Upgrading my Tanks for the New Edition

Like every other Imperial Guard player, I'm all but forced by the new tenth-edition rules to add a bunch of odds-and-sods to my tanks.

Left: This tank was fine from 5th through 9th edition, but simply won't cut it in the new era. Right: the new-pattern tank that I'm going to transform this guy into.

As laid out in my initial post, I believe that chasing meta builds will inevitably lead you to build or paint models that you don't enjoy. I normally try to avoid that kind of situation where possibly by heavily-magnetizing my vehicles: the turret weapon, the turret itself, all of the hatches, and the hull mount are all magnetization points that various weapons can connect to. All of my vehicles are on the same standard, so normally I can swap between (counts-as) chimeras, Russes, hellhounds, manticores, and hydras pretty easily.

I actually wound up with so many of my own kitbashed vehicles, mostly made from GW or FW parts (supplemented by tracks and wheels from the exemplary modelsandminis.com) that I printed out and brought a "spotting guide" to games with my local group for awhile.

My old spotting guide. I've added more variants to the motor pool since I made this, in particular, using the new Enigma tracks from modelsandminis.

All the way from 5th edition up through 8th edition (I never got a game of 9th in with my Guard because the codex came out a half-second before the edition ended), this served me fairly well. I pretty much always like to run more stuff than more heavily-upgraded stuff when it comes to tanks, so I habitually left the sponsons off my tanks. Same with hunter-killer missiles and the hull lascannon. I did occasionally put a heavy stubber on top because they look cool, but rarely used them in games.

Well, that's a no-go in 10th. You're paying for those multi-meltas, lascannons, heavy stubbers, and hunter-killer missiles whether you like it or not. Normally I'd suck it up and take the loss (Losing is Fun!) but in this case, having recently gotten and read Michael Rinaldi's excellent Tank Art 3, I was itching to try some of my newly-learned techniques.

So I decided to retrofit one squadron of my tanks with all the new stuff for the new edition, and commit to a full repaint of each using all-new techniques.

I've done two of these retrofits already, but when I round out the third tank in the squadron, I'm going to write up my steps along the way for the absurdly-specific kitbashes I'll be doing:

1. Building a heavy stubber out of a boltgun

2. Mounting a lascannon on a chimera

3. Building executioner autocannons out of random stuff from the hardware store

4. Mounting sponsons on modelsandminis.com's wonderful Enigma tracks