Grizzled Vetrans: Part 1.1 - Beakies I Overlooked Last Time

A few months ago my desktop melted down and had to be rebuilt, but the good news was that the images on the drive were salvaged and I've been sorting them for quite some time. As a result I realised that some images I thought had been lost never got uploaded to my photobucket account and I could squeeze another mini post from the stuff that fell through the cracks.

Brother Tippy-Toe here is one of the earliest marines out there with the backpack of his power armour sculpted as a part of the actual mini and those frankly bizarre knee pads that stick out a mile. I've said in the past that his stance reminds me of Elmer Fudd stalking his prey and I suppose that the true nature of the bizarre scifi blunderbuss he's holding is any one's guess as well.

By this point the weapon has started to mutate into something that might be a bolter, or a futuristic Pez dispenser...I have no idea. More crazy knee pads and note the layered armour on the feet of the mini, not sure what the advantage of that was supposed to be. Perhaps even harder to identify than the main weapons from this period are the sidearms that many of the marines carry. To me the thing on this marine's left hip looks like an autogun, but it really could be anything.

This mini never seems to show up in the catalogues that GW put out when the older stuff was still available to order (curse them and their new fangled changes). His proportions are smaller than most of the other RT era marines, his head being tiny for one thing and he has an odd pose that doesn't seem to echo any of the other common positions the marines from the time were sculpted in.

I've assumed that this marine is armed only with a bolt pistol and painted it as such. Perhaps he's just that hard he can dispense with the idea of a proper bolter or even a hand weapon; all he needs is his odd-looking pistol. The amount of variation in the depiction of weapons in this period stretches even the understanding of a collector like myself. Surely a company with so many talented artists could have come up with a standard design and held it under the noses of the sculptors in conjunction with a big stick?

You'd have to be pretty unobservant not to start to see the common poses that the marines from this era are posed in. This is what I like to call the "knackered" pose, which looks as though the marine in question is about to go for a nice sit down after a hard day hammering the snot out of the Emperor's foes. I'll hazard a guess that the thing in his right hand is a flamer pistol...any offers?

I think that if this marine had been aiming anything larger than a pistol in this manner he might have managed to look somewhat intimidating, rather than a bit silly. I wondered if he'd lost his telescopic sights, but then I thought about the fact that in all the novels the marines have targeting a HUD built into their helmets, so is there really any reason for non-scouts to carry them?

The next post will, I promise be the one that I mentioned at the end of the last, but now with more marines as I have more rescued images to clutter up the web.