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In the first part of this article I had a look at some of the marines and the weapons from the Space Crusade boardgame and in this part I want to take a moment to mull over the mechanical minions of chaos that populated the game. These were the biggest bad in the chaos player's arsenal in the form of the Dreadnought and the Androids.
The Dreadnoughts were so awesome and scary that they even got their own expansion: "Mission Dreadnought"...or "Missie Durfar" if you lived in the Netherlands and played "Starquest" (the Dutch version of the box seems to be the only one on the net!). The expansion allowed the chaos player to churn out dreadnoughts and androids faster than UK china factories are currently producing tat in anticipation of the upcomming royal wedding.
Now the original Dreadnought was a towering hulk of plastic that sported two heavy weapons and a pair of chained bolters, but then the expansion introduced this monster with a whole extra pair of weapon mounts. In response the marines had access to a tarantula weapon platform, but they must still have been filling their pants looking down the barrels of six weapons.
No amount of desperate rummaging has been able to turn up my own version of the impressive four-armed Dreadnought, so you'll have to make do with the standard version that I painted back when I was at uni in the late 90s.
At the time I painted this I was pulling together a selection of odds and sods to make an Imperial Guard penal legion squad and the Dreadnought got painted in their colour scheme. As far as I'm aware, this design for a dreadnought was only ever used in the Space Crusade game and bizarrely in the epic scale Space Marine game. No other GW dreadnought, chaos or otherwise, that I've seen has been but humanoid in design.
The Android fitted in somewhere as being more deadly than the Orc, but not as scary as the Chaos Space Marines in the game. To me they always seemed to be somewhat like the Fimir in the Hero Quest game, an odd addition to bolster the ranks. Perhaps they were so evil because they violated the taboo in the Imperium about AIs that imitated humanity?
It was only when I was stripping and repainting these miniatures for this article that it struck me they bore a striking resemblance to the Necrons in terms of their poses and design.
I wonder if someone went on a bit of a scavenger hunt when GW was looking for a new 40k race back in the late 90s?
I'll be trying to wrap things up in the last part of this article and have a look at the Chaos Marines, some more of the bad guys and some of the marines themselves.
4 comments:
I have vivid memories of waiting in an Argos for them to bring me down my Mission: Dreadnought box. I so wished I'd have kept a hold of all that stuff now.
I actually used all of my Space Crusade Dreadnoughts as Titans in Space Marine (Epic) for years.
Spirit of the Guerilla Gamer, I like it.
Those were seriously the strangest design for dreadnoughts that GW ever came up with.
I was lucky enough to get a 4 armed Dreadnought. I painted it up for my White Scars army before they came out with rules limiting Dreads in that chapter. It's still with em.,I just used the vehicle design rules to make something up.I love that mini.
katana2001@rocketmail.com
Good for you. use the old "counts as" rule to keep that mini in your active army and remind people that at the end of the day this hobby is owned by the people who play it rather than the rules in a book.
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