Falling through the heavens in a drop pod is about the most Space Marine thing you can do, besides angrily pointing at something while standing on a rock, or possibly struggling to fit through doors. So last year, when Games Workshop announced they were doing a new drop pod kit that's easier to build, I was pretty excited. I have two of the old ones, which are great once you've done them, but which take a lot of time to build, and suck to paint. The new ones, on the other hand, were a fun puzzle: was it possible, I wondered, to paint them mostly using masking tape and spray primer? It's so few parts, and those parts are so flat, that I wanted to see if it was possible.
The answer is yes, but the remaining question is how much effort this truly saves you.
Glue is mostly optional
Other than one section of one of the five doors, the only parts you need glue for are the optional extras, which are the additional bits of rubble and the Chapter Badges/Aquilas. Once those are glued on or discarded according to taste, each pod is seven structural components: the base, five fins, and the engine. These hold themselves together quite happily without any chemical intervention. This has the added bonus that if you need to transport them and have limited space, you can flat-pack them. Given how space-inefficient transporting 40K vehicles can be, this is an amazing bonus.
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| IKEA called, they'd like their drop pod back. |
The kit: pros and cons
It seems clear to me that the kit is a conscious trade-off. GW have used the softer moulding tech usually used for terrain kits, and then maximised the pod-to-sprue ratio by putting two pods in three frames. One of the frames is duplicated, which again saves on cost. Consequently a pair of the new pods retails at £52, or £26 per pod, while the old kit, now moved into the Horus Heresy range, goes for £35.50. Regardless of whether this represents good value to you, this makes the 40K kit cheaper and faster to build, but at the cost of inflexible doors that will prevent it sitting on a curved surface such as a hill. This being the era of gaming mats, this is clearly a trade-off GW felt confident making, and one that resulted in me happily parting with some cash.
I think the mandatory rubble on the base makes no sense if one takes it to be the product of the drop pod's impact - any machine hitting the ground hard enough to produce its own crater isn't surviving, no matter how much magic space metal you use. Perhaps the rubble is intended to be agnostic basing that would read as urban ruins or rocky terrain, but whatever the visual intent, I get why they needed it given the single hollow base plate they were going for to save on sprue space. If you want the premium, fully-modelled and functional drop pod experience, I'd go for the older kit.
People have complained about the mould lines on this kit, and I see why; they're quite pronounced. They certainly took time to remove, but were generally on exposed flat surfaces that were easy to get at, so I didn't find that aspect too onerous. Happily, once you've removed the mould lines, assembly is effectively complete.
Are the doors too short?
I've heard this criticism in a few places, and I am honestly surprised by it. I think the confusion comes from the design change between this kit and the last. While the old doors sat over the engine housing, the new doors slot in beneath it. As best I can tell from waggling a tape measure at the thing, the doors are the right length for this new design. This comes with the added bonus of shaving about 2" off the total footprint, so while the new drop pod can't handle uneven terrain easily, it can fit into smaller gaps on the table.
The painting process
Drop pods are effectively terrain pieces, and I approached them as such when it came to the painting. People are never going to look at them as closely as my other minis, so my goal was to get them to the minimum acceptable standard.
Phase 1: Gunmetal drybrush over black primer
The opening move was to mask off any areas that needed to skip paint, since the fins are pretty snug going into the engine block, and I wasn't convinced they'd go in with a layer of primer on them. I masked those off with putty, then primed the whole thing black.
With the first layer of primer down, it was time for some basic metalwork. All the metal areas were hit with a drybrush of gunmetal. Any gunmetal paint like Citadel Leadbelcher or the Army Painter's Gunmetal will be fine. After this I did a lighter drybrush of Vallejo Air Steel, in particular adding some lighter scuffing to the middle of the boarding ramps.
Phase 2: Light blue drybrush over Macragge Blue primer
To do the blue prime, I had to put a lot more masking down. This was mostly masking tape alongside a little putty; in the image below you can see I taped off the metal sections of the fins and used putty on the vents/thrusters at the outer edge of the fins to preserve the gunmetal beneath. The engine blocks were masked entirely with putty, since it's a complex shape.
The blue on the base plate was a fiddly enough shape that it was quicker to paint that on by hand, which went pretty quickly as it's not a huge area. If you aren't gluing your pods together, you don't need to worry too much about getting paint on the contact points.
