Deathstrike... Artillery spotter?

Greetings once again. No physical progress to speak of for this update, jut some random scribbling and some ideas… As many of you know the lure of the Deathstrike missile launcher, as published within the newest Imperial Guard codex, has inspired a number of model builders to make their own since Games Workshop, up to this point, have not released an official model nor have they announced any plans to do so. Why the allure for such an expensive one shot weapon platform? Quite simply it is the possibility of laying down a 21” template that hits really hard. Infantry are for all intents and purposes vaporized unless they have and make an invulnerability save. Vehicles are even in peril since it hits so hard. Now this is great for a normal Imperial Guard of Cadians or other modern to futuristic regiments, but what about those of us who have chosen to play a more archaic faction such as the Praetorians or my WWI inspired Iron Dogs? A huge ICBM type missile just does not fit in with the theme.

So I got to thinking… (Yeah, I know, scary…)

My regiment is an artillery corps and reaching back into history for inspiration, there have always been giant artillery pieces with incredible ranges. Now the ones that has caught my attention was the Dora cannon and Karl siege mortar built by the Germans in WWII. Imagine if you will a mortar model so large that the table top model would be mounted on a chassis that is made from a pair of Baneblade class hulls with a large span between them… The model would be about 30” long. I have had machinations to build that display piece for quite a while, however funds simply have not been plentiful enough for me to justify $300 plus on a single model. As you may be aware, such a monstrosity of a vehicle would have a plethora of smaller support vehicles, especially ammunition carriers. So in this line of thought, who is to say that such an artillery piece would not have a dedicated targeting / spotter vehicle to guide its shots? An easy conversion for such a vehicle would be to simply take a Chimera and mount the dozer blade as an antenna dish onto the turret with the multilaser removed. While again this would work for the Cadians, this would not be suitable for the Iron Dogs. So taking inspiration from Rich at Bossmans Bitbox (http://bossmansbitzbox.blogspot.com/) from his Hellhound conversion, I give you this sketch. I realize that the scan is not that great, but you can still see what I am getting across…



As you can see, the hull is based off of the Leman Russ hull with the hull mounted weapon placed where the driver typically goes and turning where the hull weapon normally goes into the drivers compartment. The tracks are patterned after the French FT-17 light tank for that much more archaic style I am after. The turret would be made from a pair of Chimera turrets placed bottom to bottom giving it the distinctive shape. More for appearances I have decided to mount a Heavy Stubber into the turret along side a spotlight. It would also mount the old style round antenna at the top of the turret. On the rear of the hull would be a telescopic binocular spotting and range finding site. Below the spotter tank you can see a basic sketch of the mortar it would be directing. Again to give you an idea of scale, the vehicle hulls carrying it would be Beneblade class hulls with the supporting center structure being based on the Highshield landing platform.