Topic: Super Heavy Land Raider Exterminus Project

[Baron de Pencier]

Wow. Just when I thought super-heavy tanks couldn't get much heavier... you make 'em bigger than ever.

I'm anxiously awaiting the final product!

[DogmaRaider]

I've completed the sponson magnetization.  Using four magnets per side makes the bond extremely strong and will hold the heavier sponson assemblies.

Sponson Magnetization - Complete


Remember the gaps in those doors, we'll I've engineered some new ones which solve the problem although I am not convinced as to their appearance.  Particularly the three pointed claws at the top of the door.  I'm looking into ways of making them more prominent as they are on the existing plastic doors. I most certainly will do some more detail work later to spruce them up a bit.  For now there adequate to allow me to continue.

Imperial Eagle & Terminator Honors Doors - Detail


In addition to completing the sponson magnetization and doors, I've also been working on the reinforced armour.  Fitting and gluing the rear and side pieces was easy; simple pinning and super glue.  The front portion of the reinforced armour, the part that covers the tracks for added protection needs special attention.  Normally the armour is supposed to wrap around the track and terminate on the other side.  However because of the Exterminus's stepped track design, the inner track being larger than the outer track, I'll be cutting part of the armour off and saving it for later use.

Reinforced Armour - Cuts and Rebuilding


As you see above, I've cut the armour straight down away from the outer edge.  This preserves the two inner angled corners and end caps, rivits and other detail which is hard to reproduce.  I'll be using it later.  In its place I've built up some plasticard to continue the current design straight; this will connect with the inner track on the side.  You can see this in the mock up of the right side track that I did below.  Even with the gaps in the armor I must say this is starting to look impressive.

Mockup - Right Side Track


In the interest of time, I'll be skipping the detail items such as the doors and sponson weapons till later.  I'm still stuck on the tunnel but I don't want to waste time on interior design work now.  I'm going to move on quickly to the central core construction, engine and front ramp construction.  I'll also try and make my posts a bit shorter; I tend to get long winded.

As always comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

[DogmaRaider]

Ok fixed the pictures.  I used https instead of http in the URL.

[Fugitive]

This just keeps getting better and better. Keep up the good work.

[Da Pittman]

Nice progress, looking forward to the final product as well.

[DogmaRaider]

Thank you very much everyone for your support!  Time for a monster post!  I worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights and have a ton of stuff to report on.

To begin with, I cut up and composed the engine.  My initial design of the engine works along the premise that it would be significantly but not over larger than the existing Land Raider.  Current Land Raiders have four exhaust stacks but given the size of the Exterminus and the need for increase engine power and width of the fuselage, I drew up a design that calls for six exhaust stacks.

Let's start with the back panel piece of the engine assembly.  In the next two paragraphs, when I say left and right sides, I'm looking from a perspective of standing at the rear of the Exterminus look back toward the engine.

I started by cutting a single left and right stack off each engine piece.  To start off easy, I cut down through between the stacks first.  I then continued and cut into the main engine cowling but only to mark a good starting place where the start of the main cut will be.  I then switched to the miter box to ensure the cut was straight.

Engine Construction - Back Panel - Cutting in Progress


For the start of the cut on the bottom of the engine, if you look near the bottom pipes of the stacks, you'll see a square notch cut out of the engine cowling.  For the cut of the left side piece, I aligned the saw with the right edge of the notch and conversely for the right side piece I used the left side edge of the notch.  That particular edge of the notch and the joint placement of the two engine stacks that we're bisecting makes a very nice straight cut.  You can see the finished result of the cut below along with the very nice close-up of the joined pieces.

Engine Construction - Back Panel - After Cutting and Final Result


Now that I've split the back panel pieces of the engine, I need to turn my attention to the front engine panel.  This is the engine panel that mounts into the sides of the Land Raider.  Just as I did before, I split the two joined stacks at the top first cutting a little bit below the stack level to start my main cut.  As this piece is too big for the miter box, I clamped it to the edge of my desk to continue cutting.

