The Beard Bunker

Back in November I made a Firestrike Servo-turret. So far it has mostly been nuked off the table by opponents realising it has a lot of firepower and not a lot of wounds. Naturally my response to this ineffectiveness is to double down on the stupid and add another. Since this is part of the same unit as the first turret, I wanted it to be automated, imagining it would be slaved to the techmarine running the battery. This required a little conversion work: slicing off the seat, various cables, and handles. There was only a little green stuff needed to fill a hole where the seat protruded from the main chassis. I tried to convey a few things in the painting. Where the manned turret has a decorative silver skull, the one on this turret is an actual servo-skull. Possibly the most heavily armed and armoured servo skull in the Imperial arsenal? At any rate, another fine entry in the long list of "heavily armoured Imperial things extremely vulnerable to headshots." I also changed ...

I've seen a few people on social media suggesting that it's thematically inappropriate for Space Marines to have a defensive turret, and that therefore, the Firestrike Servo-Turret shouldn't exist. Since this is obviously the most important debate of our time, I'd better weigh in. My position is that those people are talking out of their butt trumpets. In the manner of any rigorous argument I should begin by declaring any biases that might affect my judgement. My biases are twofold. Firstly I like the overall look of the mini even if there are elements I find silly (more on that later). Secondly I like it thematically for my army, since visually it makes me think of a Roman ballista supporting their heavy infantry. Even with those two factors, I was still on the fence until I saw 40K Badcast host Campbell's paint job of it . Five minutes later I'd smacked the buy button. Which is weird, given that I've been much more minimalist with mine. I was very tempted...