A new fleet begins

Last year I completed my long standing Eldar (space elves) army for Battle Fleet Gothic (space ship combat game based in the Warhammer 40K universe) so I’ve been thinking about a second fleet. And After a bit of thinking I’ve settled for a Chaos fleet, I chose these for a few reasons, I don’t think anyone currently plays them at the local club so hopefully make games more varied. They are humans and as such have very standard rules, the Eldars are great but have very different, completely different rules for movement, and as such I wanted a more “standard army.” The are the settings “baddies” which should make a very natural pairing against my Eldar who are some of the “goodies” But most importantly they have some really nice looking ships!

So before I get into the ships and how I’ve started to paint I thought I would mention who Chaos are, incase people don’t know, but even for people who do this is who I see them and hence why I’ve started to make the colour choices I have. So In the Warhammer 40K Universe there is another dimension called the “warp” which is really useful, ships can go through it to get to far off starts really quickly, people can communicate to others light years away via sending messages through it, some people can even draw on the energy there to cast “spells” in the real world like blasting enemies with lighting. However there is also a slight down side, its full on “demons,” basiclly the natives of this other domain and they really really like people, for lunch. And as such any time a ship goes in or someone tries to communicate through or use the energy of the warp there is the chance one of these demons will be “near by” in the warp and cause issues! However these demons are not all mindless and have there own internal power structure and power struggles, and as such there are some really really powerful demons so powerful they could be considered Gods! And that is what the followers of Chaos believe that these Demons are the True Gods and if they worship them they will not get eating but there enemies will. So in a lot of respects similar to any sort of classic “evil cult” but with the interesting twist that the beings they worship are really there, if they are Gods or not, or even want worshiping is rather another matter!

So the fleet I’m doing is going to be very much fully into worshiping these beings in the warp that they have witnessed, but I also want them to be just worship any of these Demons and not have picked side in the internal wars of the demons as I assumed they would be to ignorant of it all really and just worship any of these powerful entities. The other thing to know about these forces is that they all started off working for the Imperium of Man, so want to keep the ships looking sensible just started to become changed by the choice the crew have made. As such I went for a very dark colour scheme (they are called the dark Gods!) and kept this on the raised edges of the ship, as I have never really painted like that so thought it might be nice, then I went with a dark green (not a yellow shade green often associated with 1 of the major demons), but a colour often associated with the Imperium but not with the black raised areas.

Here is the ship so far, the top is getting there while the stand / base and underside of the ship have not yet been started, I think the green body with black raised areas is working, I think I still need some more bits of colour like lights along the spine of the ship but its starting to look like I imagined. Just a note on scale, these ships are huge I think this ship has a crew of around 8,000 (fairly sure that I read somewhere each hull point/damage point represented about 1,000 crew) and enough weapons to level a city As such the tiny twin barreled guns along the sides I’ve painted silver are huge weapons require teams of operators each. The gold lines pointed downwards just below the guns I assumed where points for the force shields and hence the choice of the brightest colour on the model.

The based like the model is 3D printed and not only looks great but the marks on it help in game as different weapons have different firing arcs and the ship can turn so up to so many degrees. The reses lines I plan to do a bright green, like a radar sort of affect, however not sure on the raised bits at the moment. But enjoyed working on it so far and got a lot of detail left I can pick out!

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