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WordBearer — M3A5 Pices Conversion
Published: 2008-07-06 03:55:49 +0000 UTC; Views: 3638; Favourites: 12; Downloads: 94
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Description
Ok, this is the newest model to join my Imperial Guard army, my Chimera equivalent vehicle the "Pices". I decided a long time ago to mechanize my guard completely (Stormtroopers in chimeras are NASTY!!!) but I wanted to continue my theme of "we get the cool toys" for the army, so I came up with this conversion based on the modern US Army Striker vehicle series.This is the third Pices I've made, and I've refined the design each time to the point where I'm now fully satisfied with my work. The first Pices was actually the first tank I made for my Guard about a year and a half ago, back before I worked with plasticard (I used flat hardboard, the stuff gw boxes are made of. It sucks, don't do it...). I was never satisfied with it, and I've slowly added cool bits, first the predator turrets and most recently the rhino hatches and chimera turret sponson.
All told the conversions took me about 9 hours to do in a few sessions, its a lot simpler of one than the Minotaur conversion, and I have parts to make 6 all told. My plan is to make another 2 with multilasers and 1 MGS (Mobile Gun System) chimera with an autocannon (It will be the transport for the fire support squads, which will always be dismounted anyways.).
For any questions on this post me, I'll do a tutorial if people want to try it out. As for materials you need:
1 Chimera
1 Predator (Not the whole thing, just the turret, the rear hatch, and the front vision ports. Some spare hatches are nice too.)
8 Orc Buggy wheels. These are the only parts that might be trouble to find with GW's bitz policies.
Alternative views here:
Front [link]
Side [link]
Rear [link]
Bird's Eye [link]
Bird's Eye minus the turrets [link]
Hit Download for the close up view.
Cheers.
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Comments: 37
dude very wicked, ive been wondering how to make a hmmvee(sp?) sorta thing my guardsmen but havent gotten around to it
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with a landspeeder, 4 sm bike wheels (ebay), and some plasticard. Thats actually 2 conversions down the road for me, once I have the tanks done and my mammoth tank superheavy (2 land raider kits...). I'll show it when I'm done.
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I think that's a much better shaped APC than a chimera. I'm currently working on a Chaos-Stormlord (super heavy tank with a transport capacity of 40 and a vulcan mega bolter) which is also APC...ish, except for the fact that it's considerably mega-er than the one you've got here!
Nice!
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Wait till you see the basilisk version I have in the works, its 70% done just waiting on the wheels. I swear I'll actually make the tutorials soon, these things are a synch.
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I WANT TO SEE BASILISK VERSION!
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Yeah I will be taking lots of better quality pics of these things including the basilisk one when I get done with AT. About time I put them on the interwebs
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Yeah you sound like you are now doing these for a living. Wow.
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Doing it as a starving artist is more accurate.
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Have you tried making models that are NOT wh40k or whf?
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I just thought you'd have enough creativity to want to do something outside the 40k frame, you know, create your own universe and tabletop with it.
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Been working on my own modern us army themed models for a while, I just need to spend the time to finish them. Honestly I think I will just start them over as I've gotten way better than I was when I started them over a year ago.
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Hmm. Speaking of real armies...
May I have you answer this question, about vehicles? I'm looking for a real army vehicle man for consulting. Military vehicles need to do what they are cut out to do at max efficiency, often leading to specialization. A sub travels through waters and it only needs to do that best, and a tank needs to travel on land the best it can. Fording watery lands is depended on engineers. A helicopter stays afloat in the air, cruising for surface vehicles to shark. Henceforth it is foolish to think of a machine that is versatile on various rough and irregular terrains (hills, mountains, etc) such as a walker. All the niches are filled already, and with added height walkers are just begging to be knocked over or found easily and terminated with rockets or KE rounds. Walker enthusiasts may argue for "shock value" but what do you think, helicopters are shocking enough and shock value is a temporary thing and passes as enemies have more familiarity with them? Like premodern tanks had shock effect in early WW2 but eventually people got used to them somewhat.
The best they can probably do is walk over steep and irregular terrain for logistics, away from frontlines, but they would probably carry much less than a truck would. What do you think of the above assessment?
Besides, ignoring all the disadvantages, what can a versatily mobile fighting vehicle do on its own, ahead in lands others cannot easily traverse, isolated from the bulk of the army?
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want me to post a tutorial? Its a simple conversion.
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That would be nice very actually! I have a ton of bits and other things from various other models and I am just not good enough with them to make up my own conversions for the most part. So yes please.
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When you first said "Pices" I thought you meant "Pisces." apparently you are using "Pices" on too many occasions for it to be a typo 
Stormtroopers? What?! Imps had units called stormtroopers? What are they and what do they look like? Are they somekinda heavier kasrkin or something? Whats a MGS?
Oh and kinda off track, but...
1. withthe ceramic armor they use on today's tanks... (?) if they get hit by a kinetic round, does it crack the ceramic? If the armor gets heated up and butteredknifed through with a HEAT(?), how does the armor give in, by cracking or melting? Is the fracture big and continues to the entire armor piece?
