It took another 5 months following the Iron Warriors Rhino that took me forever to complete, but now I’ve FINALLY got this Vindicator done! As with the Rhino and the Dreadnought (Hellbrute), this model was bought second-hand from the same guy back over a decade ago, and then took me a long, long time to get around to stripping off the over-done spikes and replacing a few parts.

I built a new set of combi-weapons for the pintle turret mount, in this case a bolter and flamer combo. The launchers can work either as smoke or possibly as Havoc Launchers (I searched and searched, but I just couldn’t find a legit set of Havocs!)

I removed a few sets of hazard stripes that weren’t to my liking and simply painted those panels either black or metallic. The striping on the weapons combined with the dozer blade seemed enough, so I didn’t feel a huge need to add in more on the top or sides.

The Vindicator and its Demolisher Cannon obviously owes a direct debt of inspiration to the Sturmtiger from WWII. The reason that the Vindicator tank destroyer (and the Predator MBT, and the Whirlwind) are all based on the Rhino APC chassis – even today – is because the only plastic vehicles available in those early Rogue Trader days were the Rhino and the Land Raider (which with it’s WWI tank stylings was not going to work for these concepts).

As you can see above, we’ve got the very first Vindicator and what later became the Whirlwind from an old, old White Dwarf. Some time afterwards, in 1995-ish, TimDuPertis (later Armorcast) sold a licenced conversion kit that replaced the stock front glacis plate of the Rhino with the cannon. A few years later, GW rather suddenly cancelled the licences to make 3rd party products that companied liked Armourcast and Forgeworld (yes, really) and Epicast held. They then brought many of the designs that others had been creating into their new in-house resin shop, which is the Forge World that still exists today.

This particular model is actually long, long out of production, but it’s the original (GW) Forge World resin conversion kit on a Rhino Chassis, as seen above.

So here it is. The third of those three Iron Warriors pieces finally complete. Now I have a few other half-finished vehicles to try and get complete, but I’m pretty open for my next big piece of Iron Warriors Heavy Metal. Predator? Land Raider? Sicarian? Basilisk/Medusa?