Warhammer 40,000: Gold Gold Gold

In August 2023, I discovered the band Wargasm, and became a little bit obsessed with them. The Youtube algorithm reasoned that I might like Do It So Good, and I did. Hey, we listened to a lot of Prodigy when I was a teen, so I immediately liked what I heard.

Clearly I needed to hear more. Spit. is pretty great, but the song that really hit me was Gold Gold Gold.

Something I've done with several of my Warhammer models is that I've written song lyrics onto them in Daedric. Since I was quite obsessed with a song that actually includes the line "blood for the blood god", it was fairly obvious I needed to build something Khornate and golden. And it just so happens that I've got a Chaos Knight box right here.

I'd decided earlier to name my Chaos Knights after Daedra Lords. Since I already figured out how the Daedric Princes correspond to the Warhammer Chaos gods, it follows that I'll be building Knight Rampager Malacath. And painting it gold.

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I'm mostly going to be building this Knight out of the box, but obviously I have to add some personal touches. Like a tail. In old Epic times, Chaos Titans could have tails that gave them a close assault factor bonus, and I've always associated tails with big Chaos walkers and close combat since. Also imagine being a Titan princeps, say in the Legio Venefica, and seeing a Khornate Knight Rampager. It's going to be like an eager little puppy. So obviously there has to be a tail. I made it out of one of the pieces of the Abominant's electroscourge.

I stuck some Wargame Exclusive skulls and a couple of Bad Squiddo mushrooms on the base, as well as a Genestealer arm I had hanging around on my table. Since I'd painted a Knight before, I knew I needed to work in several subassemblies. I primed and painted the legs before sticking on the armor plates.

The upper body was also primed in several bits. The base color for most of the body was Gunmetal Grey with a Black Glaze wash.

I decided to stick a magnet under the carapace weapon mount, even though Rampagers can't have carapace weapons, just in case I ever want to use this model in Horus Heresy. Also there's just no reason they can't have carapace weapons anyway.

I even magnetized the heavy stubber, although that choice has also been inexplicably removed from the Rampager. The meltagun would make so much more sense!

I already magnetized my previous Questoris Knight's weapons, and followed the same logic here.

I also decided to magnetize a flaming skull from Anvil's Skeleton Commissar and mount it on the carapace hardpoint, because it was there on my desk, I guess. I also decorated the front of the carapace with a Khorne symbol from the Bloodletter sprue.

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Then it was on to painting. I got started with my Daedric by writing the name of the song on the tail armor plates.

The red color is strongly suggested by the lyrics, and I like it. I started the chorus on the armor plate over the head, and wrote the Knight's name on the shield.

I think I reached my limit for how small I can make my Daedric letters on the chest armor.

The chorus carried all the way to the highest leg plate, and I went on to do the second verse and army badge on the rest of the leg panels.

The weapons are appropriately labeled.

Then it was just a matter of writing the first verse on the carapace.

And moving on to the shoulder plates.

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So here he is: Knight Rampager Malacath!

I'm very happy with this!

He is very large and golden, and this is good. I have to admit, all this gold is making me think about the Custodes again... But this was a fun little project to do. I really like building and painting big models, and sometimes I think I should focus all my 28mm energies on the chonkers. We'll see.

Horus Heresy: Looking for Allies

Many creatures which once had shunned this desert ventured to live here now. Many in the band remarked how the daylight owls proliferated. Even now, Ghanima could see antbirds. They jigged and danced along the insect lines which swarmed in the damp sand at the end of the shattered qanat. Few badgers were to be seen out here, but there were kangaroo mice in uncounted numbers.

 - Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

I've been very much enjoying getting into Horus Heresy, if only because I keep getting new modeling ideas all the time.

I like the rulebook and Liber Hereticus because there's a lot of stuff in there. For example, there's this relationship chart, without which I would never have realized that the Salamanders are the friendship is magic legion.

More to the point, it tells me that my Word Bearers aren't really super friends with anybody except the Sons of Horus. I do like their color scheme, but other than that, eh. None of the special units exactly inspire me, and the legion as a whole is just not that interesting to me. All of the fun factions, though, are less close friends and more in the sort of casual acquaintances line.

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Since I've already got some Thousand Sons for 40k, I have to admit I'm partial to building some for 30k as well. Besides, the magic robots and psyker dreadnoughts are pretty cool. It also occurs to me that the funniest possible Thousand Sons unit would be a Scout squad, and once I'd thought of it I really wanted to build it.

I decided they should have Nemesis bolters, and frankly, the Nemesis bolters on some of the Forge World models just look like boringly generic sniper rifles. Not to mention that the whole idea of a silencer on a bolter is absolutely ludicrous. So I bought a box of regular scouts and took their bolters apart.

