This weekend a selection of new plastic Mechanicum models go up for preorder, including the Archmagos Prime and Thanatar Cavas Siege-automata. Games Workshop kindly sent the latter out for us to review, so here goes.
The Thanatar is a chunky boi, towering over marines entombed in Leviathan or Contemptor Dreadnoughts. Size-wise it’s almost as large as an Adeptus Titanicus Warlord, although thankfully with much less trim to paint at the end.
Assembling for War
The Thanatar Cavas is made up from three sprues, one of which will be swapped out when Games Workshop inevitably releases the Thanatar-Calix loadout. The build experience reminded me of the plastic Leviathan Dreadnought, which was mostly straightforward and took the most of an afternoon to assemble.
There were a few things which I found a bit frustrating with the build I want to highlight. The first is the great big seam across the front of the torso – dry fit this and dry fit it again to ensure you get a flush fit. You’ll see from my photos above that mine was quite not right and I had to bodge it a little. This is something that you can easily weather away, however I would be interested to see if anyone else runs into this one with their builds.
The second thing to highlight is the lack of pose-ability of the arms and legs. I’m a bit spoilt having come from Adeptus Titanicus, but the legs in this kit only come in two poses, both of which still kind of read as standing still. Part of this is fitting for a hulking war machine like this, but I would have expected a little bit more options with the legs and torso joint out of the box. Aside from the rigid legs, the position of the left arm is dictated by the ammo feed, which can be assembled one of two ways for an ease of firing position, and the mortar itself can be closed or flowered open to rain molten plasma death upon your enemies. I’m sure avid converters will do just fine with the right tools, but this is the experience I found out of the box.
Both of the above aren’t showstoppers of any sort and something that I imagine will be easier the second time around.
When building the kit, I would suggest keeping the feet and the hip socket pieces completely unglued, so that you can figure out your pose nearer the end. When it comes time for painting, I’d suggest subassemblies to keep things simple. While you can’t leave all the armour plates off like you would with a Titanicus Titan, you can leave some of them off. I also kept the arms, ammo feed torso, mortar and faceplate separate for ease of painting.
Show Your Colours
If you wanted to replicate my scheme for whatever reason, I went over this in our Mechanicum box review, below is the tldr;
- Greens:
- Army Painter Ruinous Spell, hit with Vallejo Cockpit Emeral Green “Faded” and zenithaled with Army Painter Potion Green
- Orange:
- Vallejo Game Color Orange Fire (that’s it, I’m lazy and hate painting orange)
- White:
- Army Painter Shark White -> Army Painter Yeti White
- Metals:
- Vallejo Gunmental
- Darkstar Blue Steel
- Darkstar Aged Copper
- Darkstar Copper
- Darkstar Polished Copper
- Darkstar Old Silver
- Darkstar Baroque
- Oil pinwash/wash
- Mix of Black and Sepia oils applied generously at the end to give some more depth.
The bases are the same usual lazy method as my White Scars – Vallejo Desert paste, with a Fuegan Orange wash and a Tau Light Ochre drybrush.
Ready for War
We’re stoked to see plastic kits released for the non-marine Horus Heresy factions, as this opens the door to more players – be they entirely new to the Heresy or wanting to add a small allied force to their existing the one. The Thanatar Cavas is a solid Heavy Support choice for raining Breaching Instant-Death* large blast templates upon the battlefield, and I can see this being quite a popular kit and look forward to figuring out how to deal with them…
*for most targets
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