Leviathan Crusader Complete: Apocalypse and beyond!

The Crusader is finished, ready for Apocalypse!

Seeing that Apocalypse is coming to 6th edition Warhammer 40k, it seemed an excellent time to put the finishing touches on the Leviathan Crusader I have been slowly working on for the last few months.  Although I largely completed the model in my last post, I never decided on a final pose, or assembled the left hand vulcan cannon arm that was given for free as a part of the kickstarter.

The Crusader is a bit of an odd size for use in Warhammer 40,000, slightly too small to proxy as a warhound titan, but then too large to pose as the smaller Knight titan.  Mordain7th has assembled and painted a few Knight titans; you can see the difference in scale on his excellent blog here. If I had to pick between using it as a Knight or a Warhound, I think it is closer to the Warhound, and with the second vulcan cannon, it has the proper weapons for one (two vulcan mega bolters!) as well.  With this in mind I set about assembling the second cannon.

The cannon is just like the right-handed counterpart.  Dreamforge games has a pdf instruction manual for the arm on their website, so you do not have to rely on those for the Right version (it is really straightforward however, even without them).  The vast majority of the cannon assembles quickly and easily.  But just like the other, the ammunition belt is an arduous task.  Fortunately, the pieces fit together well, and you cannot put them on wrong, but there are just so many of them (there are almost more parts to it then the rest of the arm).  Each piece is also laced with moldlines; unlike the rest of the Crusader, many of these are placed in areas that simply cannot be ignored, rather than natural seamlines.  As a result, the ammunition belt took longer to assemble than any single part of the crusader.

Both vulcan cannons! While they do not look like mega bolters,
they certainly resemble assault cannons.

With it done, however, I think the Crusader looks quite nice with the two vulkans, despite their enormous size.  The arms swap out really easily, which will make it such that I can play around with the different weapon loadouts.  I particularly look forward to when Dreamforge releases some of the other weapon options later this year.

Ready to go toe to toe with any warhound titan!

Having finished all the arms, the last thing I needed to do was fix the titan in a pose.  Despite the inclusion of the tension screws in many of the model’s joints, due to the sheer number of movable parts it is essential that one glues the legs in place to effectively use the model on the tabletop.  In terms of range of motion, the only disappointing aspect of the kit is that the head is not possible at all.  The only option is to lock it on face directly forward.  Although it is not a big issue, it does restrict your options for making a believable pose for the Crusader.  After playing around with the Crusader’s joints and torso, I settle on something I liked, the titan in a vast stride/stable brace for firing the heavy cannons.  Fixing the Crusader into the stance was remarkably easy using Tamiya Ultra Thin Cement.  Without having to move the model at all, I was able to apply the glue to every moving part on the legs and torso.  The water-thin glue was simply wicked up into all the seams, leaving no residue or frosting.  It worked far easier than using traditional super glue.  In fact, the discovery of the Tamiya cement was probably the best part of the entire Crusader building experience, and will go a long way in helping assemble larger plastic models in the future.  I cannot recommend it enough!

One can only imagine many Wraithknights have fallen to this Leviathan's blade.

Now all there is left to do is to wait for the release of the new version of Apocalypse, to see what gets added and how things change!

- Godwyn Fischig