2. Is it better to have a gun with a bigger ordnance than many smaller guns put together? I thought big guns > many small guns. Can't the rines just make a bigger laser cannon rather than sticking multiple peewees together?
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Kasrkin are Imperial Guard Stormtroopers.[link] 
Ah, did I misspell Pisces as Pices? I'll fix that then...
1. Modern tanks have a composite armor, which is still clasified so I can't go into specifics, but in concept it works by having multiple layers of armor stacked on top of each other, and each layer is designed to defeat a different threat. Ceramics have extremely high heat tolerances themselves and yes they crack and by doing so they disperse the impact of the round, but as they are held together by the different layers this does not actually weaken them except in that exact spot and even there not by much. There are also layers that disperse heat rapidly ot deal with high energy weapons.
2. Theoretically, but really it is the quality of the gun which matters and the velocity of the round which is most important. Russian tanks tend to have larger calibers than Nato tanks (the T72 for example has a 125mm main gun compared to our 120mm main gun) but our weapons are of vastly higher quality with much higher muzzle velocitys, which makes our kinetic rounds (sabot) both more accurate over range and more potent, plus the quality of our rounds is much better than theirs.
3.I really don't know about the lazers, thats the air force's gig.
Oh, and an MGS is a Mobile Gun System, a variant of the Stryker IFV [link] Its a good vehicle on its own, but we still haven't figured out how to use it (It fulfills no current battlefield role in our modern doctrine.). Its essentially a Tank Destroyer, which is a class of vehicle that has gone out of style since WWII, at least for the US. The defining characteristics of a Tank Destroyer is that it is a lightly armored vehicle built around an antitank gun. The problem with Tank Destoryers is that historically they tend to take heavy casualties without inflicted heavy losses, so figuring out how to use the damned thing in combat is a challenge. Still its a very cool vehicle.
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I mean, even for kinetic weapons, isn't it better to get one high caliber gun than to get multiple lil' peashooters?
Btw, u opened up some new areas of interest for me with ceramic armor and tank destroyers..
I heard from a rare warhammer40k fan in Korea, that the imps use laser weapons mainly due to the lack of funds and it being rechargeable (no costly kinetic rounds depleted!), maybe link'em up with plasma generators for that too. If this is true, why don't the massive imp guards have enough funds? Don't they have tens of thousands of worlds to draw taxes from? Is it all going into the Rines chapters? (are there a bigger body of a collective of chapters that is lesser than the adeptus level?)
Whats the pros and cons of having metallic armor? Are they too malleable for kinetic rounds and bad at maintaining shape at high temperatures? I wonder why infantry today wear ceramic and weird kevlar kinda stuff for armor... Whats bad about metallic armor?
What is the best type of weapon that can cut through all those tank armor layers?
I saw the top view ofthis PISCINE chimera APC.. wasn't the idea of having gunports scrapped when designers realized its impractical for an infantry in an APC to aim and fire at anything outside while the the vehicle is on the move and even when its not moving the angles for the guns are awkward and impractical? How do people see and aim at external enemies from the inside anyway?
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The difference between ceramic and metal armors is actually pretty simple. When you are shot not only does the bullet hit you but so does the force of the bullet. Think of it as someone hitting a piece of paper. If you hit the piece of paper with just one finger you'll find that you can punch though it pretty easily at that one point but that you won't do much of any damage to the rest of the piece of paper. This is because all of the force of your attack is concentrated on one point. This is essentially how bullets effect metal armor when they hit them, they try to punch through the point of impact and transfer all of their force through the armor at that one point. Now try to hit is with a fist. You'll notice that it takes a lot more force to break through the paper at the point of impact, but that you will do a ton more damage to the whole sheet of paper when you hit it. This is because the force of your blow is spread over a much larger area and needs to in effect break through more paper than when you poke it with your finger. This is essentially how ceramic armor works, it spreads out the force of the impact throughout the whole piece of armor by cracking, which both increases its resistance to penetration and decreases the amount of force which is transferred through to the wearer.
Now for metal weave or wire mesh armors like kevlar you are in effect taking lots of interlocking layers of thin flexible metal and trying to punch through it, sort of like trying to punch through a plastic bag. The mesh bends around the impact point, dispersing the energy as it does so and "catching" the round.
The best kinds of armor on the market right now for people at least are combination ceramic and Kevlar plates. In effect these have a layer of kevlar on top, an insertable plate with several layers of ceramic tiles stacked on top of each other with kevlar mesh in between them, and then another layer of kevlar behind that. The kevlar holds the ceramic tiles together so that they maintain their strength and shape even once they have been shattered by rounds, allowing them to withstand numerous impacts, and the layers of ceramic tiles give far more protection than a single really thick peice of tile would.
Metallic plates aren't used in body armor any more really because they are too heavy and they cannot withstand multiple impacts like ceramic armor can.
That being said for vehicles metalic armors are better because you can afford to have thicker layers of it and metal is stronger than ceramic the thicker it is.
