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Project Jubilee (a.k.a. Leander, 54mm Warhound Titan)

Started by MarcoSkoll, January 23, 2012, 08:30:28 PM

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Dolnikan

The head looks very good, it has the proper shape. Even with milliput it has to be quite hard to get it right.

Motorising the Vulcan Mega bolter could be cool but I'm afraid that it would be a lot more work. And the rotating barrels would not add very much to the model I'm afraid.
Circles of the wise My attempt at writing something, please comment on it if you have any advise.

Draco Ferox

Since it would add a lot of work to the project, I wouldn't bother. Remember Marco, you're making a 54mm titan. That by itself is impressive enough, and all I see is your mind racing ahead of the project. I'm not bashing you personally, it's also a huge character flaw of mine, but time and hard experience have shown me that I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew (not just figuratively...)
Be polite. Be efficient. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

Draco Ferox

Since it would add a lot of work to the project, I wouldn't bother. Remember Marco, you're making a 54mm titan. That by itself is impressive enough, and all I see is your mind racing ahead of the project. I'm not bashing you personally, it's also a huge character flaw of mine, but time and hard experience have shown me that I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew (not just figuratively...). I think that not motorising the barrels is a good choice, as let's not forget the responses at the start of the project, most of which were *rubs eyes in disbelief* "Did I read/see that right?". It's already a fantastic project, and I would like to see you just get it done and painted, so you can use it in that conclave you're running.
Be polite. Be efficient. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

MarcoSkoll

I think I probably agree. While I fully intend to do the LED lighting, I'm not sure the motorisation would add enough to justify the extra complexity and weight.

That said, I think I'll add the additional battery box anyway. Extra battery life and balance weight can't be a bad thing. (The design of the Warhound is quite front heavy, particularly when you start using Milliput on the head instead of plasticard or balsa)
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

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MarcoSkoll

Regrettable update to status:
Given the pessimistic soothsaying of people on Skype about whether this can be done in time, I'm shifting Leander to 2nd priority so as to avoid any risk of not getting my actual warband done in time.
When they're done, I'll come back to this and do what I can to see if this can still be finished in time - but based on previous mistakes, there's too much of a risk of this eating up all the time for everything else.

Worst case scenario, if the theme for the Summer Conclave sticks, the game I've written for the Titan will happily work there with just a change or two.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

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Inquisitor Octavian Lars

Possibly play the scenario over a titan being built?
Velterax III
All my wargaming under one address
http://velterax3chronicles.blogspot.com/

http://www.the-conclave.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=1566.0
Insertion Zone. Also on the Velterax III Chronicles.

Always looking for comments

Koval

#36
If a fight's going to spill into a Titan manufactorum it'll likely involve a lot more (just in terms of combatants) than just a few warbands. I doubt the Adeptus Mechanicus would take kindly to their holy sanctum being defiled. You're probably looking for something closer to either a Deathwatch game (if small warband versus large army) or Apocalypse match (if more than one army).

I'll warrant that there's a very good reason for bringing a Titan into Inquisitor, but there are lots of reasons why a scenario in a manufactorum wouldn't really fit.

MarcoSkoll

A bigger issue is that a model Titan being built looks nothing like a real Titan being built.

However, on Koval's note, I do have a load of NPC guardsmen (not exactly Skitarii, but needs must) and some new NPC rules I want to try out. :P

But in any case, I assure you, it will get done ASAP. I have a big Maelstrom box filled with Infinity Haqqislam that I'm sworn off working on until Leander is finished.
I think as far as the size of a normal game, that pile is actually the Infinity equivalent of an 40k Apocalypse army, but given how pretty the models are, I don't care.
(Note to Robey: I know I said I had Yu Jing HI, and I do. I have both. Daft, yes, but refer to previous note about pretty models and not caring.)
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Koval

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on February 11, 2012, 03:10:39 PM
A bigger issue is that a model Titan being built looks nothing like a real Titan being built.
That is hardly a problem that you can't fix with chicken wire, guitar strings, and a few cables. :P

Serge

As everyone already knows, I totally love inq.scale super heavies.

Nice work, Marco.
Nothing endorses anything that has something to do with me.

MarcoSkoll

With the various talk regarding the IGT13, I'm working on this beast once again.

I'm doing a mulligan on the Vulcan Mega-Bolter, as while balsa makes a decent structural material, it doesn't paint well unless it's smoothed over with wall filler or something.



