Today, I'm gonna talk about the Wargames Atlantic Cannon Fodder kit (Females), how I used them for my Astra Militarum army, and how you can use this kit for general kitbashing. This will be part one in a two part series, because, well, I had ideas.
So, Ive played a few games with my Chem-Dogs, and I think Ive found my balance with them. The army has deviated from my original intentions though. Initially, I'd wanted a very old school infantry gun line sort of affair. A meat grinder designed to rope-a-dope a foe, and then jump on any mission objectives later on. That's why I have 40 basic infantry, 2 command squads, and 2 heavy weapon squads. That's more less a classic infantry platoon, with a few extras. Unfortunately, that isn't really how 40k is played at the moment. With the mission how they are, they may be different by the time you read this, need you to be active and playing to objectives almost immediately. The capitalised Infantry Squad does well with the home objective, and static dakka, but I find the other battleline choices more appealing. So I needed to expand and alter my footsloggers. My first instinct was to modify some squads into Catachan Jungle Fighters, but then I thought, “Why not others?”, and so this became a two-parter.
Its
probably necessary to provide an
overview of the kit in question. Coming from the Death Fields series,
the Cannon Fodder (Females) box features 24 models, six to a sprue.
These notably lack bases, an omission common to Wargames Atlantic's
entire range, although thats more of a sundry expense these days. The
individual models are largely setting agnostic, although their guns
have a lasgun vibe, as well as a convict theme. These are ladies in
jumpsuits, with the choice of head and colours affecting their
overall vibe. One image of the box shows off the kit done up as 50's
style silver spacesuits, whereas going for caps and green makes for
a second line infantry look. There's also a fair few bionics in the
mix too, as well as
a
bounty of alternative heads. Actual equipment though is a
touch more limited. There is a bulky
energy weapon, drum magazines, fiddly scopes to make a passable sniper rifle, and a
few pistols on each sprue, but you don't get a fancy melee weapon for
the squad leader, or a real choice in weapons. This seems to be a
weakness of the
male Cannon
Fodder box too,
and you may wish to look into compatible kits, like the Bulldogs.
I
got
lucky during Project Chem-Dogs, I’d
chanced upon an old Cadian BattleForce box which provided a lot of
sundry bits and
weapon
options with made running them as regular infantry much easier. Recasting these bits was not entirely successful, and I
would probably recommend other solutions going forward. My sarges
where equipped with bolters, easily found, and power weapons, less
so. Vox units were recast with wire aerials. I would likely
just add an aerial to a
spare
cannon fodder backpack next time, its probably a more elegant
solution. On the plus side there's a number of bits that lend
themselves well to Heavy Weapon teams and similar, like binoculars
and pointing hands. You have enough for the rank and file, but for
the squad specialists you'll need some bits and some creativity.
You'll also note that mine have a lot in the way of
sculpted gasmasks and capes. I'm not talking about that too much
today, and its definitely not required for your
models.
So,
how to make these as Catachan Jungle Fighters? Well, these
have famously limited options, so making these is fairly
straightforward versus the other
battleline units.
I built these as "swaps" for existing Infantry Squads, so I
skipped the Vox units. You need a melee weapon for the sergeants,
here being leftovers from my attempt at Rough Riders. The flamers
were a combination of old Black Templar examples, and the energy
weapon from the Cannon Fodder sprue. I cut the business end and
canister off a flamer, and attached them to the existing weapon,
which had been trimmed for length. These were then painted in my
usual way, and came out pretty well.
At the same time, I took the opportunity to make a "counts as" Sargeant Harker. That’s a bit of change for me, I don’t think I’ve fielded a named/special/epic character like this before. At least outside of Bloodbowl. This was based off a Bulldog body for increased size, but had the same basic idea as the flamers above. While this worked out nicely, it does highlight a potential weakness with the Cannon Fodder, they are somewhat slight of proportion. I'm also not good at faces.
Up next: Death Korps
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