For anyone not around at the time or otherwise not aware, the Warhammer 40,000 of Rogue Trader days was fucking nuts. One of the many, many weird ideas of the time were the Jokaero. Essentially super-smart space Orangutans who were the creators of the much-sought-after “digital weapons” available to some heroes of various types. Or Jokaero Digital Weapons, as they were then known. The “digital” this was in reference to wasn’t zeroes and ones, but our digits – fingers. Basically, we were talking ring-lasers.

Finger-Bang, Rogue Trader style…

While the Games Workshop of the last couple of years has done a good job of recognising and bringing back old, neglected parts of the lore, like Deathwatch, Genestealer Cults, Tzaangor and so forth, the Jokaero were brought back(?), well, into the game with an actual model back in 2011 with the 5th edition Grey Knights Codex. I know they’d gotten a mention with the earlier Necrons Codex, making it 15 years before being mentioned again after RT, and 24 years before getting their first model. Will 8th Edition give us a second Jokaero model? Only time will tell, but I can’t see them investing in plastic tooling for something like this unless it’s included on a sprue alongside a plastic Inquisitor or some such.

I gave him pinkish flesh for his hands and feet, mostly because I forgot to check out reference photos of either actual Orangutangs or GW’s model before painting that part of the figure. Ah well, still looks good! I pretty much copied the official GW scheme for the electronics. I went over the white/grey of the accessories with a pearlescent paint, giving it a nice, subtle, shimmery effect that can be seen in hand and not at all in photographs.

Something pretty cool is that the upcoming indices for 40k 8th edition are going to feature rules for all of their currently-produced/available models, which includes this guy. This means there’s a decent chance that this model will actually hit my table at some stage in the near future. Who’d’a thunk it?