Project II/26

Dragon Models StuG III Ausführung G 10.5cm Imperial Series

In the final days of summer '25 I visited Tieto-Nikkari and their shelves because I felt the fever for something tracked and German. Based on some looking around and chatting I dropped a StuG III on the desk and pondered out loud that if they had a Hummel, I'd taken one immediately. The shopkeep thought also out loud that "we'll get them at some point soonish, come by and check. Or it's actually easier if I just call you when I get them". This very clearly meant that I had a heavy SP howitzer elbowing its way to my work queue. Like I've said before, I had one and had even mostly painted it, but it got stuck in some sort of a limbo over the years.

Back to the business at hand: the theme was a StuG III's G variant with a larger howitzer. This happened to be a mightily titled Imperial Series box from 2004 according to my searches. Of course this all meant that I had to start thinking of ordering some tracks - or two sets of them to be more exact - from the Polish supplier.

Sprues and stuff

We've got a healthy load of plastic on numerous sprues, even the tracks were individual links in this set. There were some bits of photoetch, and one piece of aluminium.

A surprising number of said pieces were going to fly directly into the bits box. The tracks I didn't even glance at again, nor open them from their bags.

Instructions

What to say about the instruction sheet? Typical Dragon stuff, which had pretty-looking isometric views of how some things were to be set together, but occasionally being made less than clear enough for stupid people like me. My personal feeling was that they tried to be a bit too clever with these.

It had been way too long since my last tracked vehicle.

Miniproject I/26

Mass-priming

Having all this freedom of choice was surprisingly bothersome. I didn't have the faintest clue of which BT miniature to poke next and nothing really jumped out as the next item. My cleverest idea was to just take the whole untouched mass and prime it all in a batch.

When the inspiration would strike, I could just take anything and start working on it. The latest minis I have painted recently had mostly been primed at some random calm moment, and that had made me happy. Now I'd just do that in a planned way.

VSP red

Surprisingly I still had a bit of the red primer left. I wanted to use it before it got too thick with age to go through my airbrush.

Mercenaries

I started with the most numerous of the lot, the default Company in the Mercenaries box.

Legendary MechWarriors II

Going on I had enough red primer to coat 66,666...% of the units in the Legendary MechWarriors II set. The SM1, the Devastator and the Charger got red, then I was out. It was a handy primer, and it lasted for years, and most importantly it remained perfectly good until the very last drop.

VSP black

When the red was done I switched to the large bottle of black primer and continued with the second Legends.

Legendary MechWarriors II

From this set just the Marauder - without its rooftop guns - and the Caesar went black.

Legendary MechWarriors III

Also the third Legend set's Marauder was primed without its dorsal gun options. I just didn't feel like fighting with them while priming rapidly. The Marauder was also the last one painted and was still a bit damp when I took the photo of the rest already in their storage blister. This was a nice set with a good amount of nice rides.

Clan Direct Fire Star

Probably I mentioned back in the day that the Rifleman IIC I knew first in MechWarrior II was the reason to pick this box. Not that the Highlander IIC was bad either. The rest just happened to be sideshows that I wasn't familiar with. Finding a home for them all was going to be an operation of its own.

Clan Ad Hoc Star

Pack Hunter had been painted a while earlier. The Kodiak was eager to get painted as a Ghost Bear, but I already had five of them.

Battlefield Support: Objectives

This photo showed the MASH truck's right side using the extended bit, whichever operating theatre module it was. There was just one of these modules, and it could be set on either of the sides - or left completely off.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Galleon / Maxim. On the vehicles I was most concerned about the undersides, I didn't want unpainted plastic shown when taking photos from the ground level.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Hetzer / Maxim. Same approach as with the previous duo, undersides first and foremost, the rest would be much easier.

Salvage: Visigoth

I didn't bother taking a separate photo of the bottom of the Visigoth.

Salvage: Blood Asp

Blood Asp could've been a good candidate for the Blood Spirits had I not already painted a full Star of them much earlier.

Salvage: Mercenaries: 'Mech

Dervish. No idea what to do with it yet.

Salvage: Savannah Master

For priming I set the tiny hovercraft on the hex base in a way that should, hopefully, maximize the underside coverage. Doing this with anything this size was a bit funny, but at least they stayed on the bases just by their pegs instead of flying away like autumn leaves. Or a five-ton hovercraft after taking a gauss slug into the side.

100mm Timber Wolf

This was the pretty and pretty large miniature. Great details.

Mass-operation operated

This all took three evenings. Somehow this made me more inspired, with all the bits and pieces being at least primed and I could just pick something up to work on it for real. Small things made a huge difference sometimes. Still, I felt like doing something else than miniatures for a change, even if it was just one scale modeling project.

