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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Rocketgaunts: Alternate Plastic Gargoyles

REMINDER: If you haven't gotten around to it yet, you've only got until tomorrow at midnight to enter the 10,000 View Commission Giveaway, so be sure to get on it :)

For all my talk of making Tyranids, there have been painfully few of them kicking around this blog for a while now, so here's an attempt to address that discrepancy! Anyone who has been around Warpshadow has, likely, already run across my Rocketgaunt concept, but I thought I'd dig out my rats with wings, dust them off, and take some better photographs of them.

The Rocketgaunt originated back when the idea of plastic gargoyles was just a rumour on the breeze. The only gargoyles available were the annoying, precarious, flying-brick pewter models. I was determined to find a way to build plastic gargoyles out of a pile of Macragge Termagaunts and some other more-or-less unneeded Tyranid bits. I took my inspiration from Tyson Koch, also known as Menelker, and his Rocket Tyrant solution for a flying Hive Tyrant:



As I didn't have any wings readily available, and seeing as--for some reason--I'd never been a big fan of winged nids, I decided to try my hand at making a jetpack for a termagaunt to transform him into a gargoyle. Tyson had used the biovore cannons rather effectively as jets, so I looked to guns that I had in large numbers, and I came up with devourers and spinefists. Here's how I decided to configure them:

The idea was that the central, cut-down devourer was the main jet, and the spinefists on either side acted as directional controls. Here is one of the jetpacks attached to the gaunt:
I added to Tyson's design by incorporating some extra carapace plates to act as wings or control surfaces or wing casings. As I was looking to make the rocketgaunts on the cheap, I elected to use cardboard reinforced with carpenter's glue.


Sorry those shots are rubbish. They are from my original rocketgaunt that acted as a kind of proof of concept. I dusted the rocketgaunts off again the other day and tried to take some proper photos of them. I agree that they can't really compare to the current, absolutely gorgeous plastic gargoyles, but I thought they were a crazy enough idea that people may get a kick out of if they hadn't seen it before.









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