House Raven Acastus Class Knights
If you've looked through my blog previously, you've probably seen my Knights of Corbenic (tied to the Fisher King) which includes a heavily converted Acastus Knight Asterius on a very heavy scenic base (Quake Hydra). He was made primarily for display and wasn't really what I had in mind for my more functional House Raven Knights.
I have two Acastus Knights for my House Raven force and I decided that although I would tweak them, I didn't want to heavily convert them or their bases as they would need to fit in with my other Knights and be suitable for use at Titan Walk games where I'd need to move them around frequently.
Both Knights of my House Raven Acastus Knights were pre-owned and refurbished, given new life with some minor repairs, pose changes and a sprinkle of upgrades.
Siegebreaker
Siegebreaker is my Acastus Knight Porphyrion and was the first of the two Knights to be completed. By the time I was working on him, I had already built an Acastus Knight so was familiar with the chassis. As a kit, the Porphyrion is pretty straightforward to assemble, but due to the arm construction, you can get a lot more poseability from the Asterius. Despite this, I really do rate the Porphyrion kit quite highly and would recommend it as the best titan scale entry level model in resin.
I built my Porphyrion in a more static, planted position without much in the way of dynamic posing. It's effectively a mobile super-heavy gun platform, so it wouldn't really look right in a running pose!
In terms of changes to this kit, I replaced the flimsy railing on the carapace with a more substantial scratch built styrene version as resin railing are just horrible. They're incredibly hard to clean up are always warped and snap so easily that I decided completely replacing them was the best plan.
I also replaced the dorky looking bowl head from the kit with a smaller Questoris one. This required some alteration to the body in order to accept a different head, but with a small amount of sculpting I think it worked out really well.
The final modification was the levelling of the dual arm cannons. I really didn't like the staggered gun barrels, so I sculpted a small armour block to bring all four barrels back inline. This may not suit everyone, but I am a lot happier with how the model looks compared to the original kit.
The final little flourish was the addition of a large metal skull to the Knight's carapace rim which would symbolically tie him nicely into the Legio Metalica / House Raven alliance.
In terms of the painting, I followed a very similar scheme to my other smaller Knight classes, but due to the sheer amount of armour panelling space available on the miniature, I was able to add quite a few extra decals like some extra symbols either side of the face plate and a whole host of kill markings and honorifics on the arm guards.
Osiris 209
This Knight is an Asterius like my previous build Quake Hydra. Like the Porphyrion, I was never happy with the head of this model kit and so sculpted a new one which looked smaller and more in scale with my existing Acastus Knight while also still feeling aligned with the Mechanicus aesthetic.
Unlike my other Knights, I didn't want to use a classic face plate, but a more abstract glass fronted dome - I wanted it to look almost like a one-way mirror and I think the final effect was quite satisfying. I deliberately leaned towards the shape of Robocop's Ed-209 when making this face plate as a little nod to one of my favourite big screen robots.
I took the painting of Osiris' carapace in a slightly different direction to my other knights as I wanted him to look different to the Porphyrion. As large centrepiece models, I felt like the Acastus Knights could have some different symbols and patterns as long as they remained within the bracket of the House Raven colour palette.
Early on I'd decided that I wanted the Conversion beam cannon arm's cowlings to sport the distinctive House Raven hazard stripes in black, yellow and white. As these represented quite a large surface area, I decided to forgo the normal carapace stripes in lieu of a large unique cog symbol to give a bit of balance to the scheme. My worry is that it may end up looking like a deck chair with too much striping!
The colours of the cog symbol mirror those of a normal House Raven Knight, just in a new and interesting arrangement. As far as the painting process, I drew and cut out a template from layered masking tape which helped me keep the edges of the design nice and sharp!
Even though I wanted to keep the bases fairly level, I did add a dead House Malinax Armiger made from spare kit parts to the base. This was a little poke at one of my buddies (and regular opponent) Luke who runs a rather lovely House Malinax Knight force alongside his Vulturum Titan Legio. You can see some of his lovely engines here: Son of Xana
