Wednesday 28 November 2012

Steel Legion Bomber - Imperial Hell Talon

Just came across the Spikey bits website contest called “Holiday Shopping Spree Conversion Contest.” You can check out their facebook photo album here for all the entries. Not sure if I will make it, but I thought I would give it a go!

http://blog.spikeybits.com/2012/11/win-one-of-five-holiday-shopping-sprees.html


Anyway the contest is looking for something original in a form of a 40k vehicle. Sweet! I have just the thing! I have decided to enter my scratch built Imperial Hell Talon which I made a couple of years ago for an apocalypse tournament in a local gaming club.

At that time my team mates and I decided that air superiority is essential to our battle plans (this is before GW released the plastic valkyries ), so I went about looking for options to build some flyers. Flipping through the Forgeworld armour books I came across the Chaos Hell Talons flyer. I have always wondered why the Imperial Navy never have something of a medium fighter plane. So my answer; build an imperial mid fighter.
Maybe it’s an experimental flyer originally developed in a certain forgeworld planet captured by chaos forces and then reversed engineered and became the Chaos Hell Talons as they are today in the world of 40k? Who knows…


The Design: Ever since watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, I grew a certain fondness to the experimental Luftwaffe “flying wing” in the movie. Though fictional of course, I realized later the “flying wing” design is probably based on a real “flying wing” called the Horten V developed by the Luftwaffe in WW2. And since my forces are already looking like the WW2 german army, it’s a no brain-er for me to adopt this type of aesthetics to compliment my steel legion force.

Using the Horten V as my inspiration, I build a larger then usual Imperial Navy Thunderbolt hull and then designed large wings on both sides by hand until I get the shape that I am happy with. If you must know, the main hull and wings of the project is built from cardboard (cereal box and foam board)



I then glue some turbines from the space marine drop pods to the front to act as air intakes and trusters to the rear from the space marine landspeeder which are glued to some reticulation bits from the garden. The engines pipes were made from cutting bending straws (Those are always cool for scratch built projects, as it gives you that industrial look). Finally, I added the weapons from the imperial guard heavy weapons spru, base coat in chaos black and it's ready for paint. 


During the duration of the project I actually built 3 in tandem and came up with an apocalypse formation datasheet. Here is a shot from the tournament of the flyers in action.


As always, good luck in your scratch building
Capt. Stainguard 



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