Tau Plans and New Stuff

Of course with a new year, I am already thinking about what I plan to bring to the next Harvester of Souls in October. I need time to prep for these things. And I feel the pull of the Tau again, after taking a break from them for so long.

Now I will be using the latest Codex edition, which will be allowing me to run a type of list I have dreamed about for a very long time. A list consisting entirely of battlesuits and drones, thanks to using 3 formations. It consists of a Commander, 9 Crisis Suits, 3 Broadsides, Riptide, Ghostkeel, 6 Stealthsuits, and a whole bunch of drones.

As I always want to feature my conversions whenever I can, I will be building some new suits and well as using some old favorites. I will be using my XV86 conversions for 3 of the crisis suits, and my XV9's for 3 more. In that case I will be magnetizing their twin-linked burst cannons and replace them with missile pods. I will also need to re-base them onto 50mm bases to make them legal as XV8's, as the new XV8 kit (which is one of my favorite model kits now, btw) comes with 50mm bases.

On top of this, with my lovely wife gifting me the new Crisis kit for Christmas, I made 3 more suits. This is a conversion I have been wanting to do for a long time now. The idea is give them a more tacti-cool 2-handed rifle hold pose. Each fusion blaster is long-barreled which will count as a twin-linked fusion blaster, to account for accuracy and precision. I also went for a different head style, using a support system bit (commonly represents Target Lock) with some other bits.

Also with some of my winnings from the last Harvester, I bought the Commander kit. I have some semi-radical plans with it. I have thought about what if an Ethereal piloted a battlesuit, and that will be the focus of the conversion. More on it in a later post.

My brother, Jarom, got me a small gift for Christmas, which I appreciate. He has been working on a Gue'vesa themed Tau force lately, and gave me the DS8 Tactical Support Turrets from his Fire Team kits he had. I built one normally (right), and a one to represent how I believe it would look like while hovering (left). The story with these turrets is they follow the strike team around in hovering, and the team can plant theirs to deploy the weapon. Only when it is planted the weapon can be used. In this case I prefer the Smart Missile System.

And finally, this may have nothing to do with my Harvester list, but I have always wanted to add Tetras to my army. I faced them in one of my games at this last Harvester, and they were effective and looked like a lot of fun. My opponent also used the official models for them, where I commonly saw people use stripped down Piranhas as proxies, which are generally much bigger. The Tetra is deceptively small, more close to the size of jetbike models. So that gave me an idea. How would I go about making a Tau Jetbike? So with a bits order I got the core parts of the Reaver Jetbikes, and tried on the drone and Coldstar Commander thrusters (which I will not be using on my Ethereal Commander). This is just a preliminary stick-together concept of course, so things will likely change, but I think with these core components I can make a decent Tau jetbike Tetra counts-as.