For the last few weeks I have been activated for natural disaster relief by the Massachusetts Army National Guard, hence the lack of posts. Here is one to hold you guys over for a few days until I SHOULD be released. There may be more snow coming unfortunately, so we will see what happens.
So I decided to change the Hellblade Interceptor I was working on into a Helltalon Fighter Bomber. It was mostly a matter of the model turning out to be about 30% larger than the Forge World Hellblade fighter, but I also really want to try out the Helltalon's rules as they seem fun.
The weapons were pretty simple to figure out. The Helltalon comes with a Twin-Linked Lascannon, 8 bombs, and your choice of either a Reaper Autocannon or Havoc Launcher. As I usually rely on my aircraft to engage enemy vehicles I went with the Reaper Autocannon. This was simple to do as I had some spare parts left over from a Chaos Defiler. After looking the model over there was an obvious visual space for weapon mounts in front of the cockpit and above the engine intake.
I settled on how to configure the weapons mounts quickly but there was a snag with the lascannons; most lascannon bits are quite bulky, so fitting two of them stacked on top of each other didn't work with the majority of the bits I tried. The lascannons from a Storm Raven were the corret size, but they have a "right-left" orientation which would have made it tough to mount them vertically the way I wanted. The solution was quite easy as it turned out, deep within my bitz box I found a single ancient lacannon from the original 1980s Predator Tank kit. It was the right size and looked adequately high tech, so I chopped it in half and used it to make the "techno bits" for the Lascannon and added some parts from a Stormtalon and the classic chaos upgrades kit. I thought they looked cooler mounted upside down.
Next up was the engine. After some brainstorming I decided to use a spare Thunderfire Cannon I've had lying around for a while as the base.
After chopping the 'cannon' off I built the rest of main engine to resemble the engines in the actual Hellblade/Helltalon kits. Parts used were the abdomen to a Contemptor Dreadnought, again a very random bits box moment, and part of a Valkyrie thruster. Some plasticard for the 'rudder blades' and it looks ok.
Some greenstuff helped unify the engine together. I intend to add a bunch of tubes and wires for the next step, otherwise I'm pretty satisfied with this part of the model.
From here I took some time to fill in the amy gaps in the cardwork on the top of the fuselage. It looks much better with this done. I also added another layer of card to the front of the blade wings as well as some thruster vents from Dragonforge Miniatures. One thing which has bugged me for a while with some of the 'space fighters' in 40k is the lack of maneuvering thrusters on them, which are kind of important for space dogfighting.
Here is a shot from the side. You can see how I started to use the missile pods from a Stormraven to make the bombpods for the Helltalon. It's ok, but I think I will change this to a hard point under slung method using the badass hunter killer missiles from a Sentinal Kit, I have 8 of those I think. You can also see that I've started to extend the wings backwards to achieve the correct look for the Helltalon.
Lastly you can see the tubes I added to make the extra thrusters, again based off of the Forgeworld kits. More details will get added to these later.
Ok that is where the model stands right now, let me know what you guys think and if you have any recommendations on ways to improve it.
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