I did two successive blue drybrush stages in my usual Cobalt Scions sequence of Calgar Blue followed by Fenrisian Grey. In the interests of saving time, I skipped the usual recess shade.
With the blue done, I added some gunmetal and steel paint to the pistons on the fins' rudders/ailerons, then began masking off all the blue on the fins.
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| Completion of the blue phase; masking removed on the engines. |
Phase 3: White highlight over Corax White primer
Here we are at the height of the masking outlay, covering up almost all the fins to leave just a single panel exposed. This step will of course be entirely skippable for those of you who just one one bold colour on your fins.
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| The Corax White goes on. |
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| A reasonable and proportionate amount of masking tape. |
The Corax White primer was given a recess shade of Citadel Dawnstone followed by pure white (in this case, the Army Painter's Matt White, but any pure white will do).
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| The drop pods at the end of phase 3. |
Phase 4: details and tidy up
A little tidy up is inevitable with using rattle cans this way, so I went in with some blue and white to sharpen up any imperfections.
Cabin lights
Having done that there were a few other details to tend to. I debated between red and yellow cabin lights, but ultimately concluded that if something broke mid-drop, you'd want every available chance to see what you're doing before the ground arrives, so, bright yellow lights it was. This was achieved by dotting pure white paint onto the lights and following up with a glaze of Yriel Yellow.
The most loyal sub-assembly
I also painted the gold aquilas as their own sub-assembly for extra speed. I put them on a thin sausage of putty on a spray stick and treated them to Colour Forge's Hyrax Brown Spray, then heavy drybrushes of Retributor Armour and Liberator Gold, before finishing with a wash of Reikland Fleshshade Gloss.
Rubble
This was basecoated in Vallejo's Burnt Umber, then drybrushed with Vallejo Earth. The rocks got a drybrush of the Army Painter's Cultist Robe, then the whole lot got a drybrush of the Army Painter's Skeleton Bone.
Hazard stripes
Every time I paint a drop pod I think it'd be lovely to skip this step, and every time I come to the moment of choice, I accept that, no, hazard stripes are about 50% of the visual charm and simply cannot be ignored. Just look at the photo further up - it looks very bland by comparison.
With my first two drop pods, I use masking tape and sponged the black on, but I remembered the masking taking a really long time, and masking wasn't very practical here thanks to the presence of the rubble. Instead I just did it by eye and decided not to worry too much. The results aren't perfect, but the chevrons went on pretty quickly. Of course, having done this, the bolts inside the doors looked conspicuously unpainted:
Ultimately I couldn't stand for that, so out came the Leadbelcher. I dotted this onto all 240 bolts, then repeated the process with Nuln Oil Gloss to imply oil and add a bit of shading. You'd think this would have taken ages, but it was quicker than I expected.
Finally, with a sigh, I realised that the yellow needed a highlight, so I went over that with the Army Painter's Skeleton Bone. I then highlighted the black on one of the drop pods before concluding it wasn't making enough of a difference to warrant the effort on the second pod. And with that last spasm of saying f--- it, my work was complete.
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| The finished drop pods |
Size comparisons
Given the hilarity of scale creep, one would almost have been unsurprised if these new pods were significantly bigger. Actually, the studio have been cleverer than that. They're the same height as the old ones, but the door redesign has allowed for a smaller footprint, and reconfiguring the passenger harnesses has allowed them to mitigate for the scale creep on the newer marine range. All 40K transports are a little smaller than they should be, I suspect as a concession to practicality, so unsurprisingly I don't think you could fit two marines in each bay. Still, it's nice to have the harness at the right height (were you to remove the marines' bases).
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| Bottom left and top right: the old pods, for size comparison. |
While there are differences in the old and new kits, as you can see in the image above, they feel - as Jeff put it - "close enough that it's essentially just "the new model of mondeo" rather than a different vehicle." As such, the Cobalt Scions' supply of drop pods has doubled. I am highly excited by this, despite the questionable genius of paying 70 points for a model that often doesn't fit between bits of scenery.
What next?
I've got some Terminators and a Chaplain primed and ready, but I sure did focus hard on Space Marines last year (thanks Harvey) so I'm going to let them chill for a while as I work on something else. Something... gribblier.
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