Ready for deployment

I'm all done here! Figured I'd finish this thing off and get my friend off my back about it, so I went ahead and added some stuff to the turret and riveted the whole thing up where necessary.

 

I think I'm done with it at this point. If the new owner feels inclined to add more to it, that's his prerogative, but all the essentials are there. I sort've winged it with the details on the back end of the hydra because I couldn't find any pictures of the thing to work from, but I'm not really dissapointed with my Ein-variant hydra design.

Hidden surprise

A few things to update this with.

First and foremost, if you guys haven't already seen, casts of the heavy automatic cannon I made for this model have been picked up and are being manufactured and sold by D6 Hobbies. Those of you with an interest in building your own Hydras may be interested, as it looks like the quad-autocannon-setup from the Planetstrike bastion might be a bit too small a substitute.

Second, I've resumed work on the model some. I attached the guns to the turret itself, and closed off the back of the turret with some handy angled pieces. Detailing of that area comes next, and I need to cast myself a couple extra ammo feed bits to sit on the outside areas of the guns. I added some rivets and minor detail around the base of the turret as well, and finished the tracks off with the addition of some handy track guards to cover the terrible Chimera treads.

 

The turret still rotates freely, and will continue to do so. I've no intention of gluing it in a fixed position.

Now, here's where I couldn't help myself.

Since I'm making this as a gift to a buddy I owe a favor to, I figure I can't just repay him the favor. That'd be too easy.

So I start thinking to myself, what could I do to spite him for making me build a hydra?

I believe I have come up with an ideal solution.

Watch carefully. Nothing up my sleeve, and...

What's that? Notice anything out of the ordinary?

Hmmm.

Look closer, and...

More dakka – obtained!

I got off my ass this morning and made all the casts of the cannon that I'd need.

Please note that I haven't cleaned them up yet, as I couldn't find my good knife. There's a few things that need to be touched up here or there, but overall I think it came out pretty decently. The ammo feed/drum thing that goes on the side is being stubborn; apparently, the one I made was airtight, and imploded when I threw it into the pressure pot. The gun nearly did, as well! It probably would have if I hadn't filled it with a two-part plumbing epoxy while I was building it for strength. As-is, a little rubber managed to leak into my original gun's housing, but nobody'll ever know...

Wait, drat!

Anyway, here's my rough mockup:

I think it's looking pretty sharp. Now to go clean off the guns.

Needs more dakka!

I finished up the gun and designed it so that it would be reversible. I'm going to cast the gun and the ammo feed will be cast separately, so that I can put it on either side to make it fit the left or right half of the quad-cannon.

 

I also toyed a bit with the top of the turret, adding a hatch, a guardsman, and some simple armor plating. The 'sensor array', or radar dish, or whatever the hell that is on the normal Forgeworld model, will have an equivalent added on this thing soon, though I may change the design a bit.

Going to throw the cannon into the casting process, and in a day or two I should have all the copies I'll ever need of this gun.

The Imperial Flakwagon

So I owe one of my good friends a favor that I've been putting off, and he bugged me enough about it that I thought I'd give painting a quick break and see if I couldn't get it done. I had a spare Chimera (actually, a Basilisk) chassis laying around in my bitz bins that was mostly-complete, and I thought I'd make him a Hydra out of it. I started by framing off the general chassis of the chimera and building a rough shape of the turret. Then, I grabbed my styrene tubing and set about making a basic Hydra autocannon. I figured making 4 of the same gun for this would be a monumental pain in the ass, so I'm going to make a single cannon without much detail on the sides so that I can cast it and use it on both sides of the turret; three extras should be enough to finish the turret off.

 

Both the turret mount and, more obviously, the cannon itself are loose and sitll being worked on. I didn't have enough tracks to actually go all the way around the Chimera chassis, so I'm going to be adding a full track guard to the top of the track well to cover up that little fact.

The greenstuff is going to get sanded down and smoothed out once it's dry. I was using it to help make up for some of the gaps in the construction - I'm not used to imperial vehicles, and I can get away with all sorts of sloppy work on ork ones that won't fly here!