Thursday, April 18, 2019

Oh, I Looked Over Jordan: A Soldier's View of Paradise

They'd been on Hecate all of three days on their most recent R&R and already orders had come down to move. Excercises, Angad grumbled to himself. Probably the ass end of nowhere out on Blanding or something. "R&R. It's really Redeployment and Repositioning" he muttered. Nevertheless, he mustered his squad and marched them to the shuttle.



As he rounded the nose of the venerable Starlifter he noticed APCs and brother Arty trundling up. And in the distance some half-converted field tractor from some forgotten moon's excuse for a museum. "Damn curious to see so much armor on the move too," he thought. He hadn't even been aware they'd brought the wagons.




Starlifters were a little leggier than the more usual Thunderchickens and Dragonflies. (Probably owing to the utter lack of things that go boom in a useful manner. Or things that stop the other guy from knocking all your organs out.) That couldn't bode well. But at least they usually didn't smell too bad. At least there would be seats. Would beat the Pinzgauer humping the Hippo.




. . . Well, so be it. They loaded up and off they went. After a surprisingly short journey of precisely one jump the shuttles were burning through atmo again. "Well that was quick. Of course, from Hecate that could be about anywhere . . . "


The air was fresh as he stepped off the shuttle. The temperature was remarkably clement. And . . . spires rose over the concrete shuttleport walls. Castle spires. "The Kaerites stars? Thalia, most likely. Damn peculiar indeed." The landing strip was a positive hive of activity as several shuttles disgorged their cargo at once. "Must be the whole damn regiment." he thought.


The next installment of the story can be found in An Exorcise in Caution Part I: Etude Tableau.

Meanwhile beyond the fourth wall . . .

Not a big piece of story here yet. Mostly just needed an excuse to show off some new acquisitions. The Logansport 1st has been building for a while, ever since PFC Bush found her way into the abandoned elf city in the dust on Moab. At first I acquired old IG in dribs and drabs along with other things. Recently I've gotten more systematic about it. I've been collecting this since Rhinos came three to a box, but I never managed to build my first until now. (I had a thing for Predators and Land Raiders. Don't ask. Both are lovely, but clearly I was a silly child.) Long story short: I'm finally building the IG army I should have built thirty years ago. And what better way to show it than a good old-fashioned deployment. The squad seen in the first few shots is new, as is the armor. In the last two photographs you can see them joining up with some of the previous unit members. There's probably a solid reinforced platoon now. Not a company yet, but a very strong platoon.

Anyway, thank you for reading along.

Sincerely,
The Composer

14 comments:

  1. Just stumbled over this blog – lovely stuff! Great to see some beautifully painted classic Guardsmen, and the narrative is cool. Consider yourself up one subscriber :)

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    1. Thank you! Glad you like it. Your own blog is also quite lovely. And I will myself subscribe . . . as soon as I can translate the eighth edition datastream protocols into something my first edition brain can parse. ;-)

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  2. Awesome scenes! Those shots of the guys getting on and off the craft are fantastic!!!!

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    1. Thank you! That's so very much why I wanted to put ramps on the things, to make poor footsore grunts and adventurers march on and march off. And so I could make shots of loading stuff. Believe it or not, I used to actually like loading trucks. (Odd that. But . . . it was a few trucks a week in theatres, not a dozen a day at a shipping company. Except for that one time when the Rolling Stones came through town, but that was . . . intense. And packing each one was a fun puzzle.)

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  3. Great stuff. I remember as a child building a whirlwind out of the only rhino we had. Also the original predator. Very cool to see them painted up for IG.

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    1. It's been so long since I last built a tank I'd almost forgotten how much fun it could be. (Heck, both of those were even technically just rescues. Already built. I just tore them half apart and rebuilt them.) Rhinos look good with IG. I'm glad I finally got around to it myself.

      Also: believe it or not, my childhood Whirlwind started life as a Predator. True story. Thus I had to reinvent the build. (And I still have a few spare parts lying around.) This one is much more official and looks quite different than my old one. Not that I'm going to lose any sleep over it. Just . . . different companies supplied the rocket tubes, I guess.

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  4. Nice builds and vehicles. I love the IG paint scheme.

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    1. Thank you! They're pretty simple, but they're supposed to hearken back to the Desert Storm inspired paint that was popular locally in my youth. It looks all right at table distance, anyway. I hope.

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  5. I feel sorry for the other guys.

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  6. It's a Shirts vs. Skins kind of game. Red vs. Blue. An exercise. ;-) Supposedly. So I suppose I should feel sorry for all of 'em. Lots of marching and not much decent chow, most likely. But at the end of it maybe they'll actually get that proper R&R at a nice station.

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  7. Another cool post. Love the transports and other vehicles. You have a fantastic eye for recycling toys into 40K gems. Really must go and raid some charity shops.

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    1. Charity shops, sometimes eBay, even toy swap-meets. Yessir. Toy-hammering is FUN! And the best part is the broken stuff with missing parts is usually the stuff the collectors want to get rid of, so even on the bay it's usually not too bad. (Usually.) Anyway . . .

      Glad you like it! :) Thank you!

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  8. I'm in love with what I see here. The pics are particularly evocative, inspired work.

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    1. Thank you. :) I had a lot of fun setting this one up. Every once in a while you can kind of tell a story with pictures alone. I don't feel like I'm able to do it nearly as often as I'd like, but this time . . . I think it worked.

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