I then drilled a couple of tiny holes, superglued in some copper wire, and reassembled the bolter to be longer.

Then it was a simple matter of filling in the gap with green stuff, and we have Nemesis bolters.

I had two telescopic sights in my collection of space marine bits.

For the other three, I chopped sights off some unused Deathwatch bolters.

Then we add some Statuesque Miniatures beret and veteran heads, and we have a Scout Squad.

This is what the Sergeant looks like painted up:

And here's the Scout squad Viman-dadaran-ich, the very producers of doubt, in its entirety.

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The problem with Thousand Sons, though, is that since they're only Distrusted Allies, they can't score objectives for me. But Word Bearers actually have precious few legions that they're really friends with, which makes sense because they are theologians. Apart from the previously mentioned Sons of Horus and Salamanders, it's just the Emperor's Children, White Scars, and... Dark Angels.

Back in 2019, I got the Vigilus Ablaze campaign book so my Dark Apostle could use the new prayers in our next game. As it happens, Vigilus Ablaze also had rules for a specialist detachment of Fallen, and I wanted to make one. The first model I finished was a Sorcerer with an improvised combi-plasma, made from the Fallen/Dark Angels Veteran kit.

I gave them old-style Librarian heraldry.

Since then, the Fallen were completely dropped from 9th edition, so I suppose this dude is now a 30k Dark Angel Librarian? Mk VII armor was around during the Heresy, it's not completely impossible. While I was at it, how was I supposed to resist Wargame Exclusive's Cypheria? I suppose I could field her as a Moritat...

This all gave rise to another conversion idea. I have a slightly ancient Legion of the Damned sergeant from 3rd edition, and I'd thought about using the model as a chaplain earlier. It's just that there's a problem. Scale creep.

Looking more closely at the model, the torso is more or less the same size as the Mk VIs, but the legs are a lot shorter. I think that's a problem I can solve.

Here we go! While I was at it, I added the Mk VI power sword.

Using the same method that got me the Thousand Sons scouts, I feel like the objectively funniest Dark Angels character to make would be an Esoterist. So while I was at it, I added some Dark Angels bits and a Kromlech Book of Damnation.

Here we go, then:

I managed to get that green stuff shaped at least decently, I think, so I feel like this is going to work! I'm going to argue that this is a variant of Mk V power armour. I think I more or less solved the scale issue:

Here they are all painted up. I'm very happy with this!

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It's a well-known fact that Warhammer has stolen huge amounts of fluff from Dune. Navigators, proscribed computer technologies, the Imperial religious bureaucracy, and so on. The Warhammer 40,000 timeline is, I think quite explicitly, written so that the events of Dune fit neatly in it.

Even though it's a science fiction classic, I have to admit I only got around to reading Dune after the new movie came out. It was not only a great movie, but also hands down the most Warhammer movie ever made, which is obviously not a coincidence. As I was reading the novels, I started thinking about incorporating some Dune content in my Warhammer hobbying. I was quite pleased, then, when I came across this in Dune Messiah:

A heliograph of 'thopter wings flashed in the bright afternoon sun above the temple, part of the Royal Guard with Muad'dib's fist-symbol on its fuselage.

Muad'dib's fist-symbol! That's it: in my headcanon, the Imperial Fists are now Fremen. I don't know what the deal is with emperors having royal guards, but they did it in Star Wars as well, even though "royal" most definitely means something related to a king, not an emperor.

I've always been slightly partial to the Imperial Fists color scheme anyway, because the yellow is such a bold choice, and I quite often ended up playing as them in the Space Crusade video game. So I hit up the excellent Victoria Miniatures for some appropriate heads, and we're ready to go.

I'm going to start by painting up the sword Praetor from the Age of Darkness box as an Imperial Fists Praetor. I chopped up one of Victoria's Desert Torsos A for an appropriate head. I also couldn't decide whether I should swap the volkite charger for a bolter, in order to take advantage of the legion bonus. I've left the volkite on for now.

While I wasn't really interested in any of the Rites of War available to my Word Bearers, there are actually several Imperial Fists ones that I might want to try: the Hammerfall Strike Force or even the Stone Gauntlet.

I freehanded the army badge and some Imperial Fists heraldry onto the right shoulder pad.

I'm actually kinda happy with this model, and I may now have to start thinking about a command squad for them.

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One of the ironies of all this is that a big reason I bought the Age of Darkness box in the first place was that I wanted to build Fallen for 40k. Only for the Fallen to then completely disappear from the game. Nonetheless, I've quite enjoyed trying out different legion paint schemes and so on. I'm definitely attracted to the idea of Dune-themed Imperial Fists, but I think I also have some ideas for more Dark Angels...

