These five figures all come from my “Space Crusade” board game by Milton Bradley/Games Workshop (1990). I played this quite a lot after getting it, but it hasn’t been touched for a decade (at least). I’ve often thought about painting all the space marines in the game, and I’ve drafted different pieces (particularly the Chaos Marines) into various D&D adventures in the past.
My recent Gamma World game involved a crashed spaceship and I used the dreadnought as one of the ships internal defences. Putting the figure on the board got a good response from my players! I would have liked to have been painted on game day, but there hadn’t been enough time to do that. Azazel’s November Mechanical Challenge seemed the perfect reason to paint it anyway, so I’ve spent most of the last week working on it and four Necrons.
The necrons have never been used outside of the board game that I recall, but they’ll make good basic robots for Gamma World. They have been quick and easy to paint too. After spray undercoating they got a quick grey base coat, then gun metal, and black ink. I’ve brushed silver over the top of most of the surface and some copper for wiring and fluoro green in the eye sockets. Also a bit of white over the skull faces. If I were to do them again, I might go for a much lighter grey base coat so that the gun metal isn’t so dark. I didn’t want them bright shiny silver, but they did turn out darker than planned. A second coat of a different silver did help with this though.
The chaos dreadnought got the same basic treatment – white spray undercoat, grey base coat, then gun metal over legs and weapons. Red over the main carapace (and gold trim), with green and bronze on wiring, etc. White on the nose, then thorough black ink over everything.
Chaos dreadnought with missile launcher and plasma cannon
Dreadnought – rear.
I touched up the green wiring to brighten it a little, and more white on the nose. Then hints of gold and copper on some components and some black and silver to darken or lighten different parts of the legs, back and undercarriage. The three weapons (for the upper “arms’) are interchangeable, and I haven’t glued them in order to still be able to swap them in and out. They should get a spray varnish this afternoon.
Dreadnought – Chain gun in place of plasma cannon.
I’m very pleased with how these came out. I suppose there’s still hope for the space marines!
Dragons of Lancasm 