Gargant, Part 3

Okay, thanks for your patience.  Now it's time to make some dakka.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m approaching this project in a very Orky way.  There aren’t any templates and I may eyeball a lot of things when it comes to measurements.  But I’m trying to throw enough out there to make this a repeatable project.  As you’ll see...

I started simple with the gutbuster kannon.  I wanted it to be big, but not so huge that it became comical.  Also, after a certain size  there starts be odd scale issues with thickness.  If I have a weapon with a ten inch bore, you don’t expect the barrel itself to be 1/32” thick.

Silly as it may sound, I decided to go with a toilet paper tube as the base.   Three of them.  I cut each one lengthwise (giving me a curved sheet of cardstock), then in half.  The tubes are about four inches long, so each one gave me two 2” cured sections.

Then I started overlapping them and gluing them together.  The first two went together pretty well (there was a small gap, but that’ll just be the bottom of the barrel, invisible to everyone except that poor Guardsman who’s about to be crushed).  Then I trimmed about 1/8” off the next one, added some glue, and nestled it inside the barrel (trying hard to keep the front edge flush).  Then I added another, and another, shifting them a bit each time so the seams didn’t all overlap.

Helpful Hint—as a rough rule of thumb, I found cutting off about 1/8” more off each barrel made them fit inside each other really well.  1/8” off the first, 1/4” off the second, 3/8” off the third and so on.

While that whole thing was drying, I started working on the Megakannon.  It’s essentially an Ork volcano cannon, so I decided that’s how I’d build it—just a big solid cannon.  Something that looks like it would always deliver a knockout punch, no matter what it was aimed at.  I knew I wanted a big barrel (at least an inch in diameter), and a good length, so my base piece was 4 1/4” wide by 5 1/2” long (plus a bit of a tab on the long edge).  I gave this piece a good, lengthwise curl and glued it together.

While it was drying I cut detail pieces for the front and back (each one about 4 1/2”) and a 3 3/8” wide piece to be a liner for the inside of the barrel (see the 1/8” rule up above).  Each of these was placed to help hide seams from sightlines. I also added on an armor plate I had leftover from last time as a bit of Orky reinforcement.

I let all that dry and moved on to the twin deffkannons. Or dethkannons. Due to the flexibility of Ork language (and GW editors and editions) there was some debate among the Warlords about what weapons were what.  The final decision was that deffkannons and dethakannons were the same thing pronounced with Deathskull/ Goff accents, respectively.

 

Anyway...

My deffkannons are based off the Imperial Knight’s battle cannon.  I just made them a bit longer.  Following the same basic setup as the Megakannon, the core piece was 1 5/8” by 5” with a tab on the long edge.   The outer detail pieces were 1 3/4” wide, the inner one was 1 1/2” wide.  I glued those together  and let them both dry.

  

Then I built two simple boxes to be the bodies of each weapon.  They add to the size and also give me a nice big surface for details and for connecting to the arms.  The small faces aren’t much bigger than the barrels.

As I was finishing up the deffkannons, though, I became aware of an issue with both of these weapons.  It’s the same scale problem that surfaces all the time in Warhammer 40K—how do we reconcile this with this? A heavy bolter is something a Space Marine scout lugs into battle, but it’s also this massive, blocky thing on the side of a Predator.  And they have the same stat line either way.

On a Stompa, a deffkannon looks a little twiggy, but it works.  On a gargant, though—even doubled up—it just looks scrawny.  And that’s considering I made it a little bigger and longer.  Even the gutbuster kannon, the largest gun barrel I’ve ever put on a model, kind of gets lost against the sheer bulk of the gargant.

It took me a little bit to figure out how to get past this.  And to do it in a suitably Orky way.  Then, when I realized how to do it, I felt kind of silly for not noticing it before.

Take another look at the Stompa.  As I said, the deffkannon looks kind of small, but it works.  And the reason it works is because it isn’t alone.  There’s the deffkannon and a mega-gatler, and a bunch of rokkits.  In true Orky fashion, there’s just more and more stuff added on top of the deffkannon until it looks big.

I’m going to try to do the same thing once I get these mounted on the arms.  Add some rokkits. Maybe a big shoota or two.  That should help bulk up both arm weapons.