Conversion: Phantous

My Apologies Once Again. Those Outside The United States May Not Understand This Reference. In Fact, I Hope No One Does...

Welcome back. This post is going to be quite long with a lot of pictures for those of you who like the whole visualizing thing this blog has going. The Phantous has been in question by a small few of you playtesters as to what it should look like. How big is it? What does the weapon look like? Will it make my pilot look fat? Unfortunately for all of us it took Chapterhouse Studios longer than expected to push out their Wheeled-Chimera kit. Once that was finally available to the public it was time to get to work. And a lot of work is what this thing took. More after the break:

To start, the weapon. This thing is supposed to be a whirling/spinning dome of rocket flurries. My first thought; wiffle ball. So after stopping by my local Target store I picked up one of these (Well, eight of these, I couldn't buy a single...) and cut it in half:

Now to keep the barrels the missiles will be shooting in place I needed the holes to stop at the surface. So I cut the bottom of the half that wouldn't be exposed like so:

Side Note; This Conversion Is The Most Involved In Sports I Will Ever Be.

And glued it inside making the surface perfect for the next step:

Next, I cut out a bunch of plasticard cylinders for the bottom of the barrel......there's a joke there somewhere:

And put those in place:

Next, the barrel extentions came from a slightly smaller plasticard tube and were then glued in place:

Moving on to the chassis itself I wanted this vehicle to be based on the Chimera chassis or something similar with a longer frame, I just didn't want a plain Chimera. Luckily, Chapterhouse has the aforementioned Rapid Response Wheeled Kit as a replacement for the Chimera's treads, giving it a completely unique look. While hard as hell to glue in place, it looks snazzy when put together:

While that was drying, I needed to close up the bottom of the weapon with some plasticard:

And shave off some extruding points on the top of the Chimera so the weapon can lay flat:

Next, those pesky holes for the lasguns. For the weapons I used a trick Eric uses (he shares a hatred for the look of the lasguns poking out of the Chimera) by gluing them upside down:

Next the back-hatch. While I could simply apply the doors the Chimera came with, this thing isn't supposed to be an empty transport. It's supposed to be full of mechanics to make the weapon-of-doom function. So I grabbed a bunch of random mechanical bits from my bits bucket and went Picasso on this thing's ass:

First, a Rhino side-hatch fits perfectly on the Chimera's top-hatch. Funny how things work out:

Next I got to cuttin' and gluin' those random bits:

And voila! Mechanical-guts!

Next, I wanted an explanation as to how this thing can hit so many targets at once. So I decided on giant radar-ish devices strapped to the sides of this thing, but I didn't want them just hanging there. So I took some power cables from Dragon Forge Design and slurped them out from the mechanical-guts from the last step:

Next, the radar dish-thingies. This idea comes straight from Mordian 7th's Myrmidon; something I've kept in the back of my head for quite a while and it finally came to pass: deodorant stick caps!

Glued in place with the power cables running behind them:

With those in place, it was time to get the weapon in place:

And a few finishing details such as the bumper, antenna, hull-mounted weapon, back-hatch and pilot guard. And finished:

While this looks a bit out-there, this is my Mechanicus and, ya' know...they're a little out there to begin with If I could somehow shrink the weapon down ever-so slightly I'd be more pleased with how this turned out, but that's as close to the correct size as I could find at the local shops. Either way I'm very pleased with how this turned out and hopefully this will answer everyone's questions on what the Phantous should look like.

More conversions on the way!