A staple of many Horus Heresy lists, and a few 40k ones, the Leviathan is 100% an absolute unit, making almost any other walker question its life choices. But retailing for at least £78 (based on the basic chassis, not the fancy ones, and 2 arma), it's an expensive boy indeed. So, can it be made cheaper, whilst looking at least vaguely like the real deal? The answer is Yes....so far.
Today we document my humble attempt at recreating one. It is based of the far cheaper Redemptor Dreadnought. Normally retailing at around £40 it's already about half the cost. If you managed to grab an easy-build variant, that is trimmed down to £25. I can go one better!
The trick is to find parts one and two from the Hachette Conquest series. At a combined total of £16, it's a mere 20% the total official cost. Even if I were to buy genuine Redemptor arms (which I might), we've spent a maximum of around half the cost. The savings do come at a cost (pun partially intended); the Redemptor doesn't really look like a leviathan our of the box. We can do something about this.
The main problem area is the torso. It's far more angular, wider and blocky compared to the Leviathan. With a lot of hacking and plenty of putty, I've managed to create...
This! Whilst not the finished piece, it is looking a lot more like our ancient brother.
Having a head instead of the flat sarcophagus makes all the different. The basis is an Armiger face-plate, with the back of the head sculpted onto it. Armigers come with a selection of faces so there's bound to be a few spares in your bits box, or the bits box of your local knight player.
Because this will be for my noise marines, the heavy flamers are represented by these volkite cannons.
I've also put the walker on a smaller 80mm, instead of the kit's 100mm one, so it stands on the same base size as the FW one.
Next time we'll look to do something about the arms; I plan to run double grav bombards for theme and design. I'll have a think about whether to go for genuine pieces or make something from scratch; given the nature of the series, probably the latter.
That's all for today folks! What affordable alternate builds would you like to see? Comment below with units you feel are too expensive to buy.