What I'm doing these days.

For the last month I've spent most of my free time car shopping, either researching on the computer or test driving everything from a Buick Lucerne to a Toyota RAV4 to a Honda Civic Hybrid. It would be easier if I knew what *kind of car* I wanted. Oh well.

Anyway, it occurred to me while looking at MINI Coopers, which seem to encourage you to personalize them with paint jobs, that it already comes in a color similar to Dark Angel Green. You could put the winged sword on one door, a squad number on the other door, a tactical arrow on the roof, maybe a purity seal painted on the back, and presto it would look an awful lot like a Space Marine transport.

I'd prefer to make it a Salamander transport, of course, but it just doesn't come in the right green. The Salamander chapter symbol would look great on it and you could certainly incorporate the flames which are common enough in other tricked out cars.

They don't have a pure white or you could do White Templars, but they do have Blood Red. No good Ultramarine Blue though. I had a good chuckle over this.

I really need to dig out the basement table and get back to painting....

Christmas

We will, hopefully, get the last of the Christmas stuff back in the closet this weekend, at which point my wife allows me to "get out my toys" again. (We use the same table to painting as we do for wrapping and sorting Christmas things.) So, if I remember how to hold a paint brush again, I can get back to it.

Bikes

I've got some bikes I'm trying to allocate. They began life as Storm Lord bikes so they are half red and half white. They either need to become White Templar bikes or bikes for my Salamander successors, the Emerald Lancers or whatever their name is this week.

It's easiest to paint them black and then green; not to worried about red bleeding through that. But Sallies aren't supposed to use bikes much.

:-/

New 40K Blog

I made a new 40K Space Marine Blog for my other SM army. If you'd like to peruse, click here. Currently, I'm asking for opinions on painting there too.

Two other ways to do the Termies

More paint schemes for you all to comment on.

Veteran Terminator - Orange Power Fist



Veteran Terminator - Orange on Shoulder



Or I could do both.

Or, what about an orange head? If I redid the mouth grill in black, that might look kind of neat.




I think I like that last one best. Maybe still give the sgt an orange shoulder also.

Thoughts?

Chapter markings

This is a work in progress and if you see any glaring contradictions, let me know.

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Chapter symbol: TBD after a name is chosen. Generally the left shoulder denotes chapter and function. The right shoulder denotes company and rank The right knee denotes squad..


Armor pattern: The standard pattern is feet, thighs, joints, and face plates with green in all other locations.


Company markings:
Company symbol is on the right pauldron.


Squad markings: Squad type determined by the trim on the left pauldron. Gold for HQ, Green for Tactical, Blue for Fast Attack, & Yellow for Heavy Support.
Scouts are designated by their armor style as are Terminators. Sternguard veterans in standard power armor from veteran squads have orange armor where the rest of the chapter's is green and the pauldrons have green trim. I don't know if I will keep this for the Vanguard veterans or not. I may simply paint them as normal assault marines and reverse the helmet and face plate colors. I may give all sergents orange or silver trim on their right pauldrons depending if they are veterans. I may throw a blaze of orange on the Terminators as well.


Rank markings:
Margrave - Denoted by a surcoat, banner, and gold pauldrons w/ green trim.
Captains - Denoted by surcoat, banner, and silver pauldrons w/ gold trim.
Veteran Sergents -- Orange right paudron trim
Sergeants -- Silver right pauldron trim
Privates -- Green right pauldron trim


Banner markings: Each Company has a symbol which is denoted on it's company banner. All squad banners are patterned to designate the squad type and are in the color codes for that type of unit. All squad banners have the squad number as an Arabic number on them as well. Squad banners may have other squad specific deisgns. Independent characters may have their own personal standards with a design that is up to them.


Specialist markings:
Apocatharies have white armor where the rest of the chapter is black except the face plate.
Librarians have blue
Techmarines have dark red, but this may change because it looks Christmas-like with the green.
Chaplains have all black armor, skull face plates.
Champions -- Black armor with green pauldrons with gold trim, green surcoat, and a gold head laurel

Pictures

Thanks to Bolter and Chainsword, I have some pictures of my paint scheme for people to look at. Without further ado:

Tactical Marine


Terminator


Assault Marine


Veteran

What's in a Name?

So I'm back to thinking about not being "real" Salamanders but rather being a chapter of my own invention. Partially this is because I like doing creative things like that. Partially, this is because my paint scheme is not really a Salamanders one (Think of a White Panther or Mortifactor but make it black and snot green). Partially it is because I found a neat article on Bolter and Chainsword about Do It Yourself Chapters. And partially it is because I have an idea.

So you have a Founding, let's say 23rd (because 23 is large enough to be interesting and also prime). A proto-Chapter is created and a group of about 20 Marines from another chapter sent to train up these boys and make the chapter operational. They settle on a homeworld and begin, but the homeworld is attacked before they get the Chapter operational. Chapter is involved in a desperate and losing struggle to repel the invaders during which the 20 trainers are all killed. When all seems lost, a company or two of Salamanders drop pods in and drives off the attackers, saving the planet and the proto-Chapter. The Salamanders leave 20 of their guys to finish off the proto-Chapter's training. This would be a very formative event for the Chapter and would lead them to take a lot of Salamander doctrine, similar colors, and perhaps even part of their Chapter name as they emulate their saviors. They might even consider the Salamanders as their spiritual parent chapter regardless of the actual gene-seed. I think that's an interesting backstory that explains the similar, but not identical uniforms and doctrine I tend to use.

