Getting Closer

I've got all the backpacks and weapons cleaned up and primed. They aren't actually glued on yet; I painted the inside surfaces while holding the parts in my hands and then slid them onto their pegs so I could paint the outside surfaces and let them dry. So far I'm pretty happy with the color scheme. I'm not going to paint the bolter bodies red as I'd originally intended. I'll probably paint them to match the rest of the armor, so they'll be green or brown.

I spent some time today looking at the Apocalypse book and the Apocalypse: Reload supplement for 40k. Specifically I was looking at the Baneblade tank and thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) about using one in an Apocalypse game sometime in the future. Then I got to thinking that the Imperial Guard wouldn't really just let the Space Marines use a Baneblade without some sort of supervision. The Imperial Guard and the Space Marines both work for the Imperium, but that doesn't mean they trust each other enough to hand over one of their rarest, most powerful pieces of wargear. I imagine that the tank would be accompanied by at least a high commander with his attendant bodyguard unit and perhaps some other kit. Maybe a squadron of Sentinels? It couldn't be because I like the way Sentinels look, though. Since Apocalypse armies don't have to fit the standard force template, I was thinking of building a Guard force consisting of a Baneblade, a Catachan 'Death Trap' Ambush Patrol (found in the Apocalypse: Reload book), and perhaps a kitted-out Command Platoon to represent the officer acting as the Baneblade's babysitter. I imagine that group will run out to a little over 1000 points. Add a regular-sized Space Marine army to it and you've got yourself a small Apocalypse force. That's all dreams right now, though, as I haven't even got my first Space Marine squad painted yet. If I alter the first five Space Marines I painted several months ago to match my new color scheme I'll have an additional Combat squad to work with. Then I can paint my Scouts or my Assault squad. That was all really off-topic, but this is a hobby blog and those were my hobby-related thoughts today. I also really want to use the Vortex grenade template I've got, so that's another motivation to get several thousand points of figures painted up. The Vortex grenade is a little hole in the fabric of space that drifts randomly around the battlefield. Anything that it touches gets sucked into the Warp where it is either destroyed or subjected to such horrors that it loses it's mind and becomes part of the zaniness that makes the Warp what it is.