Alright, dudes and dudettes - new pics of new things!
As my army is a knightly order crusade army, war machines need to be mobile. And, as I have a Greek theme to a lot of it, rather than make horse-drawn artillery, I'm going for a sort of "Leadbelcher" look, but with minotaurs. Each minotaur will be accompanied by two human loaders, with a small horse-drawn cart and a horse for them to ride so they can keep up with the faster minotaur.
I'm planning to make a cannon, a helblaster and a mortar. The cannon is going to be modelled as a huge flintlock rifle, being held at an angle by the minotaur while one of the humans loads the cannonball and the other primes the pan; the minotaur will be sighting with a large telescope.
The mortar will be held by a kneeling minotaur, with him loading the shell into the muzzle with his other hand. There will be a level and protractor on the side to measure the trajectory angle, and the loaders will be reaching out to light the touchhole and checking the angle with an abacus and calucation sheet.
The helblaster will be modelled as a sort of oversized repeater handgun, with the minotaur firing it from the hip with a "Say Hello To My Little Friend!" vibe. The loaders will be flinching away and loading another handgun, ready for the insanse cow-beast to let rip.
So! These are the plans! I am aiming to get these converted by the end of February and then paint them in March so I can enter them as three entries into the April painting competition (I have no interest in the Feb and Mar categories).
And here are the pictures! (Click for bigger ones);
The first thing I did was cut all the bits off the minotaur sprue, assemble the arms and bodies, and then do some dry fitting to see how they fit together and which parts could give me the result I needed. Obviously, only some arms would give me anything close to it - and none of them would give me exactly what I wanted (they tend to be pretty close to the body, and I needed a lot of arm positions which aren't "holding a hand weapon".) I assembled three piles of bits and a big heap of everything else .... you get a LOT of arms in that boxed set!
What you see above is an example of how I cut up the arms; I chopped it in half at the elbow and carved away plastic at the shoulder. Because of the way the minotaurs are constructed, the arms have no options in them - they go in a single position or not at all. What I did was carve away the shoulder of the arms, which allowed me to turn the arms very subtly. If I'd done it too much, it would have placed the arm in an unnatural position. You can make a small change in the position of the elbow too, and bend the wrist a little as well. Taken together, with careful choosing of the arm used, you can get almost any position.
I'm unjustifiably proud of this - it's a cannon-sized flintlock rifle. Not complete - it needs a trigger and the rear of the stock modelling out so it's wider; but, yes - it's a cannon-sized flintlock.
Here is the minotaur as he stands right now - I've modelled his arm to be holding the spyglass, and I've given him hooves rather than the silly feet they come with. Minotaurs should have hooves, damnit!
And here is the ugly machine-tool I call a hand holding the flintlock at the angle it will be held at, with the loader putting the cannon ball in place. He needs a hand weapon at his belt (I am going to give him an ax, and the other guy some kind of hammer to perform "maintenance" on the cannon) and a shield. I'm going to give the minotaurs handweapons and shields too, either slung on their backs or on the carts.