Work has sucked up a lot of my time lately, and so The
Grim Cheapness of the Future has suffered (as has most of my 40K
construction in general). I haven’t
given up on the Silver Towers—they will get finished--but I wanted to put
up something to keep the dust off the blog.
One thing that’s bugged me a lot in recent Codexes is the
lack of support given to older models. I
know, from a business point of view, that Games Workshop wants people to buy
all new stuff with every codex release.
Back in the olden times, though, they’d still acknowledge that people
might have older models they don’t want to get rid of, and a given Codex would
point out it’s still fine to use to use your old Tomb Spiders, Dark Eldar
warriors, or whatever happens to be in your army already.
As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, Tyranids
were my first army. I’ve only played them five times in the fourteen or so
years I’ve been playing Warhammer 40,000—and that’s using three different
codexes. Most of that’s been recent use
in the non-power armor league my friend Marcus has been running.
I’ve got one of the old metal Hive Tyrant models—the one
that has a very Aliens feel to it.
I like the new one a lot, but it was tough justifying fifty-odd bucks for
a Headquarters unit I essentially already had.
So I dug through my bitz bins and tried to come up with a way to update
my old Tyrant a bit for the league.
Also, for the record, most of the monstrous creatures in my
Tyranid army are nicknamed after Japanese movie monsters. My super-expensive Carnifex is Megalon, and my Hive Tyrant is known as Gigan.
I broke the model apart and started going over the
individual elements. The first thing,
and one of the biggest, was the legs.
The old Tyrant has small, skinny legs that aren’t much bigger than the
ones on a Tyranid Warrior. He needed to
be taller and he needed some bulk.
Taller was easy. I
just glued some plasticard on to the bottom of his feet, then clipped and filed
it until it matched his toe-hooves. This
makes the feet look bigger and more solid.
It’s only a hair over 1/16” taller, but on this scale that’s sizeable,
and it’s a subtle increase people will register but have trouble picking out.
Then I looked at making the legs a bit bulkier. Like most Tyranid players, I had tons of large
and small armor plates. I took six of
them and filed them down a bit on the inside so they’d overlap well. Then I put a thread of green stuff over Gigan’s
lower legs and put three plates on each one.
I layered them to match the thighs up above, and I think the results
were pretty nice. For the record, I had
to do the right leg twice to make the plates look right.
Looking at the new Tyrant, and the excellent picture/
diagram from the last codex, I noticed that the new model has a set of small
talons flanking each foot. They’re like
toes or something. I had a bunch of tiny
claws left from the Trygon model Marc and Gillian got me for my birthday last
year, so I glued two on each leg (superglue on the ankle, plastic glue on the
base). The ones on the new plastic model
go up and forward, but I angled mine back so they added to the sense of a
broader foot that covered more area. For
the record, I needed tweezers to get the inside ones in place.
Once I had this (and it was all drying) I looked at the
torso. The big thing for all the monstrous Tyranids these days is the back chimneys/ vents. Lucky for me, a few years back (in the glory
days when GW let you buy individual metal bits from mail order) I’d bought a few sets of the vents that
normally go on the Zoanthrope model. A
little bit of filing, some more green stuff to smooth the edges, and these
blended pretty darn well into the back of the old Tyrant.
I also wanted him to look a little more armored in the
front. I ended up doing the same green
stuff and plates trick right down the sternum (if that’s the right term for a
huge alien dino-insect). It looks, if I
may be so bold, fantastic.
Helpful Hint--If you’ve got one of the old big
bugs, I highly recommend playing around with these small armor plates. The results are amazing and they add a nice
amount of life and detail to these older models without being too distracting. I also ended up doing this same chest-line on
a pair of second-generation Carnifexes I’d set up as basic hunter-screamers and
it looks great.
Alas, it was about this point that our league began. I didn’t want to be the guy putting a
headless, armless, unpainted model on the board (we’ve all seen it happen), so
I rewrote my army list around a Tyranid Prime, which worked better for the
endless swarm theme I was doing. Anyway,
Gigan was still sitting on the project board, so I kept working on him when I
had a few free moments. Everything else here took about a month as I got to step away from work now and then.
I put the torso on the legs and used a little roll of green
stuff to straighten it out and fill in some gaps. This also added another few milimeters to
Gigan’s height. As I mentioned before,
on this scale every little bit helps.
I had leftover arms from my Carnifex, and this let me add
some new elements to the old model. I
decided to go with a pair of scything talons and the twin-linked
deathspitters. If anyone’s interested
why I can give you my reasoning, but for now just accept that’s how Gigan is
armed. I also added a few of the large
armor plates here to make him a look a little heavier (if I decide to go for
the armored shell biomorph).
Then came the head. I
had one of those nose-blades leftover from the Carnifex. A tiny bit of superglue and a hair of green
stuff for blending made it look great.
This was probably the most “take your time” part of the whole project
because it’s such a thin piece and it needs to sit perfectly. It’s Gigan’s face, which means a mistake here
will be very, very visible and will gnaw at me every time I look at the model.
I attached the head with a line of green stuff that I
flattened out to cover the neck. It gave
me a much more solid join than superglue (more contact area), and it also added
another fraction of an inch to the height.
For the record, all these fractions have really started to add up at
this point. Gigan’s almost a
quarter-inch taller than the original, unmodified model and a bit heftier, too.
I built this on one of the big 60mm bases, so there’s a lot
of space to fill up. If I don’t, his
feet are just going to look tiny on this big, open area. As a final bit of detail, I added a Hive node. Between
the old Battle for Macragge set and a few from the bitz bins, I’ve got a
bunch of these.
I also made a few extra-long tentacles from green stuff to
spread across the base. I just took
little balls of green stuff smaller than a Space Marine’s helmet and rolled
them between my fingers. Once I had
them, I gave them little curves and twists and let them dry. I figured out which way they'd sit best and then cut the tips off one end so they'd be flush against the node. A drop of superglue held each one in place
And there you have it.
A revamped Hive Tyrant using the existing model and some leftover
bitz. Definitely cheaper than dropping
fifty bucks for a brand new one.
Although the winged version does look reaaaallly cool...
Speaking of which, if you want to see a really cool
retrospective on the Hive Tyrant through Warhammer 40K history, go check out
the post Marcus just put up over at Atomic Warlords.
