Creation of a Tau Catfish

December 30, 2007 by Blackhat · Filed Under Modeling & Scenery

White Dwarf #271 saw the release of the Tau update to the Vehicle Design Rules. Finally armed with our weapon point costs, Shas’os could finally start breathing life into the mad scientist ideas that had been plaguing their minds. Given the anime style of the Tau, there was no shortage of inspiration, nor of model kits to transform into Tau machineries of destruction!

Rather than be inspired by some uber-cool Gundam kit lying about, I was instead inspired by an assembled Devilfish kit that I had used to practice my airbrushing skills on (quite pathetically, I might add).

Step #1

I had an assembled Devilfish from an online trade which was really convenient as I did not have to assemble the hull and engines from scratch. If you are starting from scratch, make sure that you carefully scrape away all the mold lines and let the glue dry completely first.

Using a jeweler’s saw I cut the assembled hull in half, just in front of the side doors. I then traced the shape of the back of the cockpit piece onto thin plastic card, like the kind used for comic book dividers. I cut this out and glued it to the back of the cockpit section, and when it was dry carefully trimmed the card to be flush with the model. This gave me a large flat are to add the engines to, rather than a big hollow area that would make precarious joins.

The back half of the assembled ‘fish I saved to use for an interesting crashed Devilfish terrain piece later on. You can just see the sheet of plastic between the hull and the engines in the photo

Step #2

ImageThe engine mounts got the same rough treatment as the hull: Sawed right through the middle! This time I was interested in the skinnier aft-facing thrusters, and saved the wider intakes for the crash scene.

The engines needed some sort of intake, however, so I constructed some louvered vents for the fronts of the engines out of strips of plastic card. I cut these to size and glued them into the sawed-off front of the engines before gluing the engine pieces to the plastic sheet that formed the back of the cockpit section.

The slope of the bottom hull and the slope of the engine matched almost exactly. The slight gaps where cockpit, plastic card, and engines met was filled in and smoothed out with Green Stuff.

You can see the plastic card louvers and positioning of the engines in the photo had a hull an engines — but now there was a large gap between the thrusters. Filling that space was what almost stumped me. Finally, I used the cradle of the Devilfish chin Burst Cannon mount — the curved “tongue” that holds the Burst Cannon in place from underneath. I removed the short nub, and sanded it to be flush to the back of the cockpit, and glued it in place at the top. In the pictures below, you can see this piece is still bare grey plastic.

Below this, to act as space fillers, I sawed off two lengths of square plastic rod. These went directly in line underneath the “tongue.” Around these spacers, in between the engines, I added a large amount of Green Stuff and smoothed it out. To smooth it, I used the small flat end of the Games Workshop sculpting tool, lubricated with a bit of Vaseline. I was careful to leave a panel line in between the green stuff and the grey plastic tongue.

Once the Green Stuff had set up a bit, I used the Shield Generator bit from a Crisis Battlesuit to construct the rear hatch — I simply pressed it into the back, and the epoxy putty held it in place. As the Air Caste are quite lean and fragile, I imagined the pilot could enter through the small hatch with little difficulty.

ImageThe last detail added to the back was a makeshift Decoy Launcher. I sawed an oval-shaped vent off of one of the remaining halves of the engine pieces, and glued it to the back of the cockpit section, underneath the hatch.

Step #4

All that was left to do was to add some weapons and finish the details.

ImageI used the large Devilfish antenna pinned to the rear of the model as an aerial. Where the chin turret would normally go, I realized that a normal Drone model fit perfectly into the circular mount. I gave the Drone two antennas from Gun Drone sprues, and these dangling sensors became the inspiration for the vehicle’s name as they resembled the whiskers hanging down from a Catfish’s mouth.

I filled the Drone ports using normal Drones, but did not assemble the regular Twin-Linked Pulse Carbine armament. Instead, I fitted a Plasma Rifle to the center of each Drone, being very careful to make sure that the weapons pointed straight ahead and in line with the antenna. Using a small bit and a hand-held pin vice, I drilled out the barrels of the Plasma Rifles. The divot in the top of the drone was filled in with spackling compound to make the top of the drone flat and smooth.

Lastly, I cut the hydraulics off of a landing gear piece, and glued the “shoe” in place to cover the landing gear alcove underneath. Into the rear of this, I drilled a hole to accept the flying stand post, as this is where the center of balance was.

Simple as that! Some fine ballast and small talus was glued to the base of the flying stand to match the rest of the Tau bases, and it was just a paintjob away from being completed.