SkullHamma Upgrades

Some of you who’ve been following this for a while may remember my SkullHamma.  It was one of the first models I ever talked about here, and I still enjoy taking it out to do some damage.

In a recent Apocalypse game, though, I came to realize the SkullHamma wasn’t doing enough damage.  On reflection, I realized it needed to embody one of the basic tenets of Orky war tactics, that tenet being “Moar Shooty!”  And, as luck would have it, I’d kind of planned for this way back when.

Y’see, back when I first assembled the SkullHamma, I put a rare earth magnet in the hull.  It's along the port side, right behind the big shoota turret.  I knew at some point I’d want to give the tank a lot of “rokkit” options, I was just waiting for the right idea to strike.  And it finally did.

  

I found a scrap of plasticard and cut a piece 1/2” x  1 1/2”.  This was going to be my base.  I used two mortars from the Imperial Guard heavy weapons team for “arms” to support the missile array.  With the aquilla filed off, they can pass for pistons, easy.  They went at either end of the rectangle. 

Helpful Hint—I used a piece of plastic trough I had to make sure the two arms were parallel, but anything flat would work.  Just make sure it sits flush to both pieces.

Once I had the pistons even, I glued the piece of trough in place.  Because I could get it from two sides, it made this piece rock-solid.  Then I dug up another rare earth magnet and checked placement against the one in the hull.   Once I knew were to make this sit I used a drop of superglue (just a drop—see below) and glued the magnet in place.

Helpful Hint—Take a moment before gluing to double and triple check that you’ve got the magnet the right way .  Nothing worse than having your two components repel each other.  Very limiting on the battlefield.

Once the magnet was in place, I dug around and found a little “box” piece from the old Rhino sets. I needed to scrape the inside walls just a bit with my hobby knife, but once I did it fit right over the magnet.  I glued it down and that gave the base a bit more of a mechanical/manufactured look.  I didn’t want it to stick out, visually, when it was mounted on the SkullHamma.  I added a few small scraps of plasticard onto the base, too, to look like extra struts and straps.  I’ll also take a moment here to apologize for all the blindingly white plastic.  It doesn’t always make for great follow-along photos.

Next I took a small leftover piece of plastic girder—about 2 3/4” long—and added it on.  I’ve had this little fragment for years, just waiting for something, and it struck me that it would work very well for this.  It also helped with the “building up) aspect, making a believably large missile gantry on top of a smaller base.  Also, as the picture shows, this makes the piece officially top heavy and off-centered, so from here on in I had to lay it down to dry. 

Next... supa-rokkits.  The Skullhamma can take up to three  I had two leftover Stompa rokkits, but I also played with putting a big, almost comical collection of different hunter-killer missiles on here (maybe eight or nine of them), giving them Orky paint jobs, and letting it be a counts-as.  But the Stompa ones are so much larger it really had to be one or the other.  At least, until I remembered that old Imperial HK missile came with a slightly larger housing sleeve-launcher.  Scrape the aquilla off that and it made a nice addition to the Stompa rokkits on this framework.

I still may use the counts-as idea for something else though.  I do love the idea of an Ork vehicle with a very Warner Brothers-esque arsenal.

Helpful Hint—It’s a little silly to write this out but... remember that rare earth magnets don’t have infinite power.  They get talked up a lot, but at the end of the day they only can hold so much weight.  And you need to take leverage into account, too.  They’re not going to hold up everything, especially if the missiles are reaching too far out to the side.  Note that this assembly goes up more than out.

And that was pretty much it.  More shooty to unleash at the Imperium.  Or Chaos.  Or the Tau.  Or Eldar.  Or Tyranids.  Or other Orks. 

Let’s face it—they’re Orks.  There’s a good chance they’ll shoot off all the rokkits before the battle even starts.