Grey knights terminators

I have been after a unit of Grey Knights Terminators for a while, to add to my Imperial Agents roster. However, one thing that was holding me back was that I was expecting a range update, I still am but I got fed up of waiting. I decided however, that I would preempt things a little and gave the termies a bit of surgery when I built them. 

The standard termies were always on the short side and so I knew a little bit of height adjustment was going to be needed, so I started off with a bit of plasitcard at the waist. I could have gone with green stuff or similar on to of the legs but decided to add it to the actual legs themselves. I did this by cutting of the top ball joint, sticking it to a piece of plastic are and then cutting it out and adding it back on. 

I did this to all the legs and while it did cause a couple of issues when adding the torso on, such as getting in the way of some of the hanging details, it was easily dealt with. 

As you can see, against the black primed bodies the whole card stands out, however, once it's all painted up, I doubt it will show at all. 

I built the models to have all the toys, as this squad is going to join an inquisitor, it's got to be tooled up for all the jobs!

The Sgt has the old warding staff, sort of as a symbol of office alongside the tabard. 

The apothecary model has the spear and stabby thing (nartheciun) , and the standard bearer is proudly carrying the unit standard. 

The last two are hammer man, the big hitter of the unit and the sword wielding heavy, with Psilencer, to support the storm bolters. 

 I could have gone with the psycannon, or even Incinerator, to give some extra anti-light armour \ elites or for horde clearing, and these guys are going to be going after infantry but mostly they are going to be sitting holding an objective or just being a pain in the enemy rear, so volume of fire is better than strength. 

I am looking forward to trying these out at some point in the distant when I actually get a game in! 

Landspeeder

 On last datasheet to look at, just in time for the release of 11th! The new Landspeeder is here, and it looks good. Very similar to the old one with a suitable scale upgrade with some additional weapons. Along with the Terminators, the new Landspeeder shows how's they should have done the SM refresh, well, apart from the Gravis models, cos they look good as they are. 

Anyway, the new Landspeeder looks good better than the other versions, the Storm speeders. 

It has the classical armament, with melta and "assault" cannon, with the option for a flamer. As with the original version, I cannot figure out why you would want a flamer. To me this unit is a fast moving fire base, designed to skirting around the battle edge, lending firepower where needed, not to be getting up close and personal with the enemy. 

The rules for the unit are good, with the move-shoot-move, even if the second move is not guaranteed. Popping the nose out of cover by and inch or two will prob work, as you can usually bank on getting at least a couple of inches of movement. I like this unit and he will be joining the Dark Guardians and the outriders. 

I guess that we will eventually see a number of versions of this, along the lines of the old versions, with missile pods and the like. There seems a lot of chat about this being the edition of bikes and cavalry, so I also expect we'll see some additional bike characters as well. The only thing I might pick up is the ATV, if it's still around. 

Alongside the model, we also had some rules for flyers or rather the FLY keyword. They seem to have taken a few hints from the old pivot rule, but actually made it make sense here! So flying units can declare that they will fly, subtract two from their movement and then be able to move anywhere in range, which is nice. 

This actually means that flying units will have a lot of versatility and actually be easy to use and understand. Sanguinary Guard have fly and a 12 inch move, so with this rule, they will effectively be able to move anywhere within ten inches regardless of any terrain or enemy models (taking care of engagement range though). No more worrying about movement up or down ruins or trying to figure out if it's better to go round or if the ruin is 2 inches or less. Just straight up and over, ten inches and done. 

I do like these new rules and this is one of a number of rules that I think are good. There's one or two that I still have to get my head around but we're still a week or so away from the actual release, so when I get my hands on the actual rule book, some of them may make more sense than they do right now. 

Knights

 Just a very quick one this time. 11th is just over a week away and I'm still playing catch-up with the previews!

I wanted to highlight this one detachment for the Knights, as it's the only one that I actually care about. Questor Forgepact is the one detachment that allowed you to bring admech and knights together. Having just finished building some more skitarii, to boost my force to 4 squads (more on that in a later post), I now have the ability to field the full 500 points for this detachment. 

The rules have changed a bit, but not as much as you might think. While the knight ability seems to have changed completely, hey have actually just swapped to be Admech ability, which actually makes more sense. The Knights aura has changed quite a bit, although it does have basically the same affect. The models gain the +1BS all the time and heavy when you don't move (very far). In theory, this means that the skitarii guns will hitting on 2+'s. There isn't a wound modifier but I don't think that a major issue with 11th, as it's the hit modifier that's modified by cover now. 

The enhancement has changed slightly as well, although it's really only the wording that's changed, what happens and why is still the same. 

The given stratagem has changed as well. No longer do we get lethal hits but re-rolls to wound, which is still useful but not as good a lethal hits. Most of the time the unit that destroys a Knight is going to be pretty tough, so most likely we're going to be wounding on 6's. Lethal hits would definitely have been the better option here but any help is always welcome. 

Overall, the detachment hasn't really changed, the only question is how many points this detachment will be worth. I don't see it being a 3 points t detachment, 2 is more likely to me. So will I have to choose another Knights detachment or will I be able to fill it with an Agents of the Imperium detachment? I don't know how these will work yet and I don't remember seeing a faction focus for them either but I might just have missed it. 

The triple T's - Temu Taurox Transports

 So, the other week I took a gamble and brought a couple of models off Temu. For just over 10 pound I picked up two vehicles as Taurox proxies. These models armed with a Gatling cannon and small coaxial guns, which seems to represent Hotshot Volley Guns. The original design I think came from NFayma, as the Minotaur APC (link). The original is better is a lot of ways, apart from one major point, it's a 3D print and I don't have a printer. I did fine some pre-printed versions, but they were only marginally cheaper than the GW Taurox. These were less than a quarter of the other versions and about a 5th of the GW original. 

Now, I do question the legitimacy of these prints, being as they are off Temu but I have no idea if they are properly licensed or not. Given they they were advertised under a whole host of other names, I guess probably not and I honestly don't know how I feel about that. 

Anyway, on to the models themselves. The prints are pretty decent, a few minor issues here and there but nothing of any note. The weapons fit in to the turrets nicely, one is a bit looser than the other but it holds fine, with some paint on it will hold properly I think. The size of the models is pretty good as well, they are, as far as I can tell, the right height and width but slightly longer than the Taurox, bug I don't have the GW model to test against. Hopefully someone will have one down the club at some point so I can check it properly. 

The plan is to paint these two up for the Scions, although the final colour scheme is yet to be finalised. It's either going to be black with red highlights, or maybe a similar red\brown to the Scions. I'm tempted to go for the black, with some spot colours but I'll need to have a think about it.