Veteran rhinos for My alpha legion 108'th navigationary expedition

Phew 


This is a post for my Veterans rhinos, and just a quick note regarding color choices and alterations



Now something that is applicable for all my rhinos so far is that i've used Mars pattern Rhinos. Now i know that there is some confusion regarding the fact that the "40K main rhino" isn't allowed to be played /even fukken existed in the thirtieth millennium. But as a matter of fact these not only exists, but was used during the Great crusade, the only issue is that while it is an easy enough vehicle to mass-produce, it is not as wide-spread nor as commonly replicated during the Horus heresy, since Mars is in a bit of an uproar due to some Horus feller.

point in case. This is from Horus heresy extermination 

Meaning that depending on your fluff for "your guys" it might not make the most sense that they have ready access to a vehicle that is not really in production. Now for fluff reasons i'm relying heavily on the book three annotation mentioning that the AL had been in the field and actually doing undocumented work (assumed to be work that the emperor kept out of even the jaded annals of the great crusade) and as such would have had access to a lot of experimental/ not widely disseminated materials. 

Now, crunch reasons i would rather have used the Deimos pattern, as i think it looks a tad beter but also conveys the proper feeling of the HH experience. But, honestly, i had two Chaos rhinos lying around ,and i wanted to try out my scheme. 

Now for both of the rhinos so far (and planned for the upcoming ones as well) I am using Forgeworlds Pintel mounted weapons set  as well as the Alpha legion Rhino door as i think that they make even the humble mars pattern rhino look spectacular. I actually bought quite a few of the latter, as i will use the hatch on my Predators as well ,and the doors can go to Deimos rhinos in the future. 

I am also using the Alpha legion decal sheet which are, as i might have previously mentioned, simply. The shit. I will be using them to show squad= rhino markings as well as pimping the top hatches and the rear ramps. For no other reason than that i like it. 

I also tried doing some gentle sponge chipping for the first time, meaning that i took sponge blister and dipped the edge in Leadbelcher, and then gently traced areas with that. Something i quickly learned was that you want to follow natural edges (hatches, thread bottoms, doors) as it gives the best result there, and on larger surfaces it just looks splotchy. I can also say that the effect looks absolutely best on black. So IH players rejoice once more. Except....for the whole......Pricmarch thing *cough*

moving on! 

For front plates and doors I've intentionally gone for a darker color (with skipping silver and just doing black= leadbelcher= layers of clear blue) so as to get some contrast. This was actually also an experiment on my behalf, but i think it actually turned out pretty well. 

looking at the rhinos themselves 

So here i actually added a gunner for my HB sponsoon as i though it looked neat. And the VET squad itself will also have two HB, so i get a good narrative theme going immediately.  Further more this one has damage to the tracks, speaking of a shitty history in rolls....

really happy with the transfer. These look GREAT. Thanks FW- 

And here i want to document some mistakes i need to rectify. 

Looking above i want to point at the sponge chipping mistake i did. In my mind it looks pretty good at the edges and around the hatch, but looking at the smoke stack on the right, and the bottom of the same stack you can see some areas that just look like random sponging. So this is where i need to amend it.

like i was talking about the rear ramp

And on this one i simply had the sponson hatch be kept open, indicating someone coming to man the gun, or bailing from a vehicle soon to be abandon'd

So those are my rhinos so far, mainly for my vets, but i have another one for my destroyers about 50% done, and i want to get at least two more going.

Seriously, those FW gubbins are great, if you take something away from this look at them.

Hydra dominatus y'all