Second Ghost/Doomsday Ark Done!

Not much to say here. There are bits that need repairing - I really raised the standard of my painting since painting the first one. I fixed a bunch of things on the old one after painting the new one, but there are still places for improvement that I noticed only after taking the pics.

Second Ark WIP

Same conversion and magnetization as before, except I did it a bit better this time... and much, much faster.

Ghost/Doomsday Ark Painting

It took me weeks to complete this model. I'm very happy with how it turned out. On to pictures!

Here are a few progress pics:

And when the model was done:

Ghost/Doomsday Ark Conversion

The theme of my army, when it comes to vehicles, is that pilots/drivers should not have limbs, a human form, and instead be integrated with the vehicle directly. It's robotic, it's grimdark, it's foreign.

My approach to doing this is largely inspired by blogger fromthewarp and his Necron ark:

So it made a lot of sense to approach my Ark conversion similarly.

However, I tend to also remove the console (keyboard) that the pilot should have been operating with their hands, and I also remove legs. This was a problem with the Ark. Doing that would leave a huge gap in the model that is visible to the naked eye. In my Barge I just left the space open, in my Scythe I moved the pilot forward and added some pipes to mitigate the problem. Neither approach was possible with the Ark and I needed to add bits in place of where the legs and the console would be.

To make things worse, removing his butt and legs implied removing his chair. The recline part of the chair looks great and I wanted to keep it very hard, but I just couldn't. There was no way to attach it to the vehicle without getting in the way of the large spine pipe I had in mind for the model. I didn't end up using the chair.

After looking at different Necron models and bits I could find on Ebay for cheap. I was looking for something approximately 2cm by 2cm that I would where his feet would be in order to hide the emptiness below. It needed to look machine-y, ideally give me an opportunity to add some orange glow that would be missing when looking at the model from above. I found a solution in the Obelisk model, namely the bug that sits on top of the C'tan in the middle:

I got just that bug, just the plates without the tentacles, for a few bucks on Ebay including shipping. When I received it and got a closer look I noticed that this bug has a very noticeable slant that wouldn't look good, so I flipped it upside down. It is slightly concave on the other side, but only slightly, I could make it work.

I was looking for a bit that would let me paint some glow, but this particular bit also gave me a perfect opportunity to tie all pipes connecting the pilot to the vehicle! I would just plug them where the tentacles would have been.

With all those pieces ready, the conversion was straightforward. I used three thicknesses of old bass guitar strings.

In addition to the pilot, I want paint all my Gauss weapons using the same freehand technique I used for my Warriors. The Gauss weapons that are on the side of the Ark have a textured rod that would prevent this, so I had to remove these textured rods and replace them with smooth rods of an appropriate diameter.

I found these rods on Amazon that are the same diameter as the green rods that come with Necron Warriors. They are the most cost efficient rods I found. Replacing the textured bits with these smooth rods was straightforward:

And, with that, the Ark was ready for painting!

Ghost/Doomsday Ark Magnetization

The Ark is one of the most beautiful 40k models in my opinion. It's massive, detailed, busy, with many layers and shapes overlapping one another. It comes in over a hundred bits that need to be put together. It may not be the best choice gameplay wise, or make any sense from an engineer standpoint, but it looks great and I'll probably be getting another one in the future.

The most easily noticeable difference between a Ghost Ark and a Doomsday Ark is that the front half of the vehicle (the ribcage) is upside down on a Doomsday Ark. This creates several challenges: the front needs to stay up in both these positions, the rifles on the sides need to be flipped upside down, and structurally, the connection between the ribcage and the back of the Ark needs to be extremely strong in order to keep the model together when picked up by either half. The only difference between the two models apart from the ribcage orientation is the inside of the ribcage - either a massive gun or a repair station.

It is possible to make the Ark fully convertible and this has been done. But, is very fiddly and leaves ]the vehicle in many bits that need to be moved around.

An alternative approach is much more quick and easy. Forget about flipping the ribcage, just keep it one side up, and change the inside of the ribcage. It makes the model more stable, the whole deal more simple, and better looking. The doomsday cannon is a beautiful piece and it shouldn't be hidden underneath the ribcage.

I didn't take any pictures while magnetizing the model, but it is fairly straightforward. I did something along the lines of this tutorial by youtuber HobbyHotTips:

The process mostly went as expected. I had some trouble lining up the (magnetized) cannon against the back of the vehicle. Since I painted the individual ribs separated, the thickness of the undercoat added some length to the ribcage, since I also undercoated where they joined to one another. It's okay but not perfect.

The warriors stay in position perfectly, they're very stable. The magnetization video above does that in a way that is also aesthetically not noticeable (though I drilled 2x1mm magnets into warrior's mounts).