[This post was originally posted to Otherverse Games & Hobbies as part of a series called Plastic to Painted, or P2P. You may see logos or references to this site and series]
It’s as if a Lamborghini and a Land Raider had sex and made a racing tank
When you think of a tank, you are likely going to think of a lumbering hulk of armored plates that acts as a mobile gun platform. What attracted me to the Sicaran on first glance was how sexy a ride it appeared to be, like an exotic sports car that some mad James Bond villian mounted a turret upon. The model screamed Horus Heresy to me: it looked like old technology that mankind had forgotten how to make by the 41st millennium. The Sicaran was more sleek and exciting than the more boxy and basic vehicles like the rhino or my beloved Land Raiders that the Space Marines use in 40k.
It is no secret that I like to do things in pairs; mostly in armies and oftentimes in units, as seen in my Spartan post. When it came to purchasing Sicarans for Kera’s Word Bearers and my Ultramarines for Horus Heresy, there were so many options and I just couldn’t help myself in getting different variants. While I ended up with a standard Sicaran for the 17th Legion for my wife, I opted for the Punisher variant for the 13th Legion (never fear kind reader, for I indeed have a new plastic Sicaran built and primed for Ultramarines as well).
Why did I choose the Punisher over the tank killer or missile launcher variants of the Omega or Arcus options? Partly, I expected to get at least one of each eventually. Mostly because at the time it was in the middle of 8th edition and Ultramarines had just got a boost from their Supplement. At that time, the Punisher had 27 anti-infantry shots (the punisher cannon and the 3x heavy bolters were the same strength and armor penetration at that point), which was nasty enough considering I was making the 40k Ultramarines list to be anti-horde.
But, wait, there is more: if the Sicaran Punisher didn’t move, it could reroll 1’s to hit, and Ultramarines were considered to have not moved when they were in tactical doctrine. Bwahahaha. The middle of the game allowed me to rock and roll across the board, blasting infantry to scraps of meat while cackling quite manically while rerolling it’s own 1’s to hit.
Neither my primary opponent nor his ork horde has ever been the same; I believe there was therapy involved.
Unlike the new plastic kit for the Standard Sicaran, these brutes were shipped to me as warped chunks of resin. I ordered the Punisher first and it was alright, the bottom plate was warped bad enough that I needed to play resin whisperer with it, but it otherwise went together fine.
The standard Sicaran, hmm, not so much. Every part of the hull was warped and needed to be reformed to make anything out of it, the lascannons looked depressed as they hung their heads down in shame and the accelerator autocannons were so spread-eagle that it appeared like they were crafted to shoot at targets on two different areas of the battlefield.
Once assembled, painting both were straight-forward affairs. Transfers were easily applied to the flat surfaces. I have yet to go back and weather them, as at that point I wasn’t sure how I wished to do that for either army. That will be an enormous project on its own at some point.
Hopefully we will get the remainder of the variants in plastic soon, so I can make the rest of the fast, badass racing tanks for my Heresy armies. Until then…
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
