Forge World Venator Saga

I have mentioned in previous posts that I was planning to buy a ForgeWorld Elysian Tauros Venator. I ordered one last week, and sat back to await its delivery.

I ordered it on Thursday, and it arrived on Monday - pretty good service. I opened it and thought "that doesn't look like a vehicle to me" - those 30+ years of modelling experience kicking in Ninja-like.

Indeed, it wasn't a Venator. Instead, it was the Red Scorpions Librarian Sevrin Loth with Honour Guard*, composed of the following plastic sprues

and some resin pieces, including, I presume, Sevrin Loth himself

Some wacky packing by the Forge World packers, but still, these things happen (bad dice roll, winds of magic etc.). I phoned them on Tuesday lunchtime, and they apologised and arranged to send out a replacement. They also said to keep the mis-sent stuff, which was very nice of them, but more on that shortly...

Wednesday morning, new packet arrives. I got it delivered to work, so put it in my bag, waiting until I got home.

I opened it in the evening, and immediately those Ninja skills kicked in again. Unless it was heavily camouflaged, Games Day 2011 Space Marine and Chaos Dwarf figures don't look much like a Venator. Sigh...

I phoned Forge World on Thursday lunchtime, to be told that they'd had a call from someone who had been mistakenly sent a Venator, rather than his Games Day figures. I'm no expert, but I think those two things could be related.

I got a return address for the figures (including the first lot, which I was never very comfortable about keeping), and posted them off Saturday morning.

When I get the next (and hopefully final package) I shall update this post with some pictures of the parts. Unless, like the road, the saga goes ever on.

Update:

The Venator arrived on Monday, but not without a final twist to the tale. As mentioned earlier, I was having it delivered to work, to avoid courier problems etc. I got home from work on Monday to find a note from the courier, saying that they'd tried to deliver... Fortunately, they left it with my neighbour, which saved me a lot of trouble. Quite why Forge World decided to unilaterally change the delivery address for the third attempt, we'll probably never know.

There are a lot of parts with this model - far more than any resin kit I've built to date - which should make the build entertaining, to say the least. There is, however, only one Imperial Eagle that I've found so far, so removing it from the 40K universe it should be fairly straightforward.

It does look like it will fit in nicely with the Halo vehicles I bought recently, which is a relief. The pictures below really just shows the chassis, so don't include the height of the roll-bars and guns, but it looks promising.

* These are very nice models (although at nearly £40 for four plastic Space Marines, one resin Space Marine and some resin torsos and shoulder pads, they aren't cheap), but I'm not doing any Space Marines at the moment. Apart from the cost, it takes forever to remove all their iconography, which is necessary to make them at least half usable in the more traditional hard SF setting I prefer.