Byron's Pirate Eldar - Doldair's Skyraiders (381)

 

This month I painted Doldair's Skyraiders. I am very excited by this addition to my army. Let's jump into it!

First a pic of the unit together. Let's go through the team one model at a time.

First, is Doldair, the Lochiarch of the Skyraider unit. She is a champion armed with a power sword on a jetbike.

She is a fairly intricate conversion. Her lower legs come from an RT eta jetbike rider. Her torso is a left over from the Banshee that was cannibalized to make my leader model. The arms are plastic, one from a contemporary corsair sprue, I think. And the other from a plastic early jetbike rider. Her helmet is from a 2nd edition dire avenger. And, her sword is from an RT dire avenger exarch. 

The flames for the jetbike were made from a cotton swab. The white paint at the base of the flame comes from a white ink. It's very white but it always shows up as a mid grey on my camera - maybe it's too bright?

The rune on the bike is hand sculpted to look like the Isha rune to match the design on my wave serpent and the army banner.

Hopefully this video works. I took videos of the jet bikes to help capture their swooping pose.

Next we have the biker with the hand flamer. This was a frustrating conversion. He was initially a standing pose with a power fist. The whole right arm had to go and replaced with an early plastic jetbiker arm with added armor over the right bicep. Then the left leg was chopped off and cut in two around the knee and repositioned.

Some of you might be wondering about the purple cyclops hand icon. This is a hand-sculpted interpretation of one of the banner icons found in the Book of the Astronomican. I didn't get the expression quite right, but it is close enough. I painted it purple because I didn't have any yellow in my pallet yet and thought it might grab too much attention.

Another video.

Another face from the Book of the astronomican. I put a lot of effort into sculpting these designs because I have another jetbike with a harlequin face on it and I didn't want that one bike to feel out of place.

This model is a pretty straightforward conversion. Head swap with a plastic jetbiker. Right arm comes from a plastic dark eldar warrior with an eldar bright lance tip put on the end. 

This jetbiker is my favorite. I think he has the best sense of motion - resulting from his swishy top knot and his jet thruster flame curving. 

Swoosh!

Points

Leaders

Lochiarc - Champion w/ refractor field, mesh armor, power sword, las pistol  = 20 pts

Squads

Skyraider unit

Eldar w/ mesh armor, refractor fields, laspistol and flamer  x 1 = 13 pts

Eldar w/ mesh armor, refractor fields, laspistol and meltagun = 18 pts

Jetbikes x3 = 330 pts

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Total                                                            381 pts

The jetbike cost was derive from the Book of the astronomican. In the eldar pirate list, serpent squads can be upgraded to skyraider squads for 547 points. That's five bikes for about 110 points each. That seems pricey to me. 

Next, the baggage train

Here is my baggage train to date. I don't want to celebrate this too much since this month it was mostly just basing the baggage train. 

Here's a pic of the cargo drone to show how the cargo token can fit in the back of the drone to be carried around. 

Finally, a pic of everything I completed this month.