SRM’s Road to The US Open Seattle Part 6: Transhuman in the Box

The grass is certainly looking greener on the other side at this particular moment, with the contrast of “edge highlighting rectangles for untold hours” being held up to “making my stabby guys stab a bunch of elves”. Anyway, let’s hop in the bed of an Impulsor and get this antique on the roadshow:

SRM’s Road to the Roadshow: US Open Seattle 2022: Part 6: Transhuman in the box: This grunge pun gimmick thing is really overstaying its welcome isn’t it

On my first step of SRM’s Return to Hovertank Hell, I built an Impulsor. I’ll be straight up, this hover El Camino is markedly more user friendly than its bigger Repulsor cousins. There’s a handful of multi-hover plate panels instead of the 15 or so individual hover plates on a Repulsor, and that means a lot less time filing down mold lines. The instructions did have a few mistakes, calling out the wrong numbers for pieces at least twice and on occasion showing parts attached out of order. Building the whole thing took maybe an hour and a half, and that’s with the extra Black Templars doodads I glued on. I do wish there was a techmarine gunner on the Impulsor like there is on the big boi tanks, but that’s one less thing to paint I guess. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who paid attention to the last edition and a half of the game, but I was painting smol Black Templars until 2019 so what do I know.

When it came to actually painting the Impulsor, it was a pretty straightforward affair. Notably smaller than a Repulsor, my hope was that it wouldn’t take as long as the RepEx. My primer also decided not to be hydrophobic this time, so paint actually stuck to the model! Painting a black tank black is exponentially more tedious when it takes 2-3 coats just to stick.

I left off the hover plates, the canopy armor, the shield dome, missile turret, and the pair of cupola hatches. I glued those last few to 25mm bases so I could hold something while I painted them. I committed to the missile launcher because it seemed like the most interesting weapon option of the bunch, and I have a gut feeling the orbital strike relay is never going to be anything but a novelty option. I’m not gluing the top armor plate down so if I want to run this cheaply, I super can, or I can swap in the cupola stubber from my RepEx. With vehicles and other expensive models like this, versatility is always the best way to go. Lastly, I painted the hover plates separately, which is a kinda messy affair, but it was a fine way to spend a rainy crafternoon.

The last touches were transfers and weathering. I plastered as many transfers as I could reasonably jam on there, but the top looked a little barren. I did something I feel like I saw Matt Hudson do in White Dwarf years and years ago and slapped a Templar cross on top of one of the cupola hatches. Since it’s got a crenelated shape I hit it with Micro-Sol a few times to soften it, then gently cut my way through the gap between the hatches with a sharp x-acto knife. Lastly, I hit it with a smidge of black paint from beneath so the loose flaps of cut transfer wouldn’t show. Weathering was just a quick sponging of Rhinox Hide, some dashes of Stormhost Silver, and a few drybrushes of various neutral browns. Altogether it wasn’t the most arduous painting experience in the world, but it certainly felt like it transitioned from “model I decided to paint” to “project” almost immediately.

Any competitive player will use some athletic metaphor like “getting your reps in” and I myself am guilty of using this wholly adequate turn of phrase. Unfortunately for me, this has been less “getting my reps in” and more answering the regular gymgoer question of “how much can you bench?” only to weakly reply “35 pounds”. You see, I’ve been enjoying Age of Sigmar far more than 40k lately, making this whole event (and NOVA afterwards) a bit of a farce. I’ve only got time for a single 40k game before heading out and I should probably write a list, as my flight is in 71 hours at time of writing.

I’ve got 303 Power Level of Templars, and will need both 50 and 100PL lists for the event. Named characters are out, as this is Crusade and should be my own story, not theirs. My first priority will be to fit in every Primaris thing I have, and then from there add in small bois to fill things out. The exception will be my Techmarine, as there’s quite a few vehicles in here that are gonna need tuning up. From there, I’ll make sure my army is legal by adding and removing units accordingly, and go on from there. Listbuilding isn’t my strong suit, and I typically build an army based more on vibes than on anything more concrete like math or competitive data.

Is this a vehicle-heavy list in an edition notoriously unfriendly towards vehicles? Yes. Will it do well? Probably not. Will I have fun going 2-4 in this event? Hopefully! I wish I could jam a Chaplain in there, but Marshal Siegward has been my Templar commander since I first started this force in 2017, a Techmarine is gonna be necessary for this motor pool, and a Crusade without The Emperor’s champion just seems foolhardy.

With a flight coming up alarmingly soon, a stack of homework still to be done for this event, and altogether too little time to actually get a game in before I bounce, I’m afraid this is the last article in this series before hitting Seattle itself. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for one last pained grunge pun made for my amusement and my amusement only, and my recap of the event.

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