From ByronM: 30k Mechanicum Thallax (65 Points)

When I started my 30k Mechanicum army / project it was just to get a few cool looking robots on the battlefield.  I made sure Greg was OK with me adding them into our local 30k games as just an add on force since I had no real plans to do enough of them for a full army.  He said sure go ahead, since the games are anything but serious, hell they don't even follow half the rules, so what would a made up force matter.

Well, I wanted to do some because they looked cool, but once I started working on them, I fell even more in love with their cool / bonkers aesthetic and have been sucked down another hobby ADHD related rabbit hole and am doing a full force of them.

Here is the first of several unplanned units that I have got since the challenge started....

This unit is made up of 9 Thallax jump troopers.  While these may look like more normal infantry sized units, they are not!  They are Ogryn sized troops on 40mm bases that while they don't necessarily tower over normal infantry, they are taller and much wider and bulkier.  Here is a comparison shot of one with a normal 32mm Infinity figure next to it for scale.

I was initially sort of so-so on these models, sure they looked cool-ish, but why on earth would you want little robots when you could have big robots?  Then I found out they were jump troops!  Yeah, towering 10' tall 700lb robots flying through the sky towards the enemy carrying lightning guns and phased plasma-fusils?  On top of that they have something called djinn-sight, that essentially removes all cover from enemies as they can see through anything and pick the best target locations and allows them to hit on 2+ almost all the time. Sign me up!

 

Technically, I can field these 9 as 3 units of 3, but I like the idea of setting them up as one massive unit that will actually live to get to the other side of the table and pump out enough shots to matter.  Oh and those shots are nasty.  Lightning Guns are short range high strength shots and the phased plasma-fusils are multi-shot long range plasma guns.  Lots of nastiness to go around.  You are only allowed one special weapon replacement per 3 models though, so they are mainly lightning guns.

The models themselves have several jets and boosters on them as you can see above.  Each has 6 different nozzles to help them wing their way to their enemies on clouds of black smokey death (I am pretty sure the Mechanicum has not bought into green energy and still uses either coal or human corpses for fuel).

While I followed my normal method for painting these guys, and you will recognize them as being done the same simple utilitarian way as all the rest, I did have to do the red differently.  I started with the same airbrush method and they looked the same as the rest, but just lacked something.  Many people talk about colour and scale, and how when you get smaller you need more contrast to look the same, well, that's exactly what happened here.  On the bigger canvas area of the larger robots, the reds and layers looked fine and still looked red and had depth.  On these smaller ones, the reds lost something and still looked muted and brownish.  So, I have to come back in after and add more highlight using a brush to key areas to help make the reds really pop at this smaller scale.

Additionally, I kept the masks bronze/brass despite the fluff saying that the djinn-sight masks are all jet black.  I tried that to start, but just didn't like it next to the rest of the force.  Fluff be damned, they have bronze masks like everyone else.

The rest of the models were the same as always though, right down to some high contrast blue/white energy blooms to set off the model and give some additional colour.  I know they are not to everyone's liking as it shows the weapon as always being hot (and I normally don't use them for that reason as well) but the models just lack something without more than just reds and metals. 

Watch out as the forces of Mars continue to expand in the coming weeks...

____________________________________________

Now before this challenge I knew nothing about a 30k Mechanicum army, to be fair I still don't know very much, but what I do know is that they look so very cool!  The more I see of this project Byron, the more I want to hear of how they perform on the table.  Amazing work again and given their scale I am going to count them as 40mm Infantry and add a couple of extra points to round the submission up to 65 points.