Engine Construction - Front Panel - Cutting in Progress


To make sure the cut lines up correctly on both pieces, I placed the back panel piece on the front panel piece and lined my saw up directly against the freshly cut edge of the back piece.  I think drew my saw back which marked a line on the front panel piece itself.  Taking off the back panel piece revealed the line which I then cut along with my saw straight through.  Unfortunately I forgot to snap a picture of how I actually determined the position of the cut but think of it as using the back panel pieces you just cut as a straight edge to draw a line of the front panel pieces.

The end result of all this are four matched pieces that fit together perfectly with very nice clean seams.

Engine Construction - Front Panel - Final Result

[DogmaRaider]

Mock Up - Engine Detail


You can see the results of the engine above when I add it to my mock up Exterminus.  Because I've cut the engine, I've also committed to a fixed size for the width of the Exterminus.  One of the critical numbers you want to remember is 74 mm.  That's complete width, including the tabs that fit inside the floor guide rails, of a section of Land Raider Exterminus flooring.

Now we're ready to cut up the flooring.  Luckily this actually quite easy given that you only have two panels of flooring.  Now one panel isn't enough to cover the width of the Exterminus hull but cutting them and combining them together do.  Since I'm such a nice guy, I've already figured out the math for you.

First we'll be cutting four total pieces; two from each floor plate.  For the front pieces near the assault ramp, the dimensions should be 68 mm x 37 mm.  For the rear pieces next to the engine the dimensions are 40 mm x 37 mm.  The width of 37 mm is dictated to us because of the width of the engine assembly; 37 twice is 74.  Be sure to include any of the tabs and not just the visible flooring.  You can see the result of the cutting below.

Floor Plate - After Cutting


Now that I have the end caps of the flooring, let's create the sub-flooring to connect the two.  Obviously these floor pieces don't comprise the total length of the flooring required so we have to produce a mid-flooring piece to bridge the two.  In turning over the pieces of flooring, one can observe a inset lip.  We can use this lip to assist us in bridging the pieces.

Floor Plate - Inset Lip


Using a 1 mm thick plasticard sheet, cut a rectangle 69 mm x 79 mm.  You'll find that the 69 mm edge fits nicely into the inset lip area of both ends.  Combining all of the floor pieces and this bridging piece yields the following.

Floor Plate - All Four Pieces with Bridging


You may have noticed a rather large dip in the flooring because the bridging piece is not level with the remainder of the flooring.  We'll come back to this piece in at a later time and correct this issue with some diamond place plasticard.

Tomorrow I'll continue building up the core by finishing up the floor and starting the assault ramp.  As always questions and comments are always welcome!

[Jehan-Reznor]

Nice work is the extra engine part from another landraider or from the dreadnaught?

PS Double posting is not allowed and will bring the wrath of the moderators so be ware

[Starrakatt]

Excellent work dogmaraider! Keep it up, can't wait to see the final result of the project, but by all gods, you like to make complicated stuff... [bow]

PS Double posting is not allowed and will bring the wrath of the moderators so be ware

Double posting in such an endeavour is perfectly fine if the work doesn't fit in one page though and is perfectly fine.

   Starky

[DogmaRaider]

Jehan-Reznor:  The engine parts all come from the Land Raider kit.  Thanks for the warning about the double posting.  I don't know if its allowed or not but I'll keep them to one in the future just in case.  I actually post this same material on 4 different forums and one of them has a restriction on the number of images in posts which is why there are two.

Godlike Starrakatt, Stomper of 3vil:  Thank you... I tend to overengineer things though making them more complicated than I have to.  Already I've thought of a diferent way to apporach this which doesn't involve building a complicated tunnel and looks a bit more realistic in terms of usage.  I'll probably be employing it in the later Grey Knight LREs that I'll be doing.


