Finally! New Pictures of My PHR Secret Project!

Hey, Folks.

Well, I apologize for the very long wait, but it's been rather busy for me these past weeks.  After my last post I left for GenCon, and had an amazing time.  However, prior to leaving for GenCon I worked by tail off getting over 1,500 points of my new PHR paint scheme painted up and ready.  I finished at 10:00 PM on the Sunday evening before leaving for Indianapolis on Wednesday morning, July 29th.  I didn't manage to get any Infantry painted up in the new scheme, but reasoned that I could use what I had from my old blue-and-red scheme for any games I could get in at GenCon.

Then I hauled my bag of PHR all the way to Indianapolis...  And never got a game in!  But, it's all good, as I was super busy helping out at the Hawk Wargames booth, and hanging out with Dave, Simon, Louis and all the other Talons and volunteers.  It was awesome! 

But I'd gone to all this trouble to carry my army bag on the plane and to the hotel, etc., so I decided on Saturday night at dinner to bust out my new PHR and show them off.  Captive audience, right?  Well, everyone seemed to like them, and I got lots of nice compliments. 

Since then I've been super busy job hunting, and it took me a while to get the new laptop that I had to order to effectively do the job searching.  Now, I've finally gotten all the photos off my iPhone and onto the laptop, got them sorted, edited, labeled and organized, and I am ready to present them all to you. 

(WARNING:  This post is very photo-heavy!)

So, without further ado, here is a slew of pictures that I took, including a combination of outside near dusk, for that great natural lighting, and inside at Empire Games in Mesa, AZ, for a somewhat different perspective under the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

I also need to point out that in some of the inside shots the orange on these PHR models ended up looking a bit more yellow than the deep orange that it really is, as in the picture above of the Nemesis.  However, I found that if I put my hand into the picture, then my iPhone made the necessary adjustments and captured a better shade of orange than without my hand.  I've since shrunk down all of these pictures and cropped my big mitt out of the inside pictures, but in some cases the orange still looks a bit yellow, and for that I apologize.  You'll just have to come to Phoenix to see them in person!  (It's worth it, but wait until January when the weather is crappy where you are, and glorious here!)

First up, the guys that started it all with the orange, my Type 1s:

Let me point out here what I did with the Ares and Phobos.  Some of my opponents complain that they don't know which unit is which when looking down on the tabletop during a game, so I decided to use the orange accent color to indicate which is which on all of my Type 1 and Type 2 Walkers.  As you can see in the pictures below, the Ares has orange on his right "shoulder", and on his left knee, whereas the Phobos has both shoulders and both knees painted orange.  This is the case with all of the Ares and Phobos in this army.  Menchits will get orange on their left shoulders and right knees, the opposite of the Ares.

 

 

 

You probably noticed the blue stripe on the right shoulders of the Ares and Phobos.  This is my solution to the problem of squad markings.  I figured that being agents of the White Sphere, and physically modified with cybernetics, that the PHR would utilize a binary number scheme for their squads.  So, using binary notation, I've marked four different squads; these squads are all made up of an Ares, a Phobos and a Neptune, because I loves me my mixed Type 1 squads!

For those of you unfamiliar with binary notation, this is how it would look, using 0s and 1s to denote which bit is "off" and which bit is "on".  In binary, you read from right to left:

0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
0100 = 4

So for my squad markings, you will read from the front to the back.  As you can see in the pictures above, Squad 1 has a blue stripe "forwards" along the orange shoulder, while Squad 2 has it about in the middle of their orange shoulders.  Squad 3, therefore, uses both the forward and middle blue stripes, while Squad 4 has its blue stripe at the rear of their orange right shoulders.

Here you can clearly see (I hope!) how each squad of Type 1 Walkers and their dedicated Neptune transports is marked.

And, of course, the Type 1s and their Neptunes are all magnetized:

Speaking of Neptunes, here is a whole bunch of pictures of just them:

You can see the difference between the natural lighting and the store's lighting really well in the last two pictures above.

OK, that's the Type 1s and their Neptunes.  Next up we have two Junos that I magnetized so that I could make either one of them an A1 or an A2.  Also, on both the A1 and A2 turrets, I included squad markings for the Infantry that they would be carrying, in this case Red Squad and White Squad:

And, of course, the Junos and their Neptune transport are all magnetized, too.

After the above pictures were taken, I also painted up a Neptune just to transport these Junos.  For it's markings, it has a red stripe and a white stripe in the orange band at the rear of the Neptune, just like the Type 1s' Neptunes have the blue stripe(s) in the same region.  Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of just that one, but it is present in the complete picture of all of what I painted up prior to GenCon; see if you can spot it!

Next up we have the Tritons!  I've been taking Junos sometimes to carry my Immortals, and now with Longreach Teams making the scene I can potentially use a Juno for one or both squads of them, if and when I decide to use them.  But most of the time, I, like a lot of you, use light dropships to ferry my Infantry onto and around the table.  So, using the same color markings, I painted up four Triton A1s, with there being a light dropship for Red Squad, White Squad, Black Squad and Blue Squad:

But that's not all!  Even though we usually don't see the underside of models in Dropzone Commander, I went to the bother of painting the underbellies of these A1s, including a glow effect in the windows of the passenger compartment:

And, of course, I painted the rear lights.  (Sorry for the fuzzy picture!):

At the time I painted up all these models, I just had two Triton A2s, and these were dedicated to their Mercury Drone charges.  So, of course, I glued on the two Skyhammer Missiles that come for free when you purchase a pair of Triton A2s to transport your Drones, and, of course, painted the undersides of these Tritons as well:

Now, I'm not sure if you noticed it or not, but the Triton A1s and the A2s have different color schemes.  Again, to help all of us (myself included) pick out the Infantry transports from the Drone and (coming soon!) Janus transports, the A2 variants have "reverse" markings from the A1 versions.  Here's a top-down comparison picture of two Triton A1s on the left, and the two Triton A2s on the right:

Clever, eh?  :-D

OK, speaking of Mercury Drones, here they are:

If you look really closely at the last picture above, you can see that I gave the sensor domes on the Drones the same "glint" treatment that I gave the black sensor domes on the walkers, Neptunes and Tritons.  Also, see if you can see the running lights up under the nose sections of these Drones:  Does anyone know what "Red Right Receiving" means?

And now, the Big Fella.  The Leader of the Pack, my Nemesis!

OK, that's a lot of pictures that you had to scroll your way through.  But I've got two more:  A small group shot, and then a big family picture of everything I painted up the get ready for GenCon:

 

Well, that's everything... So far! 

I hope you've enjoyed these pictures, and that they show up clearly on whatever device you're using to view this post on.

As always, please leave whatever comments you'd like below!