Ork Battlewagon 1

With the last of my Fantasy tournaments for the summer over with, it’s time to change focus to my Orks again. I have some dethkoptas and a battlewagon to finish. I’m prioritizing the battlewagon for a couple reasons:

1. If it goes no further than it is right now, it isn’t playable. The dethkoptas are playable, and look mostly done.
2. For some reason I’ve constructed a barrier of fear around the dethkoptas. I really don’t want to paint them anymore.
3. Battlewagon == AWESOME.

With that decision made, we pick up the project where I last left it – mostly assembled.

The Dilemma

Most of my trukks are Space Marine Rhinos that have been caved in, sawed in half, guns glued on randomly, etc. It’s a lot of fun. However, for this model I won a Battlewagon model and so wanted to use it instead of the Land Raider that I would have used otherwise.

I started to assemble it a couple months ago. I was amazed at the quality of the construction. Everything fit together perfectly. The instructions were complete and useful. The model was beautiful. It was a work of a divine being, and not the Games Workshop that I’ve come to know and love.

Which left me with an issue – how can you cut/carve/slice/scratch the work of the divine?! I didn’t want to convert it. I wanted to put it together in its pristine beauty and leave it for all the world to admire.

But…that would go against my theme. I asked a bunch of my gaming friends what I should do, and none of them could truely understand the nature of my problem – they all said (paraphrasing) “carve it up!” They thought I was asking for conversion advice, and not looking for permission to leave it as it was “no, it’s ok Craig, you don’t have to follow your theme this time…my that’s a beautiful tank you have there.”

The Solution

Time. I left it for a month. It’s still a brilliant model, but I don’t feel so bad about slicing it up. woot! Lets get cutting!

The primary conversion on this thing was to take a hack saw and slice a Rhino into 2/3rds, then glue it where the cab of the Battlewagon usually sits. For this stage, everything else is stock Battlewagon.

The Next Steps

1. Figure out where to place a couple guns. The stock tank has gun turrets on top of the cab, but that won’t work out perfectly anymore.
2. Figure out how to attach the deffrolla. Yeah, this bad boy needs a rolling pin.
3. Decide what options I’m going to give it standard, and provide magnet attachment points for those. Think about future options and see if I can’t provide attachment points for those as well. This is hard, since it requires reading the future and I’m not so awesome at that.
4. Orkify the cab.
5. See if the Animosity Orks will fit in the trunk. gwahaha.