Like a lot of wargamers I ‘ve got too many projects on the go and I dip in and out of them as the mood takes me. One project I’ve been working on on a very ad-hoc basis is building a Minervan Armoured Legion for as little money as I can manage while I concentrate on my main Epic projects; Vraks and Krieg.
The Minervan Armoured Legion is a fun project because, unsurprisingly, you get to field a wide variety of tanks. Not only that but there’s a lot of scope to convert the Leman Russ variant tanks available for use with this army. Some of might be thinking why would I want to convert the tanks when the Forgeworld models are reasonably readily available? There are three reasons for this:
Firstly, I’m not willing to pay what some of these Forgeworld tanks go for on the second hand market. For example, Leman Russ Tank Destroyers for an average for £8-10 each? That’s far too pricey for me!
Secondly, (this is going to make me sound a bit weird) I like my tank sculpts within an army to look coherent, particularly the tracks. I realise that in a real world conflict involving armoured vehicles are all shapes and sizes but on the wargames table I like a nice coherent look if I can achieve that. Moving swiftly on…
Thirdly, Forgeworld didn’t release sculpts for the Leman Russ Annihilator or Exterminator variants, although the Annihilator variant isn’t in the Minervan Armoured Legion.
I skimmed through the army list and decided to convert three Leman Russ Exterminators using some broken Leman Russ Tanks I won on ebay:
How did I convert them? When I got hold of my Vraksian Malcador tanks they came with two types of guns meaning that they could be built as either the standard Malcadors or Malcador Annihilators. I’m intending to only build three of the Malcadors as Annihilators leaving me with seven of the below Annihilator guns:
The mold slippage is quite bad on some of them, which is surprising given how cleanly cast the tanks are, but these guns are actually very quick to clean up. To remove the Lascannon look the Annihilator guns have I filed down the angular barrel. I think it works enough, this is 6mm scale after all!
Next up will be converting Executioner, Destroyer and Thunderer variants which don’t actually look to difficult to achieve.
chewinglead 