Project VIII/25

The merchant-minded Clanners for a new year

The one Operation:REVIVAL Salvage box from my Mercenaries loot gave me a Piranha that half-surprisingly inspired me to paint it as a Diamond Shark. It required four friends to go with, preferably around the same weight class. I started by checking what my BTTracker said and indeed a selection of Light/Medium 'Mechs tagged REPAINT caught my attention. There were more of those available than what I needed this time, so I let the randomizing song play a couple of cycles.

Star's Points

Not counting the fresh Piranha the other four Poitns were isorla from Jade Falcons and also metallic IWM minis from 10-20 years ago. The metal ones had to be reprimed to begin with.

Piranha

Cougar B

Like all these four minis, the B config of the Cougar was older than the Project Mumblings so I had no memory of where I got the laser under the cockpit, but the ER PPCs were donated by a Warhawk C that didn't need the lower pair of the cannons as they were swapped with Large Pulse Lasers. No artesanal crafting and modding was visible in my doings and I didn't think I had improved over the years.

  

Stormcrow C

This Stormcrow config with an LB-10X and lasers was customized by slapping on a Gargoyle's arm, if my vague memory served me correctly. I really had no recollection of how I ended up with this piece when making my IWM order, and there was no documentation of any sort before the verbose days of this silly blog.

Stormcrow

In case you, dear reader or peruser of photos, wondered why and how this Stormcrow was so different from the one above, the reason was simple: this was an earlier sculpt I had mistakenly ordered at some point. The other Stormcrow was the new sculpt. The differences weren't that massive, I was mostly bothered by the tininess of the lasers in those arms and how tedious painting those was.

Ice Ferret E

How did I have an Ice Ferret, and such a "new" config as E if I hadn't even heard of the chassis back in the day? No clue. It was a funky version with an ATM-9 in the Left Arm and the weapons were painted however.

If nothing else, these old minis showed how I had consistently painted all energy weapons with just red dots. These cockpits had been repainted at some point in red, because I distinctly remember doing them in black for the longest of time.

Project VI/25

The last of the Invasion miniatures

While updating the BTTracker again I was pondering where in the Empire would I assign these last seven 'Mechs. Three of them - Nova Cat, Crossbow, Kingfisher - were Heavy or Assault class, so they could move to the Jade Falcons. With this allocation my Cluster only missed full Trinary C and about three quarters of the AeroSpace Trinary E. The updated painting situation was pretty weak, but it was a self-made problem thanks to my decision of dropping Mediums and Lights pretty much completely out.

My last unstarted minis were: Cougar, Fire Moth, and a Huntsman. One older IWM-made Nova fit here nicely, as it was coming for a reassignment. I was just missing one measly 'Mech from a fresh Star for a new Clan, and as I was just admiring the latest version of my tracker I found a Pack Hunter from the Mercs set. This Star was going to find itself in the Touman of the Hell's Horses.

Apart from the Pack Hunter, Crossbow and Kingfisher they were all already primed black so I was going to be up to speed in no time! If the excitement carried me to new levels of insanity, I might even turn this into a Nova with that one unassigned Elemental Star.

Project V/25

Revell F-15E Strike Eagle

Santa brought me both a Panzer Aces set of paints and surprisingly, a 1:72-scale F-15 that I had wished for, and this was a subtype E. I didn't mind the config myself, and this was the first of the three F-15s I wanted to implement a funny (to me) idea.

This multimodel main project affected how I was going to handle the documentation of this first plane.

Most probably I'd go with a build, cockpit painting, and the priming, maybe even the basecoating of the plane would be included in IV/25, then it would be stored until the other two would have reached the same stage. At that point, with the triplet in the place where they'd diverge, I could do the actual paintjob as its own subproject.

Optionally I'd do this one from start to finish but just skip sharing the paintjob until I was far enough with the others. Some basics I would need to paint in a recognized and proper way anyway, like the titanium engine cowlings and whatnot.

Instructions

On a cursory glance the coloured instructions were pretty clear, I appreciated the colours supporting the A-Z flags. Especially the colouring of the weaponry was a very nice detail. Was I going to bother following those? We'd see.

Bits

There were three transparent pieces this time, the canopy bits and the collector plate for the HUD. Maybe I ought to paint the sides with a coloured wash instead of doing them black. I had to look into that stuff, as I had no clue right now.

All I could say about these was that they looked like pieces of an airplane.