This version should weigh about the same as the balsa version without any meaningful compromise on strength, although it is taking a lot longer to build.

~~~~~

What is still worrying me is the matter of weight and balance.

My upper guess on the upper body (torso, weapons, head) weight is around 1500 grams; the low guess is about 1000 grams. It's all a bit dependent on how many batteries I shove in there (I'm currently debating between 8 or 12*) and how much the remaining parts will weigh.
*More batteries is obviously longer battery life, but the bigger bonus is the chance to use them as a counter balance to get the torso's centre of gravity closer to the waist joint (which has the effect that rotating the torso won't throw off the balance).
The downside is it will move the overall centre of gravity up.


... in any case, that's all perched between 30-45 cm up off the table.

However, each individual foot and lower leg should weigh in at nearly as much as the entire upper body (mostly due to lots of lead shot) and does have an area about the same as my splayed hands. I'm hoping that this will bring the centre of gravity low enough and make the ground contact wide enough as to quash any doubts about stability.

This bottom-heavy approach was in the plan from the start, but it's beyond hard to predict exactly where the centre of gravity is going to be. Or rather, it's actually impossible, because the thing articulates and won't have a fixed CoG.

(Then again, I suppose the Forge World 28mm scale ones can be stable without a base, and those don't have the advantage of being weighted.)
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Koval

Why don't you put the batteries in the legs and just run some wire up to the upper body?

seaglen

How have i missed this thread in the past??

Just inspiring stuff!
Are you going to be detailing an interior replete with princeps etc?

Trasher

I'm happy to see this project hasn't been forgotten :)
My Nurgle Cult Thread on The Conclave
My Nurgle Cult Thread on Papa Nurgle
"Come on, daemons live in the warp. [snip] hours turn into cm, cm turn into walruses."

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: Koval on December 15, 2012, 07:34:18 AMWhy don't you put the batteries in the legs and just run some wire up to the upper body?
The two halves of the Titan are not going to be permanently attached, but magnetised so it can be disassembled for easier transport. The legs and the upper body will each make a relatively "flat" piece to transport, without the big voids the overall shape would have.
(I had considered making it fold up at its hip joints, but that wouldn't pack very efficiently - even if the hip joints didn't have pistons that would fall apart under those circumstances.)

Running a connection up through that kind of joint is not likely to be reliable. Running wire outside with a breakable electrical connection wouldn't be a problem though.
However, it would mean deviating from the design, and I'm not actually sure exactly where in the legs I'd put a battery box. The "Pelvis" is going to be mostly structural engineering to make the hip joints work, so there's not really much room there. The upper thighs are large enough - but I'd have to re-engineer my plans for the structural skeleton there.

The tl;dr answer is that it's the only practicable place to keep the power supply.

Quote from: seaglen on December 15, 2012, 12:15:04 PMAre you going to be detailing an interior replete with princeps etc?
Yes, there will be an interior, complete with a Princeps, Techpriest, 2x Moderati and 2x weapons targeting servitors. Some sources list an extra servitor and Techpriest, but space is fairly tight in there anyway! (Even though I'm likely going to omit one of the internal bulkheads/doors)

I'll probably throw in some maintenance servo skulls though. (I'd imagine they're MIU-Linked to the Techpriest, letting him work through them and access areas he otherwise couldn't).

All except the servitors should be removable. Partly so the crew can have "on foot" models to allow them to appear not in the Titan (although the Techpriest is going to have a standing model anyway), partly to offer up another possibility.

The plan is to leave some parts swappable to leave open the possibility of a later project to make parts to reconfigure the chassis into a Chaos Titan - likely Khorne dedicated based on my planned colour scheme and the number of parts that are practicable to swap. (Armour-wise, the shin, loin, head and back plates).

The former case is simply that the colour scheme is going to be similar to the Legio Ignatum - a Maroon, Yellow, Black, Brass combination taken from (as I've said before) this steam locomotive. That colour scheme works for Khorne, so that's good.

The other part is that I won't have the opportunity to defile every last armour plate - with Khorne, that works fine. Things like the Brass Scorpion and Blood Slaughterer are actually very "clean". They're not covered in rust or dribbling daemonic pus all over the place, which means that having some "plain" armour plates won't be out of place.

Leaving the crew interchangeable will mean an opportunity for either rotting crew (as a daemon engine) or some traitorous fanatics driving it.
But that is (at very best) a long way off. Still, planning ahead never hurts.

~~~~~

As an aside, I have no idea how the Vulcan Mega bolter is meant to hold the 14,000 rounds claimed in Imperial Armour. With conservative ammunition dimensions, I can about see a way (although not fully practical) to get about 2,000-2,500 rounds per hopper.

With my own interpretation of the mega-bolter, with much longer barrels (you may notice the ejection port is much further back on my version) and the larger cartridge to make use of that, I'm getting about 1,200 rounds per hopper.
(Basically, my interpretation starts with the idea that each half of the Mega Bolter is roughly a 50mm version of the GAU-8 Avenger*).
*Although the Avenger doesn't eject cases, it feeds them back into the magazine. It stops them damaging the plane as they're ejected.

However, rather than the normal interpretation of bolter rounds, I'm playing it as something a bit different, with the fuse instead being more like that on the Bofors 3P ammunition.
The full description on that is here, but the short version is that it comes with proximity fuses (to allow it to detonate near hard to hit aerial targets), time fuses (to allow it to detonate at a given distance) or impact fuses (to let it explode on impact, or delayed to go off after penetrating the target).

50mm calibre (although I'm not sure on a canonical source for that, it's what I'm going with) is not something to use against infantry in the way bolter ammo is normally fused (to go off when it hits its target).
I see the Mega-Bolter as being able to air-burst munitions, blasting apart entire squads with well timed and aimed bursts of just a fraction of a second (perhaps even delaying detonations until after the rounds have penetrated intervening terrain). Against harder targets like vehicles, it might use direct impact.

Of course, using that kind of ammunition in a Gatling gun is crazy... but so is a Titan. Stupidly awesome over-engineering is routine in the GrimDark.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles