Hoffman Avatar of Voltron... I mean Amalgamation WIP

I finally got my hands on the crazy Avatar version of C. Hoffman on Saturday :)



Here he is all on one well packed sprue. I clipped off all the parts and got to sanding off mold lines.



to match the rest of my crew I had to work out where to put in some gems. 1st obvious spot was to drill the eyes out of the face.



I used a round rotary bit on the back of the mask to open up the eyes area to fit in the smallest of my green gems.



They fit in nicely. I'll glue them in place after painting the mask.



The chest of the robot already had a sculpted gem in the middle of it's chest continuing the Iron Man look of the other robots. I drilled this out then used rotary bits and a knife blade to expand the hole big enough to fit the largest of gems I have. I went a bit deep drilling though so had to fill it back up a bit with a cut off bit of sprue.



There it fits in just right.

After the converting I kept cleaning parts and glued him into his stock pose.











He really is quite a beast. Nice presence on the table. The only dissapointments I have is the plastic version of C.Hoffman seems less defined and a bit weedy compared to his metal version. Not that keen on him just being kinda strapped to the robot's arm either. Lastly The design of the feet is a bit weird, and more importantly, doesn't really fit on the top of the base. Surely the sculpter knew what size base this would be going on, yet the very fragile claw tipped feet look destined to get hooked on stuff in carry cases and break off. They also seem very flat which I don't like very much. Maybe I will think of something that extends over the lip of the base for him to stand on or I will redesign his feet.

Flyers get ya flyers here

Here's a couple toys that could be used as drop ships or objectives in a sci fi game.





I have to say I loved the design of the Quin Jet in the Avengers and have wanted to pick up a toy of it since the movie but due some oddaity it was never released in Australia. You can buy the much bigger Helicarrier and you can get the Quin Jet in LEGO but none of the toys. This was the 1st version released which I picked up on ebay from the UK for about $44 including postage. There's a later version with slightly different colours and red canopy and another smaller one that is a remote controll vehicle that drives around or something. I went with this one since I'd seen several gamers mod it a bit and repaint it as a drop ship. I liked the idea so grabbed my own.











with some minis for scale





and ramp lowered.

To mod it properly you'd either want to paint over the canopy or mod the interior to have a couple pilots in place of the one big seat. The canopy isn't very transparent though so it may be easier to just change the frames on the outside so it seems smaller and give some coats of Tamiya smoke over it to be super dark.

For the back transort area I think you need to unscrew the body and do some interior work removing the seat that is in there and maybe putting a couple rows of benches on the sides.

Some missiles or something under the wings wouldn't hurt either. In anycase it's a very nice chunky looking yet sleak flyer.





This bird on the other hand is a clunky looking giant helicopter. I saw someone post about this being on sale at Big W for $38 and it's possibility as a vehicle for Infinity, problem is we both assumed the figures it was scaled to were LEGO sized (which is pretty much the same size as a space marine) but the figures are actually nearly double that size. So in scale this thing would be a beast of a heavy lift carrier. Though I could totally see this thing dropping off an entire squad of TAGs (the big Landmate style things)





Note you'll be putting this baby together for a few hours.



She is big.









Looking at it, it is kinda huge compared to say a BlackHawk but compared to a Sikorsky (which I think it's based on)  it's a pretty good match. Problem is more that 40K and most other SciFi games seriously undersize it's aircraft.