Miniproject IV/25

Lego 10358 Soundwave

From rumours to actual items

I started hearing some whispers of the next Lego Transformer during H1/2025 and these whispers said it'd be Soundwave. This got confirmed before my summer vacation and it'd also have a sound brick and of his minions we'd get Laserbeak and Ravage. On the e-shelves it'd be on 4.8. unless you were an insider, you'd get to send them money on 1.8. already. Conveniently that was also the day when I returned from my vacation, absolutely perfect timing for a change.

Then all I could do was to wait for the delivery. Luckily there was the weekend, and a long enough way home, so I got enough things to keep me busy and away from fretting.

This time the express shipping was truly express

Early on Monday I got a message telling me they'd actually deliver it by the end of the day. That was a bit ambiguous but I was prepared for much worse. During my morning meetings the delivery window got specified to 13-15, and it was a timeslot I was meeting-free! The driver ended up having some trouble somewhere, so it was a bit later when I got the box, but I was so excited I didn't even think of grumbling.

Construction in three evenings

One and half a thousand pieces in twelve numbered bags required some time to assemble. As always, working on doubles the first arm/leg/whatnot was half as quick to build than the follow-up(s).

Mini-me

The bag number one gave us Soundwave's alt mode and two printed different minion tiles on the deck. Genious.

Laserbeak

Bag #2 had the bits for Laserbeak. Just the printed 1x1 tiles with the Decepticon insignia made me giggly. The lego version wasn't quite as complex as the Masterpiece versions so the engine-gun pieces had to be detached when transforming to the alt mode.

Ravage

Third up, Ravage. Ravage's engine things were detachable for the transformation as well.

They were magnificent! And that's as far as I got on Monday, but I wrapped up in good spirits.

Soundwave

On Tuesday I got to start on Soundwave's hips. Behind the now-fallen Play button we had a cavity for the sound brick. The infamous sound brick that I hadn't encountered yet.

Ah, the sound brick was immediately in bag #5, and over it I built a nice face mosaic. In the name of transparency, I may have spent a stupid amount of time playing with the sound chip. There was a silly amount of sounds in it, more than I felt like counting. The list contained some pew pew effects, the transformation sounds, the scene change jingle from the cartoons, and a pile of Frank Welker quotes such as "Soundwave superior". The rest of the family wasn't quite as extatic as I was.

Over the sound brick I built a chest cavity, with enough space for one minion at a time. The instructions said that the opening mechanism was the first thing they engineered.

This glorious Decepticon-decorated transparent bit was in a separate bag to avoid scratches. Now that I got another bagful of pieces assembled, the cassette bay door and its opening mechanism worked. Satisfying was the perfect word here, both for the tactile feel of pressing the button, and the sound that it made.

Interestingly the remaining pieces of this bag brought the craftily hinged bits where the arms were going to be attached to.

Now the next bag (I guess I was on the seventh now) gave Soundwave his arms. He had four fingers per hand, and they all were articulatable unlike Optimus Prime's sausages. In addition to the usual finger-pointing and fist-shaking he could do the heavy metal horns or just flip the bird. Or both at the same time. The limbs also had an amount of ball joints so they were going to be very nicely poseable.

On Wednesday I returned to the build and started with the right leg. The inside of the calf got a funky multi-jointed himmel, whose functionality only started being clear when the whole leg was closed and the sides encased the mechanisms properly.

\,,/ Rock rock \,,/

While in progress the spurlike thing was a silly floppy thing that didn't feel like it had a good real position. 

After smashing the missing leg into his hips I was already sadly far in the building proess. I didn't even think of checking if Lego Soundwave could press his own shoulder button as coolly as MP-02 could.

I had been wondering why I had to press the front faces of the legs into the leg itself as if I was partially transforming him into his altmode. Still, I obediently followed the instructions. The reason became clear after the next bagful of pieces and the subprocess of building the feet of his. Those were easy to press into their places when the receiving ends were in a sturdy position. After setting them in place the feet were then folded out for a proper standing robot pose.

The last two bagfuls and steps gave us Soundwave's head and the head's hideout in his upper back, and the AA batteries / weapons. The final bag just had the Icons set's plaque. At this point it was a bit late and I was both excited and busy, so I didn't take too many WIP photos.

For his optics I was given two options: red ones like in the early episodes, or yellow. Instead of choosing randomly, I checked what MP-02 had and installed the yellow lenses.

Naturally I tried out the alt mode and its transformation process. It worked very nicely, thanks for asking.

Photoset - coming soon :tm:

Very much unlike my usual approach to this, this time I didn't wait to get the light tent, tripod, camera, image editors and all set up and done before sharing this post. So for a change the photos were going to be dropped in afterwards. All the essentials were already shown, so only silliness remains.