The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

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.