The Beard Bunker

In mid-2021 I ran face first into a metaphorical brick wall of demotivating architecture. I was never happy with either the look or the efficiency of my original paint job on the Sanctum Administratus , and stalled badly on getting enough of it done to make it a truly useful addition to my terrain collection as a whole, and consequently my modular urban board project in particular. The whole thing rattled to a halt. The original paint job: both too rusty and too clean. Some time later, the Fronteris terrain range came out, and the fast method I developed for painting that stuff was a joy. In the last few months, keen to clear out lingering work-in-progress projects, my eye settled on the stupid, half-finished modular ruin I'd built from 3 sanctum administratus kits. That was a lot of investment sunk into something that wasn't finished enough to be useful (I'd only ever fully painted the intact sections, so it was essentially just a giant urban hill rather than something yo

“What's this?” Sirrus Bizniz asked the nervous-looking mek. Of course, Sirrus knew perfectly well what it was: it was a battlewagon. A big pile of armour on wheels and tracks, designed to transport orks too wimpy for a traditional charge. Sirrus liked his enemies to see him coming. He liked seeing the fear in their eyes as he got closer. The question was not what the battlewagon was, the question was how the mek would try and sell him on an idea that didn't mesh with his Klassik Goff vision for the Metalwaaagh. “Tour bus,” said Zibbitt. This was, to be fair, a pretty strong opening. “Just for transport between battles. We made it big and tough to show that you is the boss.” This was clearly rehearsed. Bignooz had put Zibbitt up to this in case it didn't go down well. It was satisfyingly chunky, and the black paint job was pretty dread, but it felt wrong to see something so big look so toothless. “Needs dakka,” Sirrus said eventually. Zibbitt’s brows furrowed. “You want to

When writing the article about the Invictor warsuit I realised I was getting way off on a tangent about weapons on modern 40k vehicles.  So much so that I realised, you know what?  I have a lot to say on that topic alone. Older readers may recall a time when a vehicle had a listed number of crew, and you could only fire as many weapons as you had crew to fire them.  They also had vehicle damage tables and some of the results involved crew getting killed, so you might need to shuffle the crew around to ensure that the most important weapons were crewed.  So if a vehicle had more guns then crew, either by design or by accident, you had to make tactical choices.  Fun stuff.   These days that level of detail has long since gone the way of the Dodo (for good reasons), along with fire arcs, blast markers, damage table etc.; but with it gone, GW has slowly been increasing the number of guns on its vehicle models.  As such, I’m going to take a look at a bunch of modern(ish) GW vehicles (either

Greetings my lovely bunker dwellers! I promised last time that I'd be back with more tales of the Kessarine 4th Armoured Brigade. Today it's the turn of the officer corps of C-company to be in the spotlight, and because they're the real story makers of the Kessarine we're going to be getting into some more lore courtesy of the opinions of the fine and upstanding Commissar Dravland . I'll split each bit of the post into two sections, one painting and modelling and the other lore. To make it nice and easy to find the bits you want I'll do Dravland's thoughts in itallics.  Given that there is no option to just have an individual non-Cadian officer any more (and with some daftness on thou shalt not duplicate weapons [heavy sigh and eyeroll]) I needed to work up some command squads. Fortunately, as mentioned last time, Anvil Industries provided some useful bits and a trawl of the bits sites gave me some nice medic and vox bits, behold: I love that Cadian master

 Stupid Tom, doesn't he know it’s a warsuit not a dreadnought?  No shit Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Cluseau.  But Warhammer is all about making it yours, so I made it mine. Why Ok, so, first up, in my mind there is a difference between a Walker, and a Mech.  So for the sake of today’s article I’m going to define a walker as a vehicle with legs, but those legs are basically autonomous and the pilot just pushed the joystick to whatever to “go forwards” and the vehicle automatically makes the legs do whatever they need to do to achieve that.  The Imperial Guard Sentinel is a classic Walker, but also maybe the Aeldari War Walker and the Mechanicus Ironstrider.  Think of it kind of like riding a horse, you have the reins and give directions, but the horse decides where to put its feet. On the other hand, a Mech is, for my purposes at least, a machine that allows a person to directly control a large mechanical body.  This can be via control machinery that reads the pilots limb movements a

It's been a minute since I had a good old hobby hangout. Just sitting around a table with a few friends, talking and painting the afternoon away. It's a very civilised way to spend time.* Being in between projects, I cast about for something to do that I could both start and finish in one day; particularly something that I might not otherwise get around to. And then I remembered: I've got that Warhammer Plus Vindicare Assassin sitting primed in the cabinet. What's his name... Googles ... ah yes, Operative Umbral-Six. I'd only built him to see if his pose still worked when he's removed from his giant hero rock statue. The thing is, once a mini has been started, it takes up space in my brain until it's finished. And I built this spandexy boy over eighteen months ago. I couldn't imagine using him regularly, so he'd never made it to the front of the painting queue. As single afternoon projects go, he's perfect. Not over-detailed, not too many differ

After too long an absence dear bunker dwellers, I return and bring with me the proud sons and daughters of fair Kessarine! Way back in October I introduced my latest venture with the first warriors from the sands. Well, since then I've not been idle... I've just not been blogging. So today we'll meet the rest of C-Company and soon their officer corps with a bit more delicious Kessarine lore. These three squads bring C-Company to five squads split across its two platoons. In the fullness of time there'll be a sixth squad to fill up the battleline thing and to have two platoons of 30 which will feel nicely satisfying. We also see the first non-missile launcher amongst their number, a relic of lost lamented veteran squad accuracy. But it does mean it's an excellent opportunity to talk heavy weapons because if you want to use third party minis you're going to have to figure those out. Lets start with the easiest, the mortars are an easy squad to make. Just use lasg