The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Spin, spin, spin

I managed to save a bunch of parts from the new plastic Kan kit, and I thought they might fit nicely on the body of my neglected Mega Shokk Attack Gun. I extended the back of the gun just a tiny bit and stuck a half of the Kan engine on either side. I'm going to be filling in the area underneath them a little later on.

I think I'm actually going to flip the treads back over for the direct fire version, simply because the larger wheels inside the tracks really should be along the bottom. I'm probably going to beef it up with track guards so that it looks larger and more capable ot hauling such a large piece of artillery.

Snotling ammo feed

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, but I had a pretty sizable paper to work on in one of my classes and I've been neck-deep in research.

I went with the vertical drop-feed design after enough people convinced me. I'm using some chain mesh on the sides to hold the shells in, since I figured It'd match what I did on my Stompa's kannon arm. It visibly houses three snotling ammunition shells, and I'll be able to use the rest around the model. I seem to have lost one, but hopefully it'll resurface!

 

The orange bit is a shell from this dart gun, which I bought because it was awesome and promptly broke by accident. The only reason I really used it was because I couldn't find PVC pipe the right diameter, and it's too big for most of my styrene tubing... it was the first thing I found that was roughly the right size, so I went with it.

I've got a fair bit of sprucing up to do to that back end, don't worry - it's just a chassis for me to add armor plating and worky gubbinz over.

I've been giving some thought to flipping the tread assembly over and mounting the gun down like that, as you can see below:

 

I think it gives the gun a better profile. The effect of it is that it angles the gun up and away from the ground, but nothing necessarily says SAG shots don't arc. I'm probably going to go with this, but I haven't made my mind up yet. If I do I have to remove the battery holder and flip it upside-down, but that shouldn't be a big deal.

More Mega-SAG design

So I gave it some more thought during the week, while I was at school, and I had a bit of an idea.

The main reason I didn't like the back-loading, artillery-esque concept for the Mega-SAG was that it seemed to suggest a tremendously low rate of fire in my mind; you'd have to put a shell in, close the hatch, fire, open the hatch, and repeat. Not very effective for a model that's supposed to stand in for three Big Meks with SAGs, but then again I'm probably the only one who'd ever really worry about the logistics of the model's fictional firing speed like that in the first place.

However, I was playing Left 4 Dead the other day, and while I had the Automatic Shotgun I remembered something. Combat shotguns can chamber multiple shells while being loaded, and then fire them off in series.

Basically, each shot ejects the spent shell and chambers the next one from the internal magazine. I figure, why can't the same mechanism apply to the Mega-SAG? The rear hatch is opened, and multiple snotling shells are loaded into the machine. Hatch is closed, and then the weapon is fired in rapid succession, ejecting spent 'cages' and chambering new ones until the internal magazine's depleted.

I did have time to make one quick conceptual doodle, which I figure I'll share:

In my previous post's comments for this project, Don pitched a decent idea of having a top-loading ammunition rail for the snotling shells. I have yet to draw that concept out, and it's definitely a good one, but truthfully I think having some sort of ammo-rail projection out the top rear of the gun ruins it's lines. Silly to be concerned with aesthetics on an orky warmachine, I know, but right now I'm sort've digging on the straight cannon-esque form in the above concept. I'll doodle up the alternative Don suggested when I have the time tomorrow. In the mean time, I feel slightly more comfortable knowing that I've come up with an overly elaborate, shotgun-magazine based explaination for the above design's rate of fire. I think I have some sort of mental disorder, because I am spending so much time thinking about the gun's method of firing, something most players would never consider in the first place.

Edit: You know what? Before I go to sleep, I may as well do this, quick and dirty.

This way I have something to work from for comparison. It's not terrible, certainly, but I'm not sure how to design rails for the shells to slide in on that won't obscure at least something. The back-loading artillery design would let me have a whole shell visible being loaded into the gun, and a pile of the remaining shells waiting to be lifted up and chambered somewhere on the base nearby... However, this one could be interesting as well. Maybe if I looted the shell-loading winch off a Vindicator I could add in a way of getting the snotling cages from the ground up to the loading grot on top...

Let me know what you guys think.

Ammo and design help

So I had a couple hours yesterday, and I'm sad to say they weren't very productive ones. I intended on mounting the cannon down onto the treads, but I realized very early on that without a finished back end to the cannon I didn't quite know how it would sit on the treads. This led me around to trying to work on the back end of the gun, which proved largely unproductive for lack of creative ideas. So, I am looking for help.

I figure that first and foremost, I should unveil my until-now secret 'ammunition' for the Shokk Attack Gun.

Yes, these are snotlings in small, metal, bullet-shaped cages. Or, well, at least they look like it. They are from a now-OOP model from Rackham's Confrontation line called "Master Sulfur". Basically, these cages hang off a large minotaur-looking dude on their source model. The moment I saw them, though, I knew they had to be Shokk Attack Gun ammunition.

