the following post in which I describe hacking it to pieces and soaking it in paint stripper...oops too late.

Seriously it was a thing of great hideousness, the sort of thing that you know someone poured their heart and soul into creating...

..

Anyway I hacked all that gubbins right off, twisted the turret off and tried removing all the other guns. For those who haven't seen one, a Leman Russ is based on a WWI style "rhomboid" tank chassis, with two wing sponsons, a forward hull-mounted gun and a turret mounted heavy cannon. I'd picked up two of these at Britcon with slightly different weapons mixes. I want to remove as much of the 40K stylings as possible, which includes recognisable weapons like the sponson-mounted heavy bolters. Although it was quite easy to force off the sponsons and crack them open enough to remove the weapons, unfortunately whoever assembled the arctic monstrosity glued his sponson guns in, instead of leaving them to pivot freely, which is going to make removing them problematic.

I've got an idea of what I'm going to do with these - build up a boiler assembly at the rear, replace the wing sponson weapons with scratchbuilt gatling-type guns similar to the ones I did for the Gun Trucks, and replace the too-modern looking turrets with something big, riveted and clunky, either scratchbuilt or possibly just use the Scrap Tank turret from Ramshackle. I'm not sure which force these are going to see service with - the rhomboid design suggests British, but they're already well catered for with the four Atlantis "Spanner" tanks. They're too advanced for the Fenians and I still like the idea of the Russians using mainly wheeled vehicles. The Evil Genius forces will have all the Grendel Dwarven Steamtanks and these Leman Russ's will fit quite nicely with them, but I've still got a hankering to add them to the Imperial German forces to complement the slightly disappointing not-A7Vs from Ironclad. For now though they're just wallowing in baths of Dettol to try to get rid of the existing paintwork.

Apart from that, today was mainly spent painting 1/72 plastic modern insurgents with Jonesy, mi hermano moderno. We're going to be visiting an old wargaming friend of his next weekend and having a go at Force on Force. Having gotten used to working on 28mm figs over the last couple of months I found the slightly smaller scale figures a little hard to adapt to. Hopefully the Army Painter Quickshade will work its magic and they won't look too bad on the table.