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The Bad Touch Battery: Traitor Rapiers

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Here we have a nice example of Sod's Law. After waiting ages for Raging Heroes to get around to releasing their crew-served heavy weapons from the first TGG Kickstarter I finally cracked and built my own Rapiers, in part due to my FLGS having a sale on some Team Yankee models including a set of M163 VADS/ M901 ITV support vehicles, which are basically adaptations of the venerable M113 APC. Since the M113 is basically a box with tracks it was perfect to act as the basis for these models.

Of course, Raging Heroes released the models I'd been waiting for almost immediately after I finished building these. Damn you French fellows!

Anyway, this is still quite nice since these models are unusual in that everything needed to make them comes from the one kit, or is a plastic tube. I can't go into a detailed part breakdown since I have no idea what most of the parts were meant to be, but so long as you can make the gun, (mine is made from a 10mm tube stuffed with three 4mm ones, as far as I can measure), the rest is fairly simple. Most of the parts are used unaltered except for the gun shield, which is one of the M113 top-plates trimmed in line with the hatch covers. I imagine that in transit, the gun barrels retract and the doors in the shield close flush to them, protecting the barrels from travel and preventing anything getting into them. I also added a tow-bar, since though the gun is self-propelled you'd probably want to hook it up to a Chimera, Trojan or Goliath to move it long distances.

As an aside, the Team Yankee kit is one of those annoying ones where you get the base model plus separate upgrade sprues, meaning that if built stock you'd have entire sprues of unused bits. Great for people building other things (like me), a bit wasteful if you just wanted a platoon of M163s.

The only other thing of note with the Rapiers is the rear screen. Once everything else was done and varnished, I painted the inside with metallic green and then filled it with Water Effect gel. Once that had fully cured clear, I then went over the top with the new clear green Technical paint, which gives a nice feeling of depth to the screen. I might go back and add a HUD to it if I'm feeling brave.

Moving on to the crew, I'm leaving open the option of getting some of the Raging Heroes crew models at a later date, so I just went for mostly lasgun-armed models in fairly static poses. You might notice Lucky Lucy there, which seemed a good use for her since she's an artillery spotter. The battery commander has an armoured torso from the KST models to add some variety, and I threw in a couple of pairs of binoculars.

You might also spot, on the far left, 'Warrior Woman' from Schaefer's Last Chancers. I've had her lying about for ages, and since the pose is fairly static it seemed this was as good a place to use her as any. I may do an individual shot of her since I like how she came out and the focus on her here is poor. The model has a larger face than the others and it usually looks a bit ugly painted, so I did her with a Rhinox Hide skin tone base, since such a dark tone allowed me more control of how her features looked. As an older metal model, this one has a few bits of 'mystery detail', especially the odd arrow tattoo thing on her left arm which is apparently bare even though the right is wearing some sort of jacket sleeve. I left the model unaltered since I don't like messing with OOP models unless necessary to repair them and the odd Imperial detail is to be expected amongst a recently-turned Regiment like the 3rd Trojan.

Photography by me, original miniatures (c) Games Workshop (Warrior Woman), Raging Heroes (other crew) and Battlefront Miniatures (Rapier parts)
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Scumdog47's avatar
"I appreciate their input."
;) :D