You can get a look at a model that has these added to it on CMON here - it's the only decent, painted picture I've been able to find of the blighters.

As far as I'm concerned, they're perfect for the job. They're projectile-shaped to begin with, which lends to clear interpretation as to their purpose. It saves the Big Mek from the trouble of trying to wrangle up a horde of snotlings into your typical SAG-vacuum, so from an orky standpoint it's convenient. Plus, think of how satisfying it would be to take a screaming, thrashing snotling in a cage and slam it into the breech of a gun to fire off!

Here's a shot of the 'ammunition' with the gun for scale:

Now, here's where my problem comes up. Let me throw these in here just for reference; they're pictures of the back end of the gun and a side profile.

 

The shadowsword cannon has to sit a little forward on the thunderfire treads so that the spinny bit on the front of the SAG has a comfortable amount of clearance to actually, well, spin. Because of that, any additions I make to the SAG have to extend it backwards a bit.

Now, I'm trying to figure out what it is that I could do as far as a loading mechanism for the Shokk Attack Gun goes. My primary goal is to have the ammunition [caged snotling shells] be visible and obvious, so that any observer who picks the model up could spot it and decipher what's going on. This basically means that I don't want to cover the shells up too much in whatever ammo feed I decide to go with. I dug through some Forgeworld and Armorcast artillery pictures for ideas, and three jumped out at me.

Idea 1 is probably the most straightforward. Similar to what you might see on the back of an Earthshaker cannon, there'd be a single hatch door and a sort of tray that slides out. The loader places the snotling shell onto the slide, pushes it up into the breech of the gun, closes the back hatch, and pulls the lever, and off the screaming blighter goes through the warp. While this has the added benefit of allowing me to pretty much show the snot-in-a-cage on the loading tray, from a design standpoint it seems pretty flawed in that it'd limit the gun's perceived rate of fire quite a bit; you'd be firing one snotling at a time, and each shot would require you to close the back of the gun up again. That hardly seems impressive for a gun this size, since it's not really artillery in the strictest sense. The other big problem I have with this idea is that the shells are relatively small compared to the back of the gun, so the chamber they go into would be sort've narrow compared to the cannon itself.

Idea 2 came from an Armorcast Cannon. Basically I'd try and work in some sort of 'clip' that fed the snotling shells around into the chamber. The particular example illustrated in the picture has the advantage of showing the snotlings off, but covers the shell design up a bit, and could prove to be a bit difficult to incorporate into the Mega-SAG since it'd basically need to be off on one side of the weapon.

Idea 3 borrows from the Thudd Gun concept. I'd basically have 4 breeches on the back of the cannon, instead of just the one in Idea 1. Three could probably be sealed up and closed, and one of them could have it's hatch swung open with a loader (possibly a grot or lesser mek) about to insert the snotling shells into the chamber.

I'm giving a bit of thought to having a separate loading platform behind the shadowsword cannon, similar to what a Basilisk has, so that the loaders would move with the gun. It'd give me a chance to put a couple of the extra shells propped up against a railing or what have you, too. That sort of detail depends on what I end up doing with the back end of the Mega SAG, though.

Normally I'd just break out my tablet and start sketching ideas out on the reference images, but I'm finding myself at a bit of a creative impasse and my tablet is unavailable in any case. I'm hoping to get some ideas and input as to what might work well for the back end of the cannon and it's loading mechanism for the snotling shells... after that, the rest of the model may well sort itself out.

The power is yours!

So I sat down and scratched my head for a minute while I tried to figure out where I was going to end up hiding the power source on this model. The battery pack that was pictured in my last video for this project was my original plan, but it just seemed impractical due to its size; I couldn't figure out how I was going to hide the dang thing.

After pondering it over a while longer, I remembered that I had coin cell battery holders that might work better: BAT1013 from B.G. Micro. I've used these on a couple other projects, but it never occurred to me to try and fit them in on this one for some reason. As luck would have it, these battery holders are the exact same diameter as the hole in the middle of the Thunderfire Cannon chassis. The only problem is that they have a bit of a square 'tab' on one side that houses the clip that holds the batteries in. I grabbed my jeweller's saw and went at the Thunderfire chassis and removed a section of the back so that the battery holder would fit properly. The results?

 

A perfect fit! This holder can comfortably seat two 3v coin cell batteries back to back, giving me the desired 6 volts to power the motor with. Even better, it should be very simple to actually change the batteries if they ever die.

My next challenge is probably going to be figuring out how to mount the cannon itself onto the treads.