One of my issues is gene-seed though. I can either say my seed is from the Ultramarines/White Scars/Imperial Fists and I know it. (Or, if the invaders destroyed the original Fortress Monastery I might not know who my gene-seed came from.) Thus, the original training cadre would be from that Chapter. That's not too tough.

The other option would be to have actually been seeded from Salamander stock. all we know is that the Salamanders seeded no SECOND Founding Chapters. Their seed is pure and there is NO reason not to have used it. However, we also know that NO known daughter chapters exist. We know that Salamanders have black skin and red eyes, but it is intimated that this might be environmental and thus limited to Nocturne. Certainly if any later founding Chapters exhibited these obvious physical traits then you'd KNOW they were Salamander daughters. The obvious conclusion is that the Salamander gene-seed does not AUTOMATICALLY convey the black skin and red eyes. So it is POSSIBLE to have been formed from Salamander geneseed.

Next problem: Since no one knows of any Salamander daughters, obviously if my new Chapter was a daughter, the records would have to have been lost. From our point of view, that is easy if out Fortress Monastery was destroyed, but why doesn't the Imperium have a record? More to the point, wouldn't Salamanders have been sent to train us then and wouldn't the Salamanders know? Could the politics between the Marine Chapters mean that the Ultramarines might have politicked to have have themselves train this new chapter so, unlike the Salamanders it is organized properly? If that is the case, does it stretch coincidence that the Salamanders happened to be the ones to drop pod in and save them?

None of this even touches what KIND of world the homeworld is (I like ice and snow because I think it looks good on vehicles. What kind of people live there? what has the Chapter done post being made operational. Etc.

Thoughts anyone?

Model Painting

When you first see some of the really well painted minis in White Dwarf or other magazines, it's kind of inspiring. Then you go home and do some painting and you think you're really doing well because you can stay within the lines, you use highlighting, you use shading, you use washing and inks, and you even paint your flock and put in grass. All on stock GW figures.

Then you see some of the armies that people have put together on the web with Eldar crossing lakes of lava, Necrons climbing small hills, or a Space Marine with his foot atop a fallen foe; where the lowliest trooper is painted far better than your best character model, and you just get depressed. How do you even posed a Space Marine's leg anyway? When I try it looks unnatural or I ruin the model.

Speed, the lifeblood of any army

Prior to the invention of the battleship in the late 19th century, naval combat was decided at short ranges by boarding. A British visionary, Adm. Jackie Fisher, changed that by building H.M.S. Dreadnought, one of the few ships that could be said to have changed everything in an instant. She was an "all big gun" ship, meaning she had pretty much only large guns to fight other ships with and they could all lob a shell quite a long way. Her invention led to a drastic change in naval tactics. Where before gun crews trained for ranges of about 2000 yards, they now had to train for 15,000 yards and be able to hit the target. Dreadnought was also armored to be able to duel with another ship throwing shells as big as she herself carried.

For all of the above obvious features of Dreadnought, one thing that is usually a second mention in discussing H.M.S. Dreadnought is the fact that she was driven by a steam turbine. Why? Because that was the only way to make her fast enough in Fisher's eyes. Why did this floating citadel need speed? Therein lies the point of this post.

Speed, as Fisher pointed out, allowed a ship to set the range of the engagement, by which he meant, absent an objective that needed to be defended tying the ships in place, the faster ship would always be the one to choose the range at which a naval battle was to be fought. If the faster ship wanted a long range duel, then it could successfully sail away when the enemy closed, thus keeping open the range. If it wanted to fight a close action, it could close and the enemy could not escape. For Dreadnought, this meant that she could stand off an enemy ship and fight at the ranges she was trained at rather than allow the enemy to close to the ranges the enemy was trained at. Likewise, it also meant that enemies could not simply avoid Dreadnought by sailing away from her.

In Warhammer 40K, we play on a table, usually 4' x 6' or 4' x 8', which means we don't have the unlimited free movement provided by an expanse of open sea. However, some of Fisher's principles still apply; the faster army can do a lot to choose the engagement range. If the faster army is shooty, it can do a lot to stay away from the enemy and allow the maximum amount of shooting for as long as possible. Tau do this. If the army is built around the assault, then it benefits from being able to close on the enemy and catch up as fast as possible. Blood Angels do this (or at least used to with their vehicle turbo boosts). Because the board is finite, you cannot employ speed completely -- Imagine what it would be like if your shooty army could keep retreating and firing as it goes for oh, say, 24 feet before the assault elements could finally come to grips with it. (Likewise a bigger board would reward a faster army because you would have room to really develop a flanking maneuver and string out a slower enemy which just can't happen on a normal sized board.) Still, even with the limits of the board in mind, it seems to me that speed is one of the most decisive factors in an army, every bit as important as armor or weapons.

All of the above said, because of the limitations imposed by the board, VOLUME of fire becomes a huge issue as well. Since you can't move as much, you need to make it hurt more that you can move.

Comments?