In my last post's comments, Amdor left me a comment regarding the creation of Vulkan He'stan, the Salamanders character. I was typing up a comment-response to elaborate my feelings on the character, but I've decided to instead make a separate post about it, because I think it's worth a longer discussion, and I can actually link the images in question inline.

Amdor said:

I've seen a couple different takes on Vulkan so far, and Amdor may be right about Sicarius not being the best model to work from for him. However, I do want to give it a try. The comparison to a Grey Knight is certainly apt, and I've seen it done here. Admittedly, it is a cool conversion. I understand the use of the Nemesis Force Weapon as Vulkan's spear, because it's pretty easily done. However, before I go on, I want to share this. It's a quick doodle I put together of my concept of Vulkan He'stan: Try not to laugh too hard! The spear I doodled on there is a placeholder; I don't know what the final version of that is going to look like yet. The one in the codex illustration seems a little plain. I sort've pictured Vulkan's armor being similar to that of a techmarine, since they both share a common 2+ save and I didn't know how to depict Artificer armor adequately on the model. I do realize that AA is essentially just tooled-up power armor, but really, I think the techmarine armor looked better in concept because of the way it was crafted from segmented plates. This sort've gave me the impression of a drake or dragon's scales, so my goal thereafter was to find armor that looked sufficiently segmented. For a while I was considering just using a techmarine as a base, but the unfortunate thing about those models are that they are layered to death in wires around their leg areas, and I didn't think having my Vulkan model trailing a half-mile of cabling looked right. I looked around for a while, and I did give the Master of the Chapter models some thought, but I just didn't like them enough for various reasons. The Master of the Arsenal, while having cool and fairly heavy looking armor, looked a little plainer than I really wanted. The Master of the Fleet would be a good choice, but I don't like the fact that he's holding his cape, as it doesn't allow for much variety in terms of posing him (though I did bitz order his hammer arm for a project down the road). The Master of the Watch has that axe that could probably be turned into a spear with a bit of effort, but I wasn't sure how to represent the Gauntlet at the same time (though now that I look at him, I have a few ideas if Sicarius is a wash). Lastly, the Master of the Recruits, while posed better than all of the other ones, just didn't seem like anything special. My decision to use the new Sicarius model stems from a couple things. The first is that, if you look carefully, you will notice he does have the segmented armor appearance on his power armor, where visible (such as his legs). Secondly, he comes in a lot of pieces, which should hopefully make converting him easier. Thirdly, I see a bit of potential in posing him - I'm going to ditch the sword and helmet arm, and instead pose him holding the spear diagonally across his body. I've got a couple ideas as to how to make that Gauntlet of the Forge wargear for him, but I need to get Sicarius in my hands before I'll be able to determine anything for certain. While Sicarius does, unfortunately, have some ultramarine-specific iconography on him, I don't think it'll be too hard to cover up. The two places where that chapter icon is visible on the mini that would need dremelling are the groin plate and his left shoulder. The groin plate can be covered with a simple scale cloth, like pictured above, while the shoulderpad might have some serious resculpting work done to it. In any event, we'll see what happens.

So I imagine most of you have figured out by now that I'm looking at starting work on a Space Marines army. I know, I feel bad about it too. Actually, I feel dirty. Marines on the whole feel impossibly cliche. Still, I'm going to point to my ork army in defense; I think I've put in a decent amount of time in a non-marine army that I can justify some Space Marines hanging around my apartment.

I am also helping to justify it by playing Salamanders, and fluffy themed salamanders at that. I imagine most of my army lists will be dense with melta and flamer weapons and exclude things like land speeders or jump packs. Vulkan He'stan is an absolute beast and I am shocked that GW didn't put out a miniature for him with their last release. I'm probably going to be making a Vulkan from Sicarius' new model.

Of course, just because I am working on marines doesn't mean I'm not going to go over the top on them. For example:

Rhinos have these weird 'jump light' things by the rear hatch that I assume are present to indicate to the marines inside when it is time to deploy. I picture it pretty simply in my head; they're red until the doors drop, then they turn green. Anyone who's looking inside will obviously have the doors open, so I used a green LED and replaced the plastic one molded onto the tank with an actual working lit one.

I may soon do a full "lighting-a-rhino" tutorial. I'm probably going to do the egress lights like above and headlights on each of my rhinos.

I'm going to sound like an absolute shill for a minute here, but I swear up and down that I'm getting nothing out of doing this.

