Greetings Terrans, how are we all? Following on from the 1^st Teknishun Swad last week, we logically follow on with Skwad 2 :-)  As I mentioned last time, the 2^nd Tech squad show up in scenario 2, and these guys are packing some serious heat… Plasma guns, Conversion Fields, Bolt Pistols and Swords to be exact! Dat’s some seriously snazzy guns, so I went with a suitably snazzy colour for these wannabe flash gitz:

 *edit – spotted that I had missed the teeth as soon as I had posted! I’ll get that sorted out :-)

Ok, so I know some of these minis are actually packing flamers, and I know that I’m supposed to be doing this project with as much accuracy as possible, but the foot is going down and I’m reinterpreting the minis & calling them plasma… Because Orks… So there.

Speaking of minis, how funny is it that the actual plasma boys appear to be resting their chins on the plasma coils? Clearly they were sculpted in the days before plasma ‘got hot’ and tried to fuck you over far more frequently than the one-in-six frequency that the laws of statistics demand… In fact, keeping in mind that Space Orks have the same ballistic skill as Space Marines in Rogue Trader, this squad is going to be a real handful…

Here’s another angle showing off their swords & pistols:

While I was painting these guys, I realised that I got the base rims wrong for my first Teknishun skwad, so I quickly fished them out of the display case and corrected that oversight… Seemed a shame not to take advantage of the situation and do a quick group shot of the whole Techy crew together:

This little lot represents a bit of a milestone in the whole project so far, in that I’m around half way through the Orks. I’m also done with all the boys that I had built and undercoated, so it’s going to be a bit of a building phase for the next few weeks I’m afraid… I have the power armoured Guards to work through, and I also have a whole bunch of ‘Skumbos’ to get sorted out… Now, I like converting minis, so this bit is going to be great fun for me, but it might be pretty boring for you guys! I hope you can all bear with me though, because I think this is going to be the really interesting bit of the project.

The Skumbos should be particularly good fun. In the fluff, the poor old Skumbos are described as being ‘lower caste’ Orcs, and they are lightly armed with Bolt Pistols & Swords… Unsurprisingly, there aren’t too many pistol/sword minis of that era, so I knew I needed to think outside of the box for this little lot! I decided to play on the whole ‘lower caste’ thing, and picked up a few fantasy Orc Archers of the correct vintage. After a bit of chopping & some putty work, I ended up with these:

Whaddaya think? They aren’t finished yet, but hopefully you get the idea… I’m planning four of these per unit, plus a legit pistol/sword Space Ork to represent the unit leader, (who, bizarrely, gets Mesh armour). I need six such units, so maths tells me that I now need to finish these four, add another twenty, and round up six proper Space Orks to lead them… should keep me busy for a while! :-)

Until next time dudes, be awesome out there!