I know that there are myriads of different versions of the Storm Talon that people have built for some specific reason. Now I have added another variant, the Marine Talon. I thought that I really should make an effort to get some where with the Opus Magna during my vacation. I am currently in a stage where I am trying to lock al the large building blocks down to each other. This requires me to run beams between the blocks and I just realised that some of these has to cross the flight deck. However, I also intend to have a working hangar deck with elevator leading down to the interior. From the beginning I have always envisioned squadrons of storm talons being lined up in the hangar. The problem now is that the hangar level is only 8 cm in height, hence, no aircraft can be higher than that, furthermore, the elevator I cut out from the imperial sky shield used for the main deck is only 10 cm wide. The original build of the Strom Talon is both taller and wider than what can fit inside the Opus Magna. So I decided that I needed to build a test variant to see how much space I have for running beams once I get the smallest build I can get out of the Storm Talon.
First I needed to reduce the hight of the model. Most of the unnecessary hight in the original build goes from the large gun box mounted beneath the cockpit. Since this is anyway one of the models least appealing features I decided to change that. I cut the landing gears from the box and attached them directly to the fuselage instead. This also meant I had to cut the rear landing stand to almost the retracted position.This simple mod saved me some 10-20 mm in height. With the engine pods mounted the model is almost as wide as the lift and if I add the wings it would not fit on the lift. So I had the option of either making the wings fold or place them somewhere else. There is not much space for making a folding hinge on the engine pods with out increasing the width above the limit. So I decided to also mount the wings directly to the fuselage. There is not much space for this and there effectiveness as actual wings is most limited in this position. But as aerodynamics is not a real concern for the Imperium I thought that that would not be a problem for me either. With the engine pods mounted in the original orientation the almost touch the wings and they can not rotate. This together with the missile pods under the wings made the wings look redundant. So I turned the engine pods upside down, in this way I got some space between the wings and the engines and as the rotation point of the pods now is close to the bottom instead of the top the can rotate without interfering with the wings. As I decided that I would not use the gun box I had to make some other arrangement to hold the nose gun. It turned out the it was not to hard to cut the bayonet mount from the box and attach this to the fuselage instead of the ring sitting in the recess in the nose (this was cut away). I also decided that it would look better with a single assault cannon. So all in all I think it still looks a bit like the Storm Talon but in a smaller more compact version.
The term "Marine" in 40k is normally used as short for Space Marine, but "Marine" can also designate a carrier based version of an aircraft when added to the aircrafts original name. So I though that Marine Storm Talon would be the designation of this modified STC. That is however a mouthfull to say so in short I think I will call it the Marine Talon.
There will probably be some other adaptations of imperial flyers to fit the Opus Magna and its flight wing as a "Marine Nephelim" and a "Marine Storm Raven".
Well I will take some pictures with the Marine Talon on Opus tomorrow when it is light again.