++++INLOADING DATAFILE 090++++ Castellax Battle-Automata Maniples WIP 1.0

So a lot of things have been going on over the last few weeks, hence the slow rate of posts.  I've been playing a lot of X-wing, there was the regional championship tournament for New England (I came in 46th) as well as at least 5 other tournaments I've attended in the last month, so that took up most of my hobby time.  I also spent some time painting my Chaos Renegades, batch painting 200+ infantry is a chore but its progressing.

Work has picked up nicely of late as well, which helps relieve financial stresses, and I have my annual training exercise starting tomorrow for the Army National Guard that I've had to prepare for.  On top of all of that yesterday I received my acceptance letter for Grad School, which is extremely exciting.  I actually had a hard time sleeping last night as my mind was alight, so I decided to finish assembling the Castellax Battle-Automata kits I picked up a few months ago.

Here are the 5 normal Castellax I've built.  There are a lot of minor touch ups to fix casting errors and to mark them out as Dark Mechanicum engines, but they are pretty much done otherwise.  This is a very interesting kit to work with, and very challenging as well to pose well.  You can do great dynamic poses, but it takes a lot of work to do.

++++INLOADING DATAFILE 076++++ Vorax Class Battle Automata Completed

It's done, and if you liked this fellow from my last post, let me introduce you to your one true love!

++++INLOADING DATAFILE 075++++ Vorax Class Battle Automata WIP 2

It's been a while since I have touched this model, but last weekend I finally played a game with my Dark Mechanicum army, using the rules for the Legio Cybernetica from the Horus Heresy series. I only had about 800 points and hilariously my one battle robot gained sentience and turned on me as the first roll of the game.

The previous iteration of this guy was too small compared with the Forgeworld kit, and it really did not stand up to my standards, so I broke it apart and kept only what I liked from the original attempt.

++++INLOADING DATAFILE 042++++ Vorax Class Battle Automata conversion

This is a test model for my Dark Mechanicum Battle Maniple. I wanted to use Centurions as a base to create variants of Thallax Battle Armor that was both more heavily armed and armored.



I quickly found though that there were a number of problems with this concept. The first of course being that the Centurion kit is substantially larger then a Thallax. Also none of the weapon options that I was able to find for any Thallax variant seemed to suit the design that I was working towards. So after working on it for a week I decided to utilize it as a Vorax class battle automata instead.



Stage 1:



Here you can see the original concept, which is not dissimilar to the base Centurion kit. I used two of the weapons to create the shoulder mounted cannon. The bubble where the head goes was originally planned to be a glass head similar to what a Thallax has but later was turned into the thorax armor for the battle robot.