As for non-kinetic rounds that use heat to cut through the armor, there are pros and cons to both metal and ceramic armors. Ceramics tend to have some of the highest temperature tolerances of any materials man can produce, but unlike kinetic impacts they tend not to disperse the heat from the round over a large area. Metals tend to have much lower melting points and thus are easier to penetrate but they also are much better at dispersing the energy over a much larger area as they are able to conduct heat better than ceramics. So the best kind of armor against high energy rounds is a combination of ceramic tiles with metallic "honeycomb" layers underneath the layers of ceramic armor. The armor of most modern tanks works a little bit along this concept, but I can't go into any more details.
As for why the Imperium uses laser weaponry, its for a lot of reasons. First, its cheap and much easier to standardize than slug throwing weapons as the only part you really need to make standard is the power cell. The Cells are rechargeable too so that helps with supply issues. They also tend to be extremely reliable and simple weapons without any moving parts so they don't need to be as well maintained as autoguns, though they also tend to lack the power of autoguns, or at least the standard issue ones do. Laser weapons are more powerful than gunpowder weapons once you put enough power to them, but they become progressively more expensive to do so and the effective range in atmosphere is far less than that of conventional weapons due to the dispersion effect of the atmosphere.
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You helped me with a lot of info there. Esp on the reasons why metal armor is not used for body armor anymore and why ceramic armor is preferred.
Say, what are the cons and pros of wheeled versus tracked (treads) vehicles? Why do they have half-tracks?
What! rly? I thought laser weaponry had a really long effective range.
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Well yes and no with the lazers range. Its effectiveess decreases greatly as the light is refracted by the air, passing though water vapour would have an ever greater effect, but it still has a long effective range. The Air force has a lazer cannon built into a refitted 747 that has an effective range of something like 10 miles.
As for the pros and cons of wheels and tracks? Tracked vehicles can move faster over rough terrain because they provide a stable semiflat surface for the vehicle to move over, but they tend not to be able to move as fast. Wheeled vehicles are bumpier over rought terrain but faster on roads. Tracks also do a lot of damage to roads over time. Half tracks were an attempt to combine the mobility of tracked vehicles with the speed of wheeled vehicles, but they never lived up to hopes and no one really uses them anymore. Some vehicles have more than 2 sets of wheels, each with its own suspension, and this sort of settup alleviates most of the bumpiness problems that 4 wheeled vehicles have on rough terrain.
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In truth, laser "beams" would be barely visible, if at all, to the naked eye, right?
Oh yeah, I have this weird question, (like I never done that b4, 
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Those buggles were a hollywood creatlon. WhlLe that movle was entertalnlng lt was yet another case of 'mlLltary unreaLlsm" and was a borderLlne recrultment vldeo for the alr force.
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uh-huh. then do buggies suck and have no use in the US Army? If so, what disadvantages can YOU see in them that makes them pitiful?
Air Force recruitment... yeah right, they practically got owned by Screamie.
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Buggies are worthless, they offer no protection and thus are only useful in bringing men to the fight so they can fight dismounted. Also no one ever rappels in a combat environment, EVER.
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You mean, they don't ever rappel, even before actual combat happened?
By rappelling, do you mean rope + walls, or just any rope-drop from higher places, like from a helicopter?
Ppl don't rappel because they are too exposed? I guess that makes sense when there actually IS bullet fair going on at that moment. What other reasons are there that doesn't make rappelling necessary?
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rappelling is almost never practical. And by almost never, I mean that I have never even heard of it being done in combat. You are completely exposed and cannot defend yourself. I've never seen a situation where rappelling could possibly be a better option than simply going AROUND the obstacle.
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What if you had to get down a cliff?
Down a rooftop?
Or get off a helicopter in double time?
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Okay, so you wanted it to look like the Stryker IFV? I guess it kind of looks like one... a bit tall for one though and not long enough. You of all people, sir, should know about the specs of real military vehicles.
I'm just joshin' at ya. It looks real good.
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Yeah, well...
As the title suggests this is the M3 version of the conversion (hehe, that sounds funny...). The M1 version was more styker like, but it otherwise sucked by comparison to this (I've since fixed the conversion and saved the model.). Yeah, I know that it was too short lengthwise. Its kinda funny but I realized that WHILE I was building this one ("Gosh, this is about 1/3 and inch too short) and because of the way I converted it it would have been the simplest thing in the world to have fixed. The only reason I didn't was because I already had 2 of them done at this length, when I make the tutorial for it I'll be sure to make them longer.
As for the height a stryker is really tall for US vehicles or so I've found, I've only ever worked with them twice (ie: passenger). Cool vehicles, very quiet.
And thank you, I really try.
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I know that it's extremely hard to do conversions like that with parts that are already set up for a specific task... and plasticard is our friend. Hell, I still have to design and build my freaking Eviscerator tank for the SM.
And yes, Strykers are very quiet, I've heard them roll down the road many a time in Iraq. Hell, I saw one with a goddamn mine plow on it before.
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oddly I was planning on doing a conversion for a superheavy tank using a land raider model, to make something along the lines of a Mammoth tank for C&C 3 [link] [link] [link] the ideas seem kind of similar so perhaps we could brainstorm a joint work?
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I could see it as a great project, and the turret style on the Mammoth is very similar to the idea that I had for my Eviscerator. A joint work would definitely, umm.. work.
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