Medusa Conversion (1)

Hi all and welcome to my first post.  As I mentioned yesterday I will be showing you my first Medusa conversion.  First of all, I’ll explain a bit about my army.  While most imperial guard regiments are very, well, regimented, mine is the exact opposite.  The army represents a veteran regiment made up of the survivors of numerous deployments of troops from a wide variety of planets.  I’ll show you some of them over the next few weeks, but for now, I just wanted to mention that almost all the armoured vehicles are non standard.  My seven completed chimeras are all different patterns (most of my own devising), for example.  

As for the Medusa, I intend to do two of these but I am undecided as to whether to make them look the same or not.  I have actually been thinking about how to create these for about four months now and I’ll just explain a bit about the thought processes as I think they are very important when attempting a scratch build or extensive conversion.  The Medusa is either a direct fire siege cannon or a self propelled anti-tank gun and therefore it never made sense to me that it had such a high profile and open platform.  I wanted mine to be much lower, and have an enclosed roof.  Not only will this help in game terms, it will (hopefully) echo some of the German tank destroyers of WW2.

Finally, i should mention that 90% of my tanks tart life as crappy Basilisks bought from ebay for not a great deal of money.  i just rip the guns off, replace the tracks and any other bits, and add plasticard.

The pictures below represent how far I have come on the conversion so far.  I am still considering what kind of detailing to put on the roof, sides, and rear, and how to mount the heavy flamer.  Suggestions are appreciated. Of course, i'll post when its finished and let you know how it turned out.  

this is what i started with.  this is after i ripped the gun off and replaced the tracks.

i then took a risk and cut a large section out of the hull.  this was where i intended to mount the gun (which i had not yet built, probably not clever, but it worked out)

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then i lined it with plasticard.  rivets will be added later.

i then made the gun.  i may add more thin plasticard to the end to cover up the holes, making it look less like a battle cannon.

two shots showing the gun mounted and the rear built.  to mount the gun i sliced up the normal earthshaker mounts so that they would fit and not get in the way of the roof.  as you can see, i wanted the gun to be able to elevate for siege work, even though it is a direct fire weapon.

here are three shots showng the completed sides of the hull and some of the interior details.  although the roof will be glued in place you can still see inside around the middle of the gun.  i used sections cut from the hull of the valkyrie kit because they have some nice details on (you will see why i have these when i show you my vendettas) could have used bits of plasticard with random bits stuck to them just as easily.  

at this point i realised i'd screwed up.  ther was nowhere for the driver to see out! i was forced to slice off the mounting for the hull heavy flamer and replace it with a vision slit for the driver.

i then built the roof.  this was very challenging as it involved small circles and curves.  it was especially important to enable the gun to elevate and therefore the gap needed to extend far back enough in the roof.  it will have a few more details and the entire thing will have a raised rim.  i am pretty sure it will be glued in place.

this is how far i have got.  as i said earlier, suggestions on where to put the heavy flamer would be appreciated.  

till next time!