For the last few weeks I have been activated for natural disaster relief by the Massachusetts Army National Guard, hence the lack of posts. Here is one to hold you guys over for a few days until I SHOULD be released. There may be more snow coming unfortunately, so we will see what happens.
So I decided to change the Hellblade Interceptor I was working on into a Helltalon Fighter Bomber. It was mostly a matter of the model turning out to be about 30% larger than the Forge World Hellblade fighter, but I also really want to try out the Helltalon's rules as they seem fun.
The weapons were pretty simple to figure out. The Helltalon comes with a Twin-Linked Lascannon, 8 bombs, and your choice of either a Reaper Autocannon or Havoc Launcher. As I usually rely on my aircraft to engage enemy vehicles I went with the Reaper Autocannon. This was simple to do as I had some spare parts left over from a Chaos Defiler. After looking the model over there was an obvious visual space for weapon mounts in front of the cockpit and above the engine intake.
I settled on how to configure the weapons mounts quickly but there was a snag with the lascannons; most lascannon bits are quite bulky, so fitting two of them stacked on top of each other didn't work with the majority of the bits I tried. The lascannons from a Storm Raven were the corret size, but they have a "right-left" orientation which would have made it tough to mount them vertically the way I wanted. The solution was quite easy as it turned out, deep within my bitz box I found a single ancient lacannon from the original 1980s Predator Tank kit. It was the right size and looked adequately high tech, so I chopped it in half and used it to make the "techno bits" for the Lascannon and added some parts from a Stormtalon and the classic chaos upgrades kit. I thought they looked cooler mounted upside down.