Every October1 I engage in some kind of mad project to build some Ork models. Orks being the Mad Max adjacent green muscle bound cockney lads in Games Workshop’s 40k setting. The net result of if football hooligans were into illicit body modification and scrapheap challenge.
Tiamat says: Why October? Because “oct” sounds kind of like “ork” if you squint. Legend has it maybe GW referred to it at some point in the annals of White Dwarf, but for as long as I can remember, Ork players have gotten mad that GW haven’t given them a massive range refresh in the month of October2, and some of us do some ork-y things in the tenth month.
Last year I built, heavily converted, and painted an Ork Stompa as part of Year of the Bigature, and so in the selection of this year’s projects I wanted to do something to complement this. I could have built some of the several kits I’d purchased to donate parts to the stompa, or expanded my current collection of one warboss and one stompa into a functioning force (especially with new Boyz now available in all their multipart glory) but instead three major options sat before me:
Convert a second Stompa This option would see me building some kind of siege stompa, giving it a front ramp and exchanging its traditional chainsaw/mess of guns armament for something more useful for attacking walls. Maybe some kind of wrecking ball, or giant grapple, and some kind of larger bombard or mek gubbins?
Build a Gargant I went from Warhound to Reaver, so Stompa to Gargant? The bigger problem here is that you can’t really bulk a stompa into a gargant, and the projects I could see online were either fully scratchbuilt or constructed over 3D printed base models, which is either more work than I want to do in scratchbuilding, or against my thoughts of what the ethos of my Orktober should be3.
Upgrade a Gorkanaut and/or Morkanaut like I did with the Stompa If the Gorkanaut is kind of roughly the Orkish counterpart to a Warhound4 then GW released a dual kit of a smaller large walker in the Gorka/Morkanaut kit. But it’s quite spartan, and the differences between the two options are, in my mind, fairly limited. So what if I took one or both of them and made them less dumpy, less obviously mirrored and (for my personal aesthetic) better?
Tiamat says: Are there not other options? Well, yes, but more limited than you think. GW has mostly retreated from the “big model” stakes until very recently, and the new models for Orks have been focused on the new starter. Orcs/Orruks in AoS are similarly bereft of bigatures. There is the Squiggoth, but none of its guns are available any more.
After much deliberation, I decided to go with option 3. But to do both options for two reasons. Firstly, my personal aesthetic sense says that smaller things should come in pairs or triplets5. But secondly, the conversions I want to do involve me giving the Gorkanaut both gun arms and the Morkanaut both claw arms6. Having two copies of the kit mean that I can do this much easier.
At this point, I have a plan. The Gorkanaut is focused on dakka, the essentially Orkish idea of firepower, so it is going to get both of the stubby gun arms. One of them will be an upgraded version of the standard double gattling gun the kit comes with, and the other will either be a rotary missile launcher or a second uprated gattling gun. I’ll then put the deathrolller from the battlewagon on the front, and beef up the engine in the back.
The Morkanaut is clearly a mek’s vehicle, so both arms will use the extended claw arm base, but one of them will have the piddly little kustom blaster replaced with a traktor kannon from the mek gun kit. The tiny little gun emplacement on the top will be replaced with a turret constructed from the remainder of the mek gun kit. Finally, the engine assembly on the back will be replaced/augmented with a custom tesla assembly, to give it the classic mek feel, replacing the half hearted gubbin the kit comes with7 to place on top.
Both kits will also get a raft of generic upgrades, including removing the middle-front little gun, attempting to lengthen the legs so it looks like it could at least try to walk, and some as-of-yet unknown upgrades to the interiors to make them a little less cursory.
Tiamat says: That sounds like a lot of work! And it is, but prioritisation of the upgrades that I think the project doesn’t work out without and the upgrades that are nice to have will be essential. Also, it’s not like I’m building several new components from scratch, and they are much smaller than the Stompa.
It is currently the middle of September, so the current phase of the project is acquiring the parts. But there is also one more part to this I haven’t yet mentioned: I am going to attempt to film the construction, conversion and painting process. It’s something I’ve wanted to attempt for a long time, and this seems like the right project to do it with.
In my mind, there are three major outcomes:
I cock up the filming or editing of the project, and I get a new blog post out of it talking about how I messed up.
The filming works, but I can’t produce a set of coherent videos I’m happy with, and the blog post(s) about the project gain some new video sections instead of the regular photos I would otherwise add.
I product a nice video or set of videos I can share with my friends.
It is in the back of my mind that video is well and truly king right now, and if I want to promote my other work then I probably need to do more video there too. This is a nice, low stakes way to dip a toe in it.
And it’s another excuse to use the Tiamat-in-a-spacesuit illustrations.
Not actually ever October, but I intend to do so every October from now. ↩︎
There might actually be a meaningful Ork release this year, by virtue of Orks being the nominated opposing starter faction this edition. But also there’s a lot of stuff in the pipe, so it’s even money in my mind right now. ↩︎
Other people are welcome to hobby as they like, but as I will expound later in this post, for my Orktober I have some ground rules I want to follow. Your Orktober Will Vary and that is good and proper. ↩︎
Depending on who you ask, when you ask, and why you ask, a Stompa is either comparable to an Imperial Knight, a Warhound, or a different category altogether. ↩︎
The astute will note that any number above one is acceptable. Four is two pairs. Five is a pair and a triplet. Six is two triplets. Seven is a triplet and two pairs, and so on. A single thing of the same category is acceptable if and only if there are at least two others already and it is sufficiently visually distinct and isn’t part of the same grouping. I.e. if I had a stompa with two gorkanauts, a lone morkanaut is allowed, because it is visually the largest thing in its grouping. Thank you for your newfound adherence to CJ’s Philosophy on the Grouping and Size of Miniatures in Wargames. ↩︎
One thing you will note here is that I’m making no reference to what the kit should be equipped with in game terms. That’s not what this project is for or about. Rules are transient. Sick conversions are forever. And lets be honest, it’s more likely I’ll play Hypersteel28 with these than modern 40K. ↩︎
You might get the impression that I don’t actually like the gorka/morkanaut kit. And you’d be half right. It is a product of an era where everything needed to be a dual kit, and I think that the decisions they made to make it a dual kit were the wrong ones. Today, I think they’d either add an extra sprue to clearly differentiate them, or give us a single more detailed model, and it suffers for it. That does, however, give me opportunities. ↩︎