Also, an additional note that I need to follow up with:

There's been a really, really strange demand for the bitz I used to make the spinny bit on this Shokk Attack Gun. I would have figured 'slightly larger than normal Shokk Attack Gun' was a bit of a niche product, but judging just from the number of people who have e-mailed me and PM'ed me since I first showed the mold off, I guess some of you want it. With that said, I've shipped the parts off to the folks at D6 Hobbies for proper casting, sale, and distribution, because I don't have the time or resources available to be selling stuff out of my basement right now. Expect it to be up under the Warforged Miniatures listing shortly.

Throwing up the Shokker

Let's get a bit more in, shall we?

I added a bit of ribbed cabling between the sections of the prongs, then went ahead and attached them to the turbine. I think the results are quite nice.

 

Of course, it's not nearly as impressive if it's not moving, so let's remedy that with a video!

I think I nailed the right speed with this.

My next goal is to figure out how I'm going to attach the Shadowsword cannon gun housing to the treads, so that I can figure out where to work in a 6v power source and switch.

After that comes the ammo feed... but that part's a secret. I have a great idea coming up for that one.

A very useful magic trick

And with a wave of my hat, some magic words ("Krump! Stomp! Smash 'em! Waaaagh!"), and my pressure pot, presto!

The original prong won't be used, so I cast myself three nice, fresh copies and cleaned them up a bit. For those of you who might be curious, this is what the mold looked like:

I got these out with surprisingly few mold lines to clean up, which makes me pretty happy. What's more, I managed to cast the areas where the cabling is going as hollow, so I can just wiggle some wire in there and be done with it, rather than trying to drill them out properly.

And lastly, here's a neat little comparison:

Leftmost is obviously my Mega-SAG bit. In the middle is a SAG bit from 2nd edition, which as you may be able to tell from the pictures is even more lopsided than the one on the far right, our current edition SAG bit. I tried designing mine closer to the current edition one, since it'd be easier for most players to recognize... though truth be told, how many three-pronged, spinning ork guns are there?

Now for the harrowing task of trying to attach them to the main turbine exactly 120 degrees apart!

Turbines and prongs

So the Shadowsword cannon base fit together with minimal headache, and I started on the front end of the gun. Using another Shadowsword cannon part for the front end, I managed to snugly fit the motor inside and glue it in so it was centered.

Now, some of you may wonder why there's a turbine on the front - after all, the videos above pretty much demonstrate that I have a SAG spinny front bit.

However, after a bit of eyeballing, I've come to the conclusion that the SAG spinny front bit has three problems that prohibit me from using it on this project. First off, it's too small. Since I'm making a very large Shokk Attack Gun, it seems only proper that the front spinny gubbin be much larger than the standard bit.

The second problem with the bit was that it was (surprisingly enough! ) never designed to actually spin, meaning that it spins horribly off-balance due to the 'prongs' not being angled out equally.

The third, and last problem with the bit was that it was heavy. While the Thunderfire Cannon chassis is more than weighty enough to hold the gun down and in place, the weight puts more of a strain on the motor, and I need the motor to survive a good, long time.

Thus, I started on what you see above by making the 'axis' for the new SAG spinny bit. The turbine on the front is one of the bits from the underside of a beakie drop pod, with styrene tubing behind it to help bulk it out a bit. There's a smaller styrene tube in the middle of the turbine that goes back through the front of the gun casing to the motor, which spins the part wonderfully. All assembled, we have the following:

 

You can see the stock SAG bit for scale here.

So, if I'm making my own SAG bit, how would I possibly make one that spins better than the existing Mega-SAG? Surely anything I make would inherently be offbalanced, due to it's hand-crafted natureWhat's worse, it could be fragile in the long run - how well does Superglue hold up to repeatedly being spun over and over and over again? I could picture one of the arms of the gun just falling off after a few years! Well, this is where the magic of casting comes in.

Here's the general idea: Make one prong out of styrene. Cast the prong three times. The resulting prongs will be extremely lightweight due to the fact that they're made out of resin, which means there's a lot less strain on the motor. They're also going to be all one solid piece, meaning that there's much less chance of any parts like rivets going flying off after years of use. Lastly, they're all exactly identical, which means that they are all the same weight, and will balance the front SAG bit perfectly as they spin!

With this in mind, I set about making the 'prong' for the SAG and came up with the following:

 

You may wonder what the heck's going on at the right side of the prong - it looks like two cylinders are just pointing out to nowhere. The answer to that is actually quite simple - there's going to be ribbed cabling between the two, from the base of the bit up to the spherical 'head', between the ends of the two cylinders. However, ribbed cable texture is a pain in the ass to cast, and is prone to defects that can be monstrously annoying to clean up. What I'm going to do instead is basically cast the bit as it is, and then get some very short, evenly-measured lengths of guitar wire to put in each end of the cylinders between the head and base of the prong.

So now, we cast the prong three times over!

