WIP: Drop Pod - Assembly

Time to put it all together, now that the paint is dry.

So after laying paint down on the panels and posts, I slapped some paint onto the harnesses and central console, getting ready to put them inside and start gluing the pieces together. If I was more patient, I'd wait and weather everything, the build it all, but I'm not, so I built it, and will now weather it as a whole. Kind of a six of one, half a dozen of another situation.

The main interior was sprayed with Alclad Magnesium paint, then immediately after with Steel, which is this almost gritty looking, dull metallic paint. Honestly not the biggest fan, but it does give it the look I was after, a used, dirty, worn interior where Space Marines in large heavy armor trod daily. I did the magnesium paint first to give it a shiny look, then sprayed the steel unevenly across it to make it splotchy, like at one point this thing looked pretty good. I then gave it the requisite washes, highlights, etc.

I didn't really know what to do with the top of the central console. I've seen some use it like a radar orb, but honestly, doing straight lines and concentric circles on a sphere by hand isn't my strong suit. I decided I'd try a 3D "hologram" look, like advanced tech showing where they're landing. While most of the worlds a Space Marine would travel to are probably quite alien looking, I decided to make it more earth-like in appearance to give a better idea of what I was trying to convey, since an earth-like world would be instantly more recognizable. I got a few different blue colors, and just slathered them on in different intervals and strokes, and then used some of GW's Armageddon Dust texture paint, stippled on, then washed in brown and highlighted with green to give the appearance of landmasses with various topographies. Shame is, it looks decent considering I was just winging it, and will be mostly covered by the turret in the middle.

After all that was glued down, it was time to add the final posts and turret in the middle. The fit was a little tight since I did it out of order, but painting was a breeze in the subassemblies, so no complaints here. Also, the magnets are doing their job well, holding the drop panels up in a lock position, while being easily opened without any mechanical pieces to do that work.

So next, I'll be washing, weathering, and generally messing up the paint work you see here. This will tone down the brightness of the orange and white, and honestly, I plan on really getting on it, since this thing theoretically drops through serious conditions in the game fluff, so I might go a little heavy on the weathering. Until next time, thanks for looking!