More Dakka!

One of the things I enjoy about building an army with assorted eBay lots, is the fact that the army evolves organically as you try to make some sense of other people's decisions. That's what has happened in this post...

...and I've also painted a pencil sharpener.

Ploughing through my small, recently acquired, Ork backlog I've come to what appears to be a mismatched group of Lootas, where for some reason whoever I bought these from had built two as Burnas and two as Lootas, leaving not enough to make a unit of each. 

Fortunately, 2nd edition 40k still gives me options for how to use them in the army.

The Burnas have been painted in Bad Moon colours to enable them to fit into my ever growing bolter mob and beginning to take advantage of the Bad Moon special rule to allow them to have as many special weapons as they like.

However, the two Lootas will unsurprisingly join my Deathskulls (which is handy given that one of them has a big skull on it). After a bit of discussion with Matt, despite having options for Auto-cannons or Heavy Bolters, I've decided to count their guns as Kustom Mega Blasters so that I don't have to remember what each gun is. Also, they look more than a bit 'kustom'.

Finally, the pencil sharpener...erm, Squig Katapult.

This is genuinely a souvenir trebuchet pencil sharpener I bought many years ago, possibly with the intention of using it in my Bretonnian army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. It used to have a firing mechanism, which would have been fun mid-game, but I've rendered it 'safe' to prevent the arm from being permanently vertical.

I've not done much in terms of converting the original model, apart from adding a few more boards using coffee stirrers (which are fortunately exactly the same width as the boards on the model) and an old Goblin shield.

I can't shake the feeling that it looks a a bit like the yellow 2CV from For Your Eyes Only. However, janky-homebrew conversions are what wargaming in the early 90s was all about, so I feel that it's totally appropriate for a 2nd edition army.

It will be crewed by two of the Gretchin without any ranged weapons.

I can't promise that this is the last of the ropey artillery to appear given that I've found a few more Gnoblars at the bottom of my bitz box. On the subject of which, I did a bit of sorting and ended up disposing of a handful of broken models that had been lurking in there for years. It doesn't affect the Lead Mountain score (as I never counted the contents of the bitz box), but it does help to balance out some of my recent purchases.

Acquired: 39
Painted: 132
Lead Mountain: 508