I want to talk about ApocaBitzNow.com. As of the time of this writing, I have placed and received two orders from them, and this morning I placed a much, much larger one if about to help flesh out my projects. I can tell you that, having dealt with them at length now, they are fantastic. While their range is currently limited to Warhammer 40k bitz, they bitz out a number of metal blisters and kits, which is a service hardly anyone else does. They even stock forgeworld parts, and I mean stock - they have them on-hand and ready to ship, unlike other services who will basically order it from Forgeworld for you. Their selection is good, but not great; some armies are lacking in variety, but their site says they continually aim to increase their catalogue. Compared to the old GW Bitz service, they are 1000% better, with the only caveat being that sometimes they may not have the part you're looking for.

My first order from their service involved a couple simple ork parts - some extra trukk bitz, engines, wheels, and the likes. I also ordered a Kommando Nob head. Within an hour of placing my order, I got an e-mail from their service saying that they had currently run out of Kommando Nob heads, and that their supply would be replenished in a week. They also informed me that I was overcharged for shipping; they ship bitz orders for 2.99 to the US, and orders with boxed sets for 4.99. They went through the trouble of refunding the two dollar difference for me via paypal - I had no idea I'd even been overcharged, so I appreciated their honesty. They told me I would not be billed for the later shipment of the Kommando Nob head.

A few days later, I received my first order from them. Every single part (and I am talking, like, the two halves of an ork trukk wheel) was individually bagged in tiny plastic wrappers, with prices on each, which I thought was tremendously thorough if a bit wasteful. That evening, I decided I wanted to purchase a set of Forgeworld Terminator Shoulder Pads and some other bitz. I sent an e-mail to their orders department, asking if I could also purchase a few more bitz to have shipped along with the Kommando Nob head, and they said that it would not be a problem. They invoiced me for the new parts via paypal promptly. They also did not charge me for shipping on this second batch of parts that I ordered, since it was coming with the Kommando Nob head from my original order, and the shipping on that had been waived.

I got the second order in the mail today, and again, everything is individually bagged. In both orders, even though I have asked for a ton of parts, nothing has been forgotten or wrong. Their communication is great - I've gone back and forth with their orders department a little bit over the past few days with questions about bitz and ordering, which always get promptly answered. They tend to keep most GW kits in stock and offer the standard 20% discount that many of us who purchase online are spoiled with. They did overprice the forgeworld parts a little bit (Forgeworld Terminator Salamanders shoulder pads cost three dollars more than the price listed on Forgeworld's site) but I assume part of that cost is from having the parts shipped from the UK to begin with; it's certainly no more expensive than buying direct from Forgeworld with the costs of international shipping considered.

This morning, I placed a bit order with them for a ton of Space Marine stuff, and they were great about it. You can do some wonderful stuff with their site. For example, I ordered a Land Raider Crusader/Redeemer set as part of my large invoice. The Crusader and Redeemer use the same side sponson pieces, so there is not enough in the stock kit to make your Land Raider interchangeable between the two. However, for a mere few dollars, I was able to purchase the extra sponson bitz needed to make it so that I could swap my Land Raider between Crusader and Redeemer at will. It's some serious value when you can get all of that at one place.

My use of ApocaBitzNow coincides with a bit of dissapointment with thewarstore.com; in the past two weeks that I have been looking into marine items, pretty much everything that I wanted to order from the warstore was out of stock. Obviously, with the new Marine codex out, Neal's being hit hard with orders, but I was still consistently let down by their lack of inventory for the items that I wanted. In light of this, and considering the great service I've been getting from ApocaBitzNow, I think I'll probably be placing more orders with ABN. I can only hope they continue to improve their selection of individual bitz; I would personally like to see some fantasy stuff on there, if only because I dip into Fantasy model ranges from time to time in the hunt for the perfect part for whatever project I'm working on at the time.

I think I'll leave it at that, and I will see how ApocaBitzNow handles my much larger order. So far, though, I have nothing but glowing praise, and I would seriously recommend them.

I have removed the forums section from the site because, let's be honest, aside from the people registering to comment and the occasional bit of spam they didn't get used all that often. Plus, I'd like to encourage people to use the commenting system a bit more. You should still be able to register and all just fine, so don't worry about that.

In the mean time, it has been replaced with...

In order to continue financing my hobby, I'm doing a bit of a cleanout. A lot of stuff is going up for sale, including a Warhound Titan and my Zagstruk W.I.P. Please give it a look, as this money will be used to help fund my future projects. :) If this stuff doesn't sell, in a week or two it's going on ebay, so now is your chance to buy it up early.

It has been a busy past few days for me, thanks in no small part to law school placing what I would describe as an undue burden on my time. Of course, that's just because I have so much I want to work on right now!

I've had a few difficulties with my blog-posting system and host recently, but thanks to the efforts of Zachary Goldberg, my not-so-resident tech guru, everything is back on track. With that said, let's get back up to speed.