Let's Paint Victory at Sea: the Kriegsmarine Fleet Box

In war, there is a conception known as the creation of a diversion, which consists of extending the scope of one's own operations to other areas in such a way that the enemy, to defend them, will be forced to withdraw forces from the main theatre of operations and thus to relax his pressure on it. A diversion, however, is of value only when, seen as a whole, it results in an advantage to the side creating it.

 - Admiral Karl Dönitz, Memoirs, chapter 10: the Battle of the Atlantic: November 1940–December 1941

I love small scale war games, and I love naval history. So when a friendly nearby mail-order gaming store offered Warlord's Victory at Sea rulebook for a competitive price, and a sizeable discount on the German navy fleet box, I knew what to do.

 - General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) in KOEI's L'Empereur (1989)

**

The German navy in World War II is perennially interesting because it offers so much fodder for all kinds of alternate histories. Decisively outnumbered by the Royal Navy, unsuccessful in the ferocious bureaucratic infighting of Nazi Germany and hampered by terrible national leadership, the Kriegsmarine still had excellently engineered, powerful fighting ships that could more than hold their own against their enemies. Reading the naval history of the Second World War, even through Anglo-American triumphalism, it's hard to not ask if the Germans couldn't have done more with what they had.

The trouble started at the top. Like most fascists, Hitler was basically a moron who replaced knowledge with bluster and bigotry. Sure, he was a successful politician, but I've always found the whole mythology of Hitler's supposed genius to be highly dubious. After nazism ended in utter defeat, just about everyone involved with it found it very convenient to blame everything on Hitler, and so he came to be portrayed as this sort of demonic spirit that somehow possessed all of Germany. It's complete nonsense. If there's anything the Trump phenomenon has taught us, surely it's that you can be a successful fascist demagogue while also being a complete idiot.

As a war leader and strategist, Hitler was useless. The post-WWI German navy never quite seemed to have a clear concept of what it was for. The ships it was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles made it essentially a coast defence force, but the Germans set out to circumvent this even before the Nazis came to power. Eventually in 1938 Hitler decided that he might have to fight Great Britain after all, and the naval building program known as Plan Z came into effect. The new fleet was to be ready by 1945, and Hitler apparently told the navy that the war would start in 1948.

As we know, the war actually started in 1939, when Plan Z had barely got underway. Because Germany faced an appalling shortage of steel, most work on the warships was immediately stopped. The fate of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin is a good example. Laid down in 1936 and launched in 1938, the ship was almost finished when the war started. In April 1940, work on her was stopped after the heavy losses in the Norwegian campaign. In 1942, however, Hitler and the navy had second thoughts, because now aircraft carriers were beginning to look like a really good idea, so work on the Graf Zeppelin was restarted in May. It lasted until December, when Hitler had a tantrum over the inconclusive Battle of the Barents Sea, fired Grand Admiral Raeder and stopped all work on big surface ships. The Graf Zeppelin was never finished, and was eventually sunk off the coast of Poland by the Soviets after the war.

So there's strategic leadership for you. Hitler's incompetence was magnified by the navy's inability to stand up to him, and its own lack of strategic direction. All in all, it never really seemed obvious what the Kriegsmarine was actually for, and the few heavy ships it did have were more or less squandered in penny-packet actions, or deployed so cautiously that they never got anything done.

This is what makes it such an interesting subject for wargaming: what if the German navy had actually been deployed as a battlefleet, and had fought fleet actions against some of its enemies?

This, incidentally, was why I was reading Correlli Barnett earlier. At the end of 1941, the Royal Navy was in a bad way. That November, HMS Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine; in December, the Prince of Wales and Repulse were destroyed by Japanese aircraft off Singapore, and HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were sunk in Alexandria harbor in a raid by Italian special forces. In the space of a little over a month, the Royal Navy lost four battleships and a battlecruiser.

What this meant in practice was that the Royal Navy had no modern capital ships in the Mediterranean Fleet, and only the ancient HMS Malaya at Gibraltar. The Home Fleet was reduced to two battleships. The Americans had transferred all three of their operational battleships to the Pacific.

If the German navy had come out and challenged the Royal Navy, the outcome could have been shocking. Especially if the Italian navy had simultaneously mounted an operation in the Mediterranean, diverting Force H from Gibraltar. The whole war at sea could have been changed.

Of course, they did no such thing. But this, I feel, is very much what wargames are for.

