It’s been close to a year since I last posted to Eroberung – As many hobbyists will know, real life often gets in the way of pursuing the hobby and maintaining a steady pace of building and painting. That being said, I haven’t been completely idle since March 2022, and the hobby itself has undergone some significant changes over the last year. With the release of the second edition of Horus Heresy, there came a slew of new miniatures, not least of which was the much celebrated re-release of mighty Land Raider Proteus as a multi-part plastic kit.

Unfortunately, I’m long enough in the tooth that I actually owned the original 1980’s Land Raider, the first plastic tank produced by Games Workshop and an iconic part of the Space Marine armoury through much of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Mine originally started life in the livery of the Blood Angels, found itself later stripped (rather inexpertly) and rebuilt as an Ordo Hereticus command vehicle for the then Codex: Inquisition, and eventually (like the majority of my miniatures from those days) went forth into the wider gaming world never to be seen again (though I hope, wherever it ended up, that it continues to fight the good fight).

Naturally, when mind-mapping out what I wanted to include in my Dusk Raiders force, I decided that Ullis Temeter’s command vehicle would have to be the, at the time resin, Land Raider Proteus available from Forgeworld. This represented a considerable emotional (and financial) investment for me, harking back as it did to my childhood and my earliest forays into the hobby. It also represented a considerable challenge as I am not, by nature, a treadhead, and typically prefer infantry heavy armies (one of the reasons the pre-Heresy Death Guard/Dusk Raiders appealed so much). It is also no secret that FW’s resin kits, especially their larger, chunkier models, suffer a number of idiosyncracies that make them particularly gruelling builds in their own right.

So, spurred on by the impending release of the new plastic Land Raider, I finally bit the bullet in Autumn 2022 and began work on building my behemoth. Rather surprisingly, I actually found the experience really enjoyable, and it was exciting to see how the humble plastic Land Raider that I remembered from my youth had been updated into a modern resin monster with some really ingenious details and features (not least of which is the moveable sponsons), as well as some old peculiarities (particularly the partitioning of the hull segements).

In terms of livery, I decided that I would once again make use of my custom Dusk Raider decals from Fallout Hobbies for the main iconography, as well as the heraldic decals I’d acquired from Greenstuff World. Rather ironically, I also discovered whilst digging through my decal boxes, that I still had the old Imperial Guard decal sheet from the first release of the original plastic Leman Russ battletank back in the 90’s, and found that the set of four lightning bolt clenched in a mail fist decals would look excellent on the gunshields of the lascannon sponsons.

In terms of naming and backstory, I’d already decided that I would include a small, regional in-joke, and named Ullis Temeter’s mighty steed the Sudoiger. This is an unsubtle nod to the local bus service in the Hannover region, the Regiobus, a staple of my daily commute to work. And so, just before Christmas and being felled by my first taste of Covid19, I managed to complete a lifelong hobby dream of once again owning a genuine Land Raider Proteus.

So without further ado, warmongers and warmaidens of the Warhammer Community, I give you the mighty Sudoiger of the Dusk Raiders legion…