I own a lot of Rogue Trader era Rhinos. Most of them are in boxes, half converted or in storage bins sitting half painted. To be honest, I've always loved the Rhino in all of its incarnations. With the release of 6th Edition people have fled from mechanized builds feeling that troop transports are too much of a liability with their new limitations on both disembarking and a perceived fragility. My mentality is that I own them, so I'm going to use them, so how do I make them into something more usable?
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| This is a fraction of what I own of just old school Rhinos.. |
At the tail end of 5th Edition I had already started to think about doing things a little differently. If I like Rhinos so much and I'm going to use them anyway - why not make them as annoying to the opponent as possible? I decided I wanted to start toying with upgrading them in unconventional ways. My first idea was to pay the 5 points for a Pintle-Mounted Storm Bolter. The single Storm Bolter can add some supporting fire from the Rhino and make it a little more effective, so why not try and improve that effectiveness? For 5 more points I'm essentially adding the fire power of a 15 point Space Marine. Now a Rhino that might get ignored by a savvy player might draw more attention and that might draw fire away from my all important scoring units.
In the spirit of WYSIWYG I usually only ran one of my Rhinos that way because that was the only one that I had set up with 2 Storm Bolters. Well last week I just wanted to convert something. I had this Rogue Trader era Rhino that I had stolen the driver compartment off of a 2nd Edition Sisters of Battle Immolator. The 2nd Edition Immolator traded in the 2 top hatches for a single central hatch with twin linked Heavy Flamer that I had simply replaced with the standard Imperial Storm Bolter hatch. The problem is, if I wanted to double up my Storm Bolters where would I put it?
My solution was to look at the housings on a variety of Space Marine upgrades and build one to hold 2 pairs of Bolters. The Bolters are two pairs of extra Rogue Trader era Rhino Bolters that I trimmed, filed, and pinned on top of each other. I scratch built the housing and decided it needed an ammo feed. I looked at the Attack Bike Heavy Bolter and decided to build a similar box. I had used a hunk of sprue for the center of the box so I filled the angled areas in with green stuff. Here are two angles on the converted Dual Storm Bolter.
I don't think its my best work but I'm a little rusty. I still felt it was cool enough to paint up and use in games. so over the next week it was meticulously painted to my usual standards.
The only thing I messed up on is that the specific Rhino this Dual Storm Bolter was built for was once the subject of a great quandary - dating back before there were pictures of Angels of Absolution vehicles in Forge World books. The question I had asked myself back then was, "Does the wing always face the same direction - feathers to the right? Or does it flip depending on the side of the vehicle its on so that the feathers always point to the back of the vehicle or nearest side?" I ended up learning that it was the latter, but my first inclination so many years ago was to go with the former. So now, when I painted this Angels of Absolution logo I automatically painted it to face the "right way". You will understand better when you see this next photo.
Still, I think it came out pretty cool and it adds a little bit of character to my Rhinos. Around the same time I had the idea to trick out my Rhinos with extra Storm Bolters I started entertaining the idea of alpha striking Rhinos equipped with Hunter Killer Missiles. On one Rhino it seems like a waste of points, and maybe with its single shot it is. But what about if you roll onto the table with 3 or 4 Rhinos, and get off a flurry of HKM's? Or maybe you save them all to late in the game just to force your opponent to focus on those annoying little Rhinos, blocking line of sight, directing focused fire, and harassing their lines? Sounds like fun to me. Maybe these will get some attention next? Just because.
Let me know what you think. Am I crazy for trying to make these options work? Thanks for reading. -Nick