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Now, though, it's time to get to those models. Surprisingly, the ships in the box come in two different kinds of resin: lighter and darker grey. The light grey ships are great: next to no flash or anything that needed much attention at all. The dark grey ones, well, aren't. It's a much softer resin, there's a lot of clipping and filing to do, and all of the ships are a bit banana-shaped. The destroyers, the Köln and the Blücher are done in the worse resin, and as you can see, the Blücher is auditioning for a refit to a ski-jump carrier.

I tried dunking one of the destroyers in hot water and bending it a bit. It didn't go well.

My next attempt was with water brought to a near boil, and it actually worked. I'm not exactly delighted that I had to do this, but it wasn't that much trouble in the end. I unbent my ships while making dinner, and frankly I'm still surprised I didn't end up serving my flatmate the Köln in tomato sauce.

Sadly the bigger ships rebounded a bit overnight, even though I dunked them in cold water, but the end result is still a damn sight better than how I got them. Then it was on to the metal bits. The destroyers were all right, you just have to glue on a funnel, but the cruisers were very, very fiddly. Some of those bits are right on the edge of what's physically possible.

After fitting masts and davits and what have you to the Köningsberg and Köln, all I'll say is that the Kriegsmarine better make do with two light cruisers, because they are not getting more.

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The first ship I'm going to paint is one of the Type 1936A destroyers. In reality, the 1936As were only known by their hull numbers, and as near as I can tell, didn't even display those anywhere. That's all very boring, though, and since I was reading Michael Moorcock's Land Leviathan when I got these, my very first Kriegsmarine ship is going to be the Z26 Gräfin von Landsfeld.

I went for Light Grey for the sides and Sky Grey for the superstructure. Apparently the exact colors of Kriegsmarine ships are the subject of a long-standing argument, like the one on Soviet air force colors, and while I find these things fascinating, I also want to paint my miniatures, so I picked the two closest-seeming Vallejo colors. The decks are in Beige Brown, which someone recommended; it's darker than most people seem to use, but I don't know, I kinda like it.

I painted the water around the ship in Blue, Dark Blue and Blue Green, with some Off-White foam in places. Maybe it's a little Mediterranean, but I like it. I'm also into this alternate-history idea of naming the 1936As after German (or Germanized!) noblewomen, so here's the one I broke earlier, as the Z23 Herzogin Margarete von Bayern, and the Z24 Kaiserin Matilda.

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Next up, the two light cruisers. I'm going to be honest here and admit that I'm not that keen on trying to figure out the exact historically accurate color schemes for these ships: I'm painting the main deck Beige Brown and the superstructure above it Sky Grey, and calling it done.

The Blücher is getting the same treatment.

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The box also came with four Stuka squadrons, also in the darker, more annoying resin, and they were a chore to prepare. I also kind of don't get solid flying stands when the same darn company sells transparent ones for its WWII air combat game. But still, the little planes are cute.

I painted the stands Blue and the planes with the same colors as in said WWII air combat game, that is, Light Grey with Neutral Grey stripes, and Green Grey for the barely visible underside.

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At this point in the project, the Steam summer sale happened, and the PC version of Victory at Sea was available at an 85% discount. I bought it, and it's fun. It's based on the original Mongoose ruleset, and it's very arcadey, almost like a mobile game, but surprisingly fun.

I tried it as the Germans, obviously, and they gave me a 1936-class destroyer to sail around in. The manual is four pages and they do the usual video tutorials that explain the controls, but that's about it. After a couple of introductory battles, I was told to go raid shipping around England, so I did. My first attempt ended when I decided to find out if i could take on a Town-class cruiser, and it turned out I couldn't. At least there's a Steam achievement for being sunk!

In my next game, I started out skippering the Z43, and ended up commanding a battlefleet with multiple battleships and a carrier. Toward the end of the campaign, the game becomes more than a bit repetitive; the overall design of the campaign isn't great, with the enemy sending out their ships in penny packets that are ludicrously easy to destroy. It's a shame, because the combat system is actually fun and exciting, but the game just doesn't know how to make use of it. I've had a good time playing it, but it could have been so much better.

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Then it's on to the last ships. First, the two other Admiral Hippers: the nameship of the class and the Prinz Eugen. I don't know why Warlord thought we needed three of these, to be honest. But they're in the better resin and there's less fiddling about, so why not. Here's the Hipper.

The Prinz Eugen, though, doesn't really interest me at all. So instead, I've decided to name it after the Hipper-class cruiser I invented for my video game fleet: she is now the Admiral Bellingshausen.

And, finally, the Scharnhorst.

I expected the Scharnhorst to be bigger, but next to the Hippers it drives home that they really were battlecruisers.

There they all are!

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All in all, I've had a great time painting my little ships and playing Victory at Sea on the computer. I've already got more little ships, and at some point I hope I get to try the tabletop game as well.