MODELLING: Second Tactical squad comes in from reserves

I've been off work today so I had a couple of straight hours to finish the first five marines from my second tactical squad. Here they are.

They look a lot better than the simpler MaCragge models if only because their poses are different. I still want to add more detail such as grenades, pouches and other equipment but I'll hang on until the other five marines are complete. Then I can spread the kit out between my twenty models.

I swung by my local GW store today to see what my options were regarding special weapons and acquiring five more pairs of arms with boltguns. To my surprise there were barely any metal blisters in the shop. I'm obviously out of touch with the marine range because virtually everything is plastic boxed sets. That ruled out buying just a couple of metal special weapons marines.

My options were to buy another tactical squad for the plastic special weapons which would also give me spare boltguns, or buy a plastic command squad for the same price that would give me just five marines, but the same special weapons and if I equipped the command squad with close combat weapons I would have spare boltgun arms. Both options would cost £18 and would give me more models that I really didn't need. I'm conscious that the current Blood Angel codex is just a stop-gap and will be revised at some time in the future. When that happens I reckon the Blood Angels will get their own dedicated models like the Dark Angels and Black Templars. I'd like to have the space to add these to my army if and when this happens. So I don't want to buy everything right now.

In the end I left the store with nothing. And that is a rare occurrence for me in a GW shop.

So I broke out my bitsbox and rooted around for ideas. As I mentioned earlier, I don't have much marine stuff, as I haven't really played my Blood Angels since the beginning of 3rd edition (circa 1998), but I did find lots of Chaos stuff. Most of it is subtle enough to use as straight marine bits, if I shave off a few details. The special weapons are still a problem so I'll have to ponder some more.

I have also posted more Warhammer battle reports on my sister site here.

Over the weekend I'll try and get the other five marines finished too, and I'm going to sit down and work out exactly what to buy at Gamesday.