Land Raider Ares, part 1

Oh look, The Limey's NOT dead!

I've been interrupted by Waaagh! Jamie, which was 4000 point Adepticon Team Tournament effort by three friends and I.  That was good times, and my six year old is beside himself that he now has 4000 points of painted Orks. Yeah!

I've been drooling over this project for a while, and doing a lot of thinking but I think there was not a whole lot of doing.  I finally got the two main Land Raider Crusaders finished, which has been the impetus I need to at least get this bad boy built. Oh yes, here's a picture of a Land Raider Crusader for my army.

As usual, based in the Orkhide Shade foundation (I have managed to hoard ten jars of it, and I'm looking for more).  The panels are painted in, as with the Damocles Rhino, in Deneb Stone - which I am also hoarding or my Deathwing just won't look right, dammit!

The Land Raider Ares is quite the tank.  A 300 point AV 14 Vindicator with twin linked heavy flamer sponsons.  Yeah! Here is one.  You'll obviously see the inspiration for my vehicles colour scheme. Here is the actual datasheet for the unit

I wasn't impressed by the use of the old Baal Predator heavy flamers on the example on the datasheet.  SO - I figured I would use the flamestorm cannons from the Crusader kit and twin link them.  On the Redeemer, it has a flamer cannon on one side of the sponson, and the prometheum tank on the other.  I cut half of the back piece off - the tank portion - from both sides, and glued the cable bits together.  "SO WHERE DOES THE PROMETHEUM COME FROM?!" I hear you ask.  It's magic.  I mean - where are the magazines for the Hurricane Bolters, hm?  I have prometeum tanks made, I think I'll just have to figure out how to mount the tanks, and what to use to get the fuel from the tanks to the cannons.  For now:

As you can see, the linkage for the back is quite simple.  As they're just heavy flamers, and I don't want to be accused of modelling for advantage, I may shorten the heavy flamer barrels by cutting out the portion between the body and the end bit. If anyone has any thoughts on this I'd appreciate them :)

It goes together quite nicely.  Sorry about the picture quality - my phone isn't THAT great and it's too much hassle to drag out the light box and the fancy camera for workbench photos. Click on the photos for larger versions in a new window.

The exhaust fans for the Demolisher cannon have to be present on the model, of course.  I had a dilemma as to where to place them.  GW's article about the construction of the Ares seems to have vanished, so I couldn't get a top-down view of the one on the datasheet.  Here is where I started.  I just whittled away at the corder of that raised portion.

I wanted to have it sitting on the top, seperate from the engine exhaust grille but I couldn't decide on where and how much I wanted to cut away, and I was also worried about messing it up and having to order another lid from a bitz provider.  Just cutting the corner away as you can see allowed me to fit it into a spot that would look "correct".  It doesn't look THAT correct as one of the fans is over the track, but we'll put it down to some inventive duct work on the STC.

I needed to create support for the exhaust fan plate, and block off the annoying gap it would create, so there was some inventive use of plasticard and liquid green stuff.  The liquid green stuff also was used to fill the gap between the exhaust plate and the raised portion on the body. 

Next posting: Widening the dozer blade!