Typically I operate on a FIFO principle for my model queue. However, for whatever reason, the drive to actually work on this set took most of a year to materialize, so it sat in a pile of mocking unassembly until I finally pushed myself to get it done.
The metal bases and the track appear to be the exact same material that came in the Hawk monorail, but this train has five cars as opposed to the four of the standard monorail.
Two of the trains have some mold slippage. I was able to mostly address the top car, but the engine was large enough that I didn’t even bother trying. It doesn’t really obscure any detail, so I didn’t care too much for the sake of getting the model done. The base/plinth of the supports had a consistent slip that had to be shaved down, and a good amount of heat bending to get the columns straight was the remaining cleanup.
The weird thing was that not only did a few of the supports not even have the pegs that slot into the metal bases, but some were off-center. Not really sure what the hell this was about; did they forget the pegs had a functional purpose and weren’t just resin gates, clipping some and not caring too much about placement on some of the molds? This wasn’t a big deal in terms of getting the columns attached, just a bit of nudging to center them and sufficient glue, but it’s sloppy kit design.
The nice thing is that you do get an extra support! On the left are the supports from the new kit, and on the right are those from the Hawk set.
They did release a scenario specific to the military monorail. You could use it in any of the other monorail scenarios of course, with the difference being it comes armed. For the scenario mentioned, it actually needs two of them, but I imagine of the few people who have these, they’re going to probably own a civilian one as well if anything, so just proxy with that instead.
We’ll just sigh and ignore the typos in the description. The issue is that victory is achieved by getting a train off the table, but it is incredibly easy for either player to prevent that by simply shooting down the supports and causing the train to crash, triggering a ‘tie’ very early in a game. Since you don’t actually generate victory points here, and kill points are used to break VP ties, you could argue both that you’re at 0 VP and use kill points, or VP are null and irrelevant and the rules never step ahead to using kill points. Easy to fix this with a house rule of indestructible supports at least.
Next, I decided to get a Leviathan. I’ve always been a bit eh on the model, but the re-release spurred me to get a Hawk-era one secondhand. Both versions come in this split design near as I can tell, which necessitates some gap filling. Getting the two pieces as flush as possible was a bit of a pain, and I didn’t even bother trying to fill in the gap on the deck, as I felt it wouldn’t be feasible to get it smooth without destroying the panel detail.
The new version, while it does come with the parts for both the Thunderstorm and the Leviathan, has a flat and undetailed bottom. I am not terribly enthused by that.
Am I actually going to paint the bottom? Fuck no. But firstly, a flat cast bottom can often be seen from the side, obscuring detail along where the model makes surface contact. And more importantly, I know the fans and whatnot are there, and it makes me happier.
The back two rocket launchers aren’t actually the ones that come with the kit; they’re excess from the storm artillery trucks I had. I like that particular variant the most, so replaced the existing ones with them.
The light Resistance behemoth was quite well cast, with only one small mold slip along a bit of the side of the main hull. Some damage from the resin gates on the top of the tracks had to be filled as well, but that was simple. There was just one issue that I can’t tell if it was a matter of resin warping, or bad model design.
Part of the supports for the weapon fit into these slots on the back. However, it was impossible to actually fit them in. There’s a small peg that they mate with in the slot, and I considered shaving those off, but I wasn’t sure that would actually do the trick. I stared at this damn thing for a long time, and near as I can tell, everything was the correct angle/size. In the end, I heated up the back end, bent them slightly apart, jammed the bits into the slots, then pressed everything back together into position before it cooled. It mostly did the trick, with the only problem being that it made the final gun assembly far more a pain in the ass.
The tracks are interesting in that, if you wanted, you could build it standing nearly on tip-toe. It would look ridiculous and ‘realistically’ infeasible to a stupid degree, but between that and having the weapon supports set up as high as possible, this model could easily reach heavy behemoth heights. I mention all this as it’s relevant to the rules for the Avernus mining laser as currently written; you draw a straight line out from the barrel of the gun, and everything underneath the line is damaged.
I didn’t bother magnetizing, as I like how the laser looks more than the vent cannon. It’s also the more mechanically interesting of the two weapons, although the rules as-is lead to some nonsense such as what I mentioned earlier, particularly if you’re operating on anything other than a flat surface. Rules change, so I usually build based on aesthetics first and rules second, and for something like a behemoth model I’m completely fine just running it as a Cerberus if I felt like trying it.
I think it wouldn’t be too awful to magnetize if you were interested; the support that runs along the underside could be glued to the hull and left unattached to the weapon, and some magnets in the support pistons on the side should do the trick. They’re a bit flexible so sliding the weapon on and off should be doable, or you can take the coward’s way out and have it lay flat on top of the hull, not having to worry about magnets at all.