Shokking development

A while back I put together Big Mek Booma, the grand architect of the warmachines in my Waaagh! When I did, I gave him a Kustom Force Field generator-type backpack in the expectation that I'd be using him for that more than anything else. However, times have changed, and I have come to see the error of my ways. You see, I tend to run big squads of Lootas. Lootas have an absolutely terrific range and high strength, but have a bit of a shoddy leadership, and if they take a couple casualties they have a tendency to up and run. Since they're pretty costly in terms of points, I've been experimenting recently with sticking a Big Mek with a bosspole in with them to try and prevent any early retreats.

From what I have been able to figure, giving that Big Mek a Shokk Attack Gun makes a ton of sense. The random 2d6 for strength averages around S7, which happens to be the same as the lootas, so it makes sense to turn the SAG on whatever the lootas are firing as well. Additionally, both the SAG and the deffguns share the same range, meaning it makes sense to keep them in a squad together. It's a beautiful squad for taking down those high-save units like Terminators, because the SAG will simply penetrate the armor if it hits, while the deffguns will just force piles and piles of saves.

The problem, then, is figuring out how to get Booma a Shokk Attack Gun. After a bit of head-scratching, I had what I thought was a rather clever idea: Make it the orky equivalent of the thunderfire cannon.

The thunderfire cannon, for those of you who may not be familiar, is the giant artillery piece that rolls along with Techmarines.

The way I figured it, if I'm going to be making a separate Shokk Attack Gun model, I may as well make it huge so that I can run it as the Shokk Attack Battery formation in Apocalypse. The idea's pretty simple: In regular games, I park the Shokk Attack Gun somewhere near Booma on the board to display what armament he actually has (which, of course, would be a SAG). In apocalypse games, I'd make a larger base (Maybe 3.5-4" diameter) that I could magnetize both my Big Mek and the gun to, which would have the same profile as 3 Big Meks (meaning, 6 wounds) and 'count as' the entire Shokk Attack Gun battery, by itself.

So, with the concept firmly in mind, my first problem was collecting the parts I'd need. I've been stewing this whole concept over for the past six months or so, and I think it was a foregone conclusion from the start that I would have to motorize the thing. The problem therein was motorizing it at an appropriate speed.

First, I started looking for motors small enough to fit in what I wanted.

The video above shows a stock SAG bit stuck to the front of a small helicopter motor. Now, this motor had two particular complications. First, it spun incredibly fast once it got going, which is impractical from a hobby standpoint because I don't need my models trying to get airborne from the table. Second, it didn't really have the torque to start spinning without help, even when voltage was applied; you had to give it a bit of assistance by spinning the bit first with your finger. I could have tried higher voltages, but the motor wasn't really rated for it, and would have burned out in a hurry.

The second motor I tried was from a lego kit. It was substantially slower, and a hell of a lot noisier, but due to it's 'lego' casing, it was a bit too large to be practical.

It was actually a bit slower than I wanted - I was aiming for a 'sweet spot' of sorts of about one to two revolutions per second.

I tried a whole host of other motors...

But I wasn't particularly happy with any of them. It seemed that with the low-voltage DC motors, your choices were either a small motor that spun at 30,000 RPM and didn't have enough torque to really get the SAG bit spinning, or larger, chunkier motors that had the torque but needed a hefty amount of voltage and space. I had been looking for a long time for a decent gear-motor mechanism that would take one of the speedy little motors and step it down enough to approximate 120 rpm or so, but the problem there was that most gearing mechanisms that could do that take up a relatively large amount of space. While I'm making a big SAG, I didn't want it to be too big as to not fit on a Thunderfire chassis!

Finally, I stumbled upon the 'holy grail' of Shokk Attack Gun motors: The 150:1 Mini Metal Gear Motor.

This little bugger had the ideal RPM for my project, ran on anywhere between 3 and 6 volts, had a hefty amount of torque, and a very small size (only 33.1mm long to the tip of the shaft!). The only downside to the motor was the price, but consider this: By making this Mega-SAG, I'm basically obviating the need to buy 2-3 more SAG Mek models, which more than recoups the cost.

I also decided pretty early on that I was not going to be using the actual body of the Thunderfire cannon, due mostly to how incredibly bad GW's casts are and how much repairing the body of the gun would have required. Instead, I'm only going to use the tread sections and the crosspiece that serves as the base of the gun.

So, what would serve as the body of the gun, then? I could scratchbuild something, and I figured I'd have to, but then the answer arrived all on its own: The Shadowsword Cannon. Specifically, the base of its gigantic barrel!

Once assembled, the base of the shadowsword cannon serves as a giant frame for the SAG to build upon, and it fills the space left vacant on the treads by the Thunderfire Cannon perfectly.

With these parts all in hand, I've set about building.