"Elephant Seal" Rhino Variant

The Slaanesh Space Marine squad needed a big center-piece model. I decided on a transport vehicle, and of course I couldn't resist tinkering with it.

There are two undercurrent styles to the models in this squad: extravagant, and brutally efficient. This Rhino variant is the latter: a boxy battering ram designed to crash into the enemy and disgorge a load of evil Space Marines. I imagine it to be a rare, outdated and not very popular Rhino variant pattern called an Elephant Seal.




The conversion involved a lot of very careful cutting. The Rhino kit is made of really sturdy plastic and straight-line cuts where needed to seperate the component parts the right way.

The top panel had to be carefully separated from the sides so that I could turn it around 180 °. I wanted the turret mounts to be at the back to increase the apparant size of the front loading bay (even though I planned to cover up the turret holes.)

The original structure around the hatch at the back of the Rhino had to be cut off and moved to the front. This left me with a big gap on the back. Thankfully the bonus big turret mount plate that comes with the Rhino kit in case you want to turn it into a Whirlwind is just about the right width to work as an armour plate.

I used almost exactly half of the turret plate to make the bottom armour plate plus half of the original front-armour plate of the Rhino to make the upper rear armour. You can see it needed a fair bit of filling – mostly to cover the messy cuts (should have used a steel rule really.)

Since the main hatch now covered most of the front of the Rhino, the only thing left there was to add sidings to the hatch. I had some bits from the Empire cannon set that looked heavy and industrial and added a bit of ornamental flair to the vehicle's "prow". Some sprue offcuts helped to fill the remaining gaps. I then – after weighing some different options including putting guns there – filled in the turret mounts all together with Milliput.

At this stage I realised the bottom of the tank chassis looks ridiculously flat, like it's a big shoebox. Since I wanted to angle it on a base, this would be really visible. To get round this I did some greebling with sprue offcuts. They wouldn't be directly visible from below so I worked very roughly to give the impression of complicated pipework and axels. I think it's really effective.

Finally I wanted to include a base for the model. In my view, bases should be a part of the model and not just a functional thing to keep the model standing upright. Just because a vehicle can sit flat on a table doesn't mean it shouldn't have the same "floor" as the rest of the army. I went for a big 150mm oval base, which turned out to be a little bit smaller than needed. In any case, I added (a lot of) Milliput to sculpt the base the same way as the rest of the squad and also to elevate the tank a bit. It looks really dynamic at an uphill angle and it helps stop it from looking really small next to the Primaris marines!

There it is. I intend to tie it into the squad a bit more at the painting stage and to make it look like a really old machine that the Slaanesh squad has appropriated from someone else (they have some backstory in keeping with the #inq28 philosophy that I'll be posting as I complete them).

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Hek