Stripe Happy

As the basecoat extravaganza continues I found myself working on the drones for my Devilfish last night. I know that a lot of the folks in the Tau intertron-meta scoff at drones on Devilfish in favor of Smart Missile Systems, but I have a very good reason not to use them. That reason being, the Devilfish kit doesn't come with Smart Missile Systems, and I will be damned if I am gonna buy them as bits. Tactical, naw, but 'eff it.

Because of my blatant disregard for strategy in favor of a lesser fiscal burden, as well as my love for Fire Warriors in APC's, I end up with a lot of friggin' drones on the board during the games. In the past, this has caused problems for my opponents because it is seldom clear which drone is with which other drone/s... because my shit wasn't painted. Now that my shit is getting quasi-painted, I wanted it to be pretty clear what drones are what. The drones I had assigned to various crisis suits I just painted the squad marking on, to tie them into their suits.

From Mars Project Blog

For the sake of identification I blocked in the markings, not worrying too much about how fine the lines were. This doesn't differ at all from the way I normally freehand. I will always block in the basic design, then wash it it, shade, it, highlight it, and clean it up as I am doing the same thing on the rest of the model with the other colors.

After looking at the various squad drones I realized that, because the Tau markings are often just lines of varying height and thickness, the drones still kind of looked the same between squads. Not a huge deal because there were suits next to them, however on the the drones that operated independently, I could totally see grabbing one and moving it with suits unless there was a noticable difference.

Most of the men in my family, myself excluded, have served in the Armed Forces in some "grunt" capacity. Not too many of my kith and kin joined up for job skills. I remembered one conversation where-in someone in my family accused the Airforce of being "stripe-happy" as it pertained to rank. Real quick, let me just say that I have the utmost respect for anyone willing to give of themselves and risk their life for the defense of this country, so I am not taking a shot the brave men and women of the US Airforce. More to the point, I bring this up because this was the basis for my design on the Devilfishs' drones. I wanted their markings to be fancier, somewhere between like what you would see as Tau Sept markings and the logos on F-1 racing cars. Not only does it add to the futuristic feel, but I figured the hot-shot pilots would their drones to look fancier.

From Mars Project Blog

The design is vastly different from the crisis suits drones, easily identifiable, and still within the feel of the Tau, so all in all I think it worked, I guess we will see in my game on Friday.

Thanks for reading,
T