After fixing my RAFM Hunter Commando I was looking at my Hunter conversion I made to represent Sergeant Espera's APE suit, from my second novel, and thought I can do better than that. Such is the burden of being self-critical. Below is the original conversion.
Pretty good job
ReplyDeleteCheers.
DeleteSo as a relative newcomer to old Heavy Gear, I have a very important question to ask. Do you prefer the current northern stylings (angular body, head, AND rocket packs) or the original old school rafm mix (angular body but curvy head and rockets)? :) I'm ok with either as long as they're consistent. For instance, in blitz scale, I had always wanted to replace all my rockets with curvy ones for the south to go with their curvy torso and heads instead of the angular rockets they came with for casting simplicity.
ReplyDeletePut me on the spot why don't ya. ;-)
DeleteI like the old style old RAFM Hunters over the new Blitz Hunters. AS you can see from the above picture, I put a round rocket pod on my Hunter from the get go: I wanted to differentiate Army from Marine combat armour suits, but given all my Blitz scale stuff is home brew conversions you can probably infer I wasn't happy with the Gears as they came out of the packs.
That's not a criticism of Dream Pod 9, what I wanted were models to use for my own universe setting: near future Earth circa 2072. So my needs were peculiar to me.
Looking at the old RAFM range some of the Southern stuff was a bit funky looking. However, in principle I approve of round weapons on one set of Gears and square on the other force.
In short, I'm pretty ecumenical about such things as long as the model looks good to me.
That's very diplomatic from you. You must be from the Terra Novan badlands! :)
ReplyDeleteIt was, wasn't it just.
DeleteLook, if I were an old HG fan in from the get go, the I'd be quite bitter and twisted over the loss of the old Gears, because the new ones, though nice, just don't have the presence that the bigger Gears have from being that much larger.
Given DP9 now market Striders and Gear Striders my nose would be doubly put out of joint too.
The old 1/87th Gears make for very good 15mm wargaming models, and really you can call them whatever scale you want given they don't actually exist in the real world. IMNSHO why oh why did they ever state these were HO 1/87th scale in the first place? It's like DP9 had never heard of wargaming and looking at the bigger picture, rather than attempting to try and lock buyers into their scale. Quite frankly I think I know of more people that use their models for 15mm wargaming than I know people who play either 1/87th or 1/144th wargames.
Sorry that was a bit of a rant.
1/87 is HO model railroading scale; it's popular for that hobby but completely unused for tabletop minis. 1/144 is on the low end of N scale model railroading as well. The only thing I can think of is that someone early on at DP9 was also into that hobby and figured that there could be some good crossover with the terrain options available there.
ReplyDeleteSometimes good reasons lead to bad choices.
DeleteWhere can I download this mod? I tried Zettamods, but doesn't seem to be available there.
ReplyDeleteNo rules for these using BT. Sorry.
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