First, something I'm proud of: Librarium Online has seen fit to host my Stompa Gargant project as a featured article! I'm on their front page! Woo!

Okay, self-indulgent moment over, moving on. My Biker Boss project has reached a stage at which I thought it required a rider. With that in mind, I negotiated a deal with the esteemed Nozeminer, the same fellow who helped me with the sculpting on my Gigantic Warboss. The bike is currently winging it's way across the U.S. to him, and he'll hopefully have a proper body before too long.

To go along with the Biker Boss project, there's also a new entry of backstory fluff, appropriately titled 'Da Historee 'Uv Zanzag Barga'. It's long, but I think it does a good job of giving the character some weightn and details.

Lastly... I must confess, since having seen the new Marine Codex, I've been contemplating starting a small marine force. As though I had free time.

I'll give you guys a hint:

We've had even more excitement pouring out from GD UK these past few days, and Felix's Gaming Blog has quite a lot of pictures for you to look at.

I'm still not very impressed with Forgeworld's showing of bikers so far, despite having seen numerous pictures of the models. The warboss on warbike is a bit flimsy. I have actually been working on my own Warboss warbike, but I haven't had time to post it up until now. The timestamps are all wrong because I am essentially digging up the content from one of my forum threads, but it's something I'm still working on in the background. I actually find the meager weaponry on the biker boss to be a bit of a relief, because I had no idea what I was going to do for guns on my own thing. I'll probably just pair up some dakkaguns on either side and call it a day.

One thing I'm a bit dissapointed in is Battlewagon news, or the lack thereof. I've been selling my own off in anticipation of the newer kit to work with, but so far photographs still have not surfaced of the damn thing. According to Felix, the white dwarf folks were vehement about no photographs being taken of the thing. I can't for the world of me imagine why GW isn't more open about stuff like this - I think you'd find people a lot more excited about the hobby when they don't have to comb through the grapevine for every little morsel of information about the hobby they dump money into.

The Flakwagon looks pretty nice, though not something I think I'd buy for myself since it's basically a trukk conversion, and I hardly ever have any air support to shoot down in my games to begin with. A lot of people are losing their minds over the Terminator Lord, and rightly so as far as I'm concerned, since he's an awesome looking model. I like the Ultra Dread's banner, as well, though it makes me wonder why GW chose to stick the boys in blue in Black Reach given their history of fighting Tyranids. Surely there must be another marine chapter that harbors the appropriate hatred for greenskins?

Now, I'm not usually one to jump ontop of posting Warhammer-related news, since I think other sites like Bell of Lost Souls and Warseer do (and will always do) a much better job of providing bleeding edge updates about the hobby.

Still, I feel compelled to throw a little discussion up here about something I dug up from Warseer regarding Forgeworld's sneak peeks at future releases. There's a couple new models that actually aren't Imperial Guard tanks coming down the line; specifically an Ultramarines-specific Venerable Dreadnought, a Chaos Terminator character, and a three-pack of Ork Nob Bikers. It's the bikers in particular I'd like to discuss for now, seeing as my primary interest in the hobby is everyone's favorite greenskins.

Now, I want to preface this by first saying that I am very happy that Forgeworld is actually starting to make new Ork items. The ridiculous amount of stuff coming out for Guard this past year has been fun to watch, but certainly in some ways dissapointing for those of us without any pinkskins in their army cases.

That said, I need to voice my complaints at the absurdity of Forgeworld pricing. I can understand they charge a premium for some of their items based on the detail they produce, but in the case of these ork nobz it is just unreasonable. The preliminary pricing stated at Warseer is 52 BRITISH POUNDS - 90 US DOLLARS - FOR THREE BIKERS. This breaks down to just about thirty dollars per nob biker. Let's compare that to the plastic boxed set GW produces, which retails for 35 dollars, and contains enough to make three ork bikers, one of whom can be made into a Nob. This means that, in retail terms, for five dollars more you can get two extra ork bikers.

Let's further suppose that you purchase the bikers from thewarstore, or any other online distributor who sells GW stock for 20% off. That's 28 dollars - plus three dollars shipping or so, and you still end up with a nearly equivalent cost to what Forgeworld is wanting to charge for these bikers. (And that's not even considering the cost of shipping Forgeworld would level at you if you wanted to buy their 90 dollar bikers!)

I think this is an exercise in insanity. They're wonderful models, don't get me wrong, but there is no universe in which I would ever consider purchasing these models over buying the normal plastic boxed set. Not to mention the incredible amounts of negativity I have been reading over Forgeworld's quality control as of late - botched and warped casts, awful moldlines, models impossible to clean up.

I'm very dissapointed. We'll see if this price pans out to be the actual value of the final product.