Modeling Spotlight: Epirian Aurochs Automated Transport Kitbash!

Time to build something!

This week, I had a tinker with the Mule, from Mantic Games' Warpath game. I love the styling of this vehicle, and thought it would fit nicely into an Epirian force for Maelstrom's Edge with just a few minor tweaks. This was the end result:

Find the full article here: http://www.thecommguild.com/roller/thecommguild/entry/modeling-spotlight-epirian-aurochs-automated

Broken Attack Buggy for Maelstrom's Edge - a Mantic Raptor conversion

I picked up a Mantic crazy box a while back, and in amongst the other assorted bits and pieces was a (discontinued, but currently temporarily resurrected by Mantic) Raptor buggy. I was never a fan of the tricycle look, but other than that it looked like a fun little vehicle, so I decided to convert it into a 4-wheel buggy for my Maelstrom's Edge Broken force. With a little tinkering, I wound up with this:



Here's what I started with:



In the interests of making it a quick and painless conversion, I decided to not have a gunner standing on the back. This saved me from having to convert one from a Broken model (I suppose I could have just used the original Marauder as a Broken xeno, but to be honest that didn't occur to me as a possibility, since I've never liked the look of the Marauder models) and also gave the option of using the back platform to add some sort of transport rule to the buggy - I'm picturing it ferrying small units around the board, as the platform is big enough for three at least human-sized models to stand on, if you disregard their bases.

So, the first step in building the buggy was to remove the trigger extension from the weapon mount. There was also a locator on the top surface that I removed so that I could spin the mount around and have the weapon pointing upwards instead of down across the roof.



The boom for the single front wheel had to go (which was just as well, as it was cast horribly twisted and wouldn't have gone together right anyway), but the actual wheel attachments were useful, so I removed them and glued them onto a pair of GW Space Marine bike wheels.





I glued on the rear wheels, and then glued the new front wheels on where they belonged.



From there, the rest of the buggy could be assembled - rear mudguards, exhaust and weapon mount.



The final detail was to add some axel hubs on the new front wheels with a little plastic tubing.



This left me with a vehicle that looked like this:



Yup, that'll do. A quick coat of paint, and it's ready to go:









If you want to build and use your own Broken attack buggy, there's an unofficial rules card for it in the Force Builder section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.