Ok let's finish up the flooring.  Remaining is adding in the side rails that will provide support and gap filling on the sides and the diamond plate on the top.  For the rails I've found that 1 mm x 2.5 mm x 75.5 mm plasticard strips worked perfectly.  For the diamond place plasticard on the top (I used Plastruct 91687 HO Scale 1:100 Diamond Plate) I cut out a piece of 71 mm x 75.5 mm.  You can see the individual pieces and the final result below.

Floor Plate - Individual Pieces, Diamond Plate, Side Rails and Final Result


This completes the floor plate.  For now we'll set it aside and create the front assault ramps.  Now previously I cut did a mock up of the Exterminus experimenting.  You can see below that I used the full both front door pieces.  I didn't like this look as to me it makes the Exterminus entirely too wide though in the future it would make a possible basis for a vehicle landing craft.....

Mock Up - Previous Assault Ramp Door Width Preview


Previously I looked into a few different designs.  When I was doing my thinking I had to take into account both the assault ramp and the rear engine as one directly correlates to the other in terms of width.  After some rough drawings, I came up with an assault ramp design based around a door with five full teeth.  This design also works out perfectly with the rear engine and also gives the Exterminus enough width to make it look logical and not overly wide.

To cut the assault ramps, I turned again to my miter box which is now one of my new best friends.  For the top part of the assault ramp, I found that splitting the third tooth from the left and right of top assault ramp piece respectively.  Each tooth itself is 6 mm wide including the inclines so measuring and marking 3 mm from either side is no problem.  When your done, each top assault ramp piece should be approximately 30.5 mm wide not counting the rods used to allow it to rotate.  Total width of the top and bottom assault ramps should be 71 mm.

Assault Ramp - Bottom - Cutting In Progress


The bottom assault ramp is slightly different.  Measuring 30.5 mm from either edge shows us that the cut will be approximately at the inclined point of the third tooth instead of the middle.  After cutting both pieces the center tooth will be replaced by  point instead.  You can see the final result of cutting below.

Assault Ramp - Final Result


Now I do have a set of Imperial Eagle and Terminator Honor top assault doors.  I ran through the plastic doors provided in the Land Raider kit as a dry run.  I don't intend to cut the Forgeworld door at all but instead build around them.  I'm looking into a way to build around them right now.

On Sunday I should be able to get a few items done and perhaps show a mock up of the floor with the engine and the assault ramps.  There's actually not much left except the tunnels and a few miscellaneous interior items before I can start gluing up all the major assemblies.  With some luck by next weekend I may be ready to proceed with designing and building the removable top.  Stay tuned.. same bat time... same bat channel.

As always comments and suggestions are always welcome.  Especially if anyone has any ideas about using these Forgeworld assault doors.

[Lucky_Jackal]

Whao! This is looking better and better with every post!

[iandanger]

Its great to see this bad-boy coming together, makes me think about doing one of these instead of a baneblade, after all, why would I want an IG vehicle when I could get a space marine one instead. You gotta take a picture of this thing next to a regular land raider and possibly a baneblade once its done, I'd love to see what the scale on that monster is.

[Addinarr]

Ever think of using a Predator turret? I've always wondered what it'd look like on a landraider chassis...

And I don't know if you're going to use the heavy weapon sponsons, but I hope you have some idea not to repeat the problem of the Terminus and restrict the firing arcs of the weapons.

[Jehan-Reznor]

Great work!

I would remove the half eagles on the ramp.

[DogmaRaider]

Lucky_Jackal:  Thanks!

iandanger:  Thanks but I don't know about trading it for a Baneblade.  At my core I'm an IG player and super heavy tank fiend.  I got into this hobby because of that tank.  I was walking by my friend's laptop and he was looking at it on the Forgeworld web site and that was the end of that.

Addinarr:  I haven't thought of using a turret on the Exterminus.  That's an interesting idea that I'll have to explore.

Unfortunately I don't have any plans to fix the Terminus issue at the moment.  I do understand the problem and don't like it either.  In the future when I create my Grey Knight ones after this project I do plan to look into this issue and correct it.

Jehan-Reznor:  Not to worry; that's just a practice piece.  Right now I'm engaged in trying to find out how to take either the Forgeworld Terminator Honor or Imperial Eagle doors and use them with the Exterminus without carving up and destroying the detail.


I modified the previous posts to make the thread more modem user friendly. If you want to see the larger images, simply click on the smaller ones.

[DogmaRaider]

I've been doing some thinking about the overall design and version without making the tunnels for the side doors is possible and probably is easier in the long run.  Instead of making the inside a long continuous rectangle, you could think of it as an elongated widen Land Raider but with alcoves where the central external doors are.  It would be much easier and would cut the complexity and construction time.  I'll be giving this method a try when I move on to the Chaos Tzeentch Land Raider Exterminus.  For now I'll continue on with the tunneled version.

Here's a UPDATED ascii rendering... these are so awesome....

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[Addinarr]

Yeah, I've always wondered why no one bothered to try that. Seemed obvious.

Any ideas on weapons and stats? I was kinda imagining a turbolaser maybe.

[DogmaRaider]

Addinarr:  I didn't think of that type of split until after.  To me the tunnel idea came to me first.  Above everything I think of the Land Raider as a heavy tank.  The thickness of the walls lends itself to this idea of survivability. 

Turbolaser... wow no nothing like that.  I'm still planning on the many different possible weapon combinations.  My thinking is that current weapon sets are enough; the added weapon spaces give the Exterminus its power and make it highly configurable.

Happy Thanksgiving!  Now its time for an update.  When I cutting the assault doors I must've been working on two hours sleep because I made the same error on both doors.  The cuts on both top and bottom doors, for some reason I made them short.  I found this out when I was mocking up the Exterminus.

For the bottom assault door, I added a piece of 2.0 mm x 4.0 mm plasticard.  If notice on the back of the bottom assault doors, There are indents for the teeth of the top assault door.  To preserve this, I cut out a 2.0 mm section of the 2.0 mm x 4.0 mm plasticard and replace it with a 1 mm thick plasticard piece.  With the plasticard in the middle, this brings the total width of the door to 65.0 mm not including the rods use to allow it to turn.  Actually I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

Assault Door - Bottom - Construction and Final


Moving back to the top assault door, the problem with using the Forgeworld door still remained.  To work in the Forgeworld door, I added plasticard extensions to existing plastic door.  Just as the bottom assault door, this top assault door is also 65.0 mm wide.

In retrospect I don't consider what I did to the bottom a failure.  In a way it helped me because what I didn't realize until now is that the teeth of the top assault Forgeworld doors and those indents on the backside of the bottom assault doors didn't line up.  To correct this problem, I cut a strip of plasticard and made my own teeth out of 2.0 mm x 2.0 mm.

Assault Door - Top - Final


Added the Forgeworld top and bottom assault doors to the mock up, its really starting to look like something.

Mock Up with Front Doors


The next challenge will be constructing a good looking front armor plate (where the assault cannon turret would sit) from all the pieces that I have lying around.  I've started to do some thinking and I want to try and combine the Prometheus kits.  There are some interesting bits and pieces on the front that I want to incorporate into the design.

Front Armor Panel - Ideas and Thoughts


One item in particular that I have in mind is using both headlight pieces.  Think those set on the sides with the turret sharing the middle with what I'll call the targeting optics on the Prometheus kit front would look pretty good.  What ideas do you guys have for the front of the Exterminus?

I'm definitely liking how this is coming together.  As always any questions and comments are always welcome!  Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

[Fugitive]

Wow, that mock-up looks sweet. Could we perhaps see a picture with a marine next to it, for size comparison.

Can't wait for the next update.

[Snuffy]

I check here almost everyday to see how this masterpiece is turning out.  (love it)

As for weapons, you could easily use some of your Leman russ parts for a twinlinked plasma cannon turret, or sponsons. (noticed the russ parts in the background) Anyways, I can't wait to see this beast finished and painted no matter how you decide to equip it.

Oh and Happy